“Love is the liberator,” Mary Baker Eddy states in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (p. 225). This liberating function of God, who is divine Love, taught me about how Love operates in our experience, and the result was that I felt God’s tender, caring presence and was freed from a painful pinched nerve.
As I was winding down one evening, I started to feel a twinge in my neck and back, which continued to get worse through the night. As a student of Christian Science, I’ve found prayer—a humble listening for God’s view of things—to be reliable for healing in times of need. But this time I was finding it hard to pray because I couldn’t find a position to sit in that was free of pain.
I started by recognizing that this pain wasn’t my own thinking. Christian Science teaches that Love is a synonym for God, so Love is the All-in-all, infinitely and eternally. It also teaches that “man is the likeness of God, pure and eternal, having that Mind which was also in Christ” (Science and Health, p. 467). This is our true spiritual selfhood. Pain reflects neither Love nor the presence of Christ, the true idea of Love, so the pain could only be a suggestion that I didn’t have to accept.
