As I lined up for the opening kickoff of my high school football team’s first game of the season, I knew I was having a healing. This, my first healing in Christian Science, was the result of a dawning awareness over the previous few years that I was not really flesh, blood, and bones. I was spiritual.
Earlier that summer, at a world’s fair, two young men had come up to me and struck up a conversation that soon turned to religion. They were Christians and they apparently wanted to recruit me. Instead of finding a way to escape the situation (a real temptation), I decided to lean in and really talk with them. I explained that as a Christian Scientist, I was learning to rely on God and prayer for healing.
They immediately brought up the story of Jesus healing the man born blind. Jesus used his own spit to make a kind of clay that he then put over the eyes of the blind man, before sending him to wash in the pool of Siloam (see John 9:1–7). My new friends claimed this showed that even Jesus must have believed in the power of matter to heal. Why else would he have taken the trouble to make this “medicinal mask,” as they put it, for the blind man? It was a legitimate question, and I wasn’t sure I had an answer.
