A popular children’s book by Janell Cannon, Stellaluna, tells a story about a baby fruit bat who gets separated from her mother and is initially raised by birds. Stellaluna finds it difficult to live like a bird—to eat bugs instead of fruit, to sleep in a nest instead of hanging upside down from a tree branch, and to fly during the day instead of at night. But one day Stellaluna meets another bat, who kindly points out that Stellaluna is not, in fact, a bird, but a bat. Stellaluna is shown how to live like a bat, and everything changes. Stellaluna gives up trying to get through the work of the day by being something she isn’t. Joy returns. Life makes sense.
When it comes to our own healing work and approach to church in Christian Science, do we know who we are? Or do we sometimes approach it like a bat working really hard at being a bird? In other words, have we accepted the assumption that we’re troubled mortals living in difficult situations, with insufficient means for making things better? If so, then metaphysical work is going to feel hard and discouraging, not to mention exhausting.
Trying to do spiritual work from within a belief that life and intelligence are in matter is like trying to eat a bowl of soup broth with a fork. You may get just enough to taste the value of the broth, but the prospect of being nourished by the soup, let alone getting to the bottom of the bowl, becomes more daunting than something to savor.
Stellaluna was so surrounded by birds that she thought she was supposed to do things the way they did. Have we let ourselves become so immersed in the conventional, mortal sense of life that we’re accepting a boring, rote, and often spirit-dulling view of what it means to worship God and to be involved in church? If we are, then it is time to wake up.
The discovery of Christian Science is about opening our eyes to the fact that God is truly infinite Life, Truth, and Love, and that man’s actual being is made up of holiness, harmony, immortality, with no taint of matter. When Mary Baker Eddy wrote Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, and then founded a church that was “designed to commemorate the word and works of our Master, which should reinstate primitive Christianity and its lost element of healing” (Manual of The Mother Church, p. 17), it was for no less of a purpose than the salvation of humanity from sin and disease.
So why does it sometimes feel so hard to do the mental work we know we should be doing? Because whenever we go along with a material sense of life, it means we’ve fallen asleep to who we actually are as the spiritual manifestation of God’s presence and power. We may need to summon all of our focused strength at those moments to splash some cold water on our face, so to speak, so we’ll spiritually wake up.
The work in those moments is consciously turning away from whatever a material sense of things is shouting, and listening intently for the quieter, but more powerful, voice of Christ, spiritually speaking to the deepest place of our being and telling us who we truly are and how we’re meant to be joyfully living in God’s love. Don’t we all find we want to put in the work when it involves being who we’re meant to be? We don’t get tired of that.
The Gospel of Matthew tells about a time in Jesus’ ministry when he’d climbed a hillside and delivered many of his core teachings to a vast crowd that had followed him there. After he finished giving what is referred to today as the “Sermon on the Mount,” it would be reasonable to conclude that he’d put in a full day and deserved a bit of a break. But an interesting thing happened as he was coming down: A man with a serious and highly contagious skin disease knelt down in front of him and said, “If you want to, you can make me clean.” Jesus placed his hand on the leper and said, “Of course I want to. Be clean!” (Matthew 8:2, 3, J. B. Phillips, The New Testament in Modern English). The Bible then assures us that the man was healed immediately of his disease.
The good news is that this kind of healing is still available today. Science and Health is the complete textbook for showing us how not to lose sight of who we are as God’s image and likeness. All that is demanded of us is to be willing to not leave the ideas we’re reading on the page, but to bring them into our hearts—to realize that what we’re reading about God and man is literally defining who we are and what our relation to Spirit is.
This empowers us to realize that we no longer owe any allegiance or acquiescence to any material assessment of life that had been weighing us down and making life feel hard. When we come to the message of Science and Health starving for something higher and more real than finite matter, we find ourselves born again, born of Spirit, just as Jesus told us we must be.
After a tuberculosis patient had been told they only had a few weeks, or at most months, to live, they began reading Science and Health. Nine years later they wrote that “it would be hard to find a healthier person than I am now” (Science and Health, p. 624). This same person added, “It seemed to me from the first that it was something I had always believed, but did not know how to express—it seemed such a natural thing” (p. 625). It was like Stellaluna being told who she really was and why she could live a wholly different life than that one she’d been struggling with.
Another person who had suffered from disease for twenty years found that it all dropped away, without any particular effort on their part, when they began reading Science and Health (see Mary Baker Eddy, Miscellaneous Writings 1883–1896, pp. 427–428). Describing the healing, they wrote, “The why? I could not explain, but this I did know, in this realm of the real I found joy, peace, rest, love to all, unbounded, unspeakable.”
This year marks the 150th year of continuous publication of Science and Health. It also marks 150 years of people being healed by its message. For those wondering if God answers prayers for healing, Science and Health voices God’s law with today’s “Of course I want to.”
The question left to be answered is, in commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the Christian Science textbook, what special edition should be produced for the occasion? Couldn’t the answer be . . . us? What if we open our hearts to being that commemorative celebration of Science and Health? That may mean we read it with renewed hunger this year. That may mean we care so much about meeting the needs of others for healing that we look for ways to share it.
One thing is for sure, no amount of solely human effort can ever make us actually earn what God has already freely given us through grace. We already are the children of God. We don’t want to waste time trying to be a better version of something we never were, any more than a bat should persist in trying to be a bird. But if we really and truly are the children of God, made in God’s image and likeness, then we want to give everything we have to realizing it.
When we do, we’ll feel the energy and joy of eagerly participating in this year’s theme of the Annual Meeting of The Mother Church: “As you work, the ages win.” This comes from a rousing letter Mrs. Eddy wrote to a church in Atlanta at the time of the dedication of their building. She assured them, and us, “As you work, the ages win; for the majesty of Christian Science teaches the majesty of man” (The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 188).
It’s time to get to work, and to do so with the natural, revitalized energy of Christ’s message, “Of course I want to.”
Scott Preller
Member of the Christian Science Board of Directors
