It’s those little shifts in thought that blow a concept wide open. One changed word can move you out of a familiar rut, and suddenly you see you’ve been holding to a somewhat limited concept. Well, that happened to me just recently.
For years I had heard and accepted the simple phrase, “God does the healing.” I appreciated this, because it reminded me that although my profession is as a Christian Science practitioner, it’s not up to me personally to heal people. It’s the truth of God’s allness and of man as God’s perfect image and likeness that corrects the mistaken impression that God is not all and that anyone is a fallen mortal, subject to sin, disease, and death. And I still really appreciate this truth.
But the other day as I was praying, the simple phrase, “God is the healing,” came to thought. Such a small change of words, and yet the implication was huge. I realized that every time I had acknowledged that “God does the healing,” I had been unwittingly holding on to a sense of God imparting some inspiring truths about a needy situation to some people—perhaps me and/or the person I was praying with—and this impartation would correct the problem, and if we properly applied the truths of God’s allness to the situation, then the problem would go away. But there’s a flaw in that reasoning. Somehow, I was reinforcing a multiplicity of factors and variables, involving God and me and another person and a problem, and trying to know that God would be the bottom line.
But God is not just the bottom line, but the All-in-all, the Alpha and Omega, the only who, what, where, when, why as divine Mind and its own infinite self-containment. Mary Baker Eddy succinctly sums it up in the Christian Science textbook, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, when she states, “God is at once the centre and circumference of being” (pp. 203–204).
Where, then, does man fit in to this allness? I like the way God spoke to Moses when Moses asked Him what to tell the people he was to lead to freedom, to assure them he was sent from God, when they asked His name. God declared, “I AM THAT I AM” (Exodus 3:14). In this beautiful symmetry of All-in-allness, I like to think of man as the “AM” of the “I AM.” Man is not God, but he is the effect of the cause—the very self-awareness God is having of Himself.
So when we experience a healing, we are understanding to some degree the All-in-allness of God. “How can there be more than all?” Mrs. Eddy questions (Science and Health, p. 287). How can there be allness and something else in addition to allness? Or allness that lacks something? God must be the healing, because there is nothing else present but God and His infinite, self-knowing universe of thought, including every spiritual creation.
As these insights were coming to me recently, they reminded me of a healing I had when I was in my late teens. It was summertime, and my parents were away while I stayed home to work at my summer job. At one point I became quite ill with a throat condition that made it difficult to swallow or eat. I spoke with my parents, who began to pray for me. I also called a Christian Science practitioner our family knew, and he too began to pray, and gave me this brief passage from Science and Health to think about: “The Christlike understanding of scientific being and divine healing includes a perfect Principle and idea,—perfect God and perfect man,—as the basis of thought and demonstration” (p. 259).
As I lay in bed, I just kept repeating, “Perfect God and perfect man, perfect God and perfect man.” Admittedly, I was using it a bit like a mantra. But suddenly, the passage came alive with light for me, and I heard it as “Perfect God means perfect man.” This said to me that you can’t have perfect God without having perfect man, the perfect likeness of God. I knew and felt this truth as incontrovertibly real. There was no separation at all between God and me. My being as the expression of God could not be more or less than Godlike.
God must be the healing, because there is nothing else present but God and His infinite, self-knowing universe of thought.
I got up out of bed entirely free from the pain and discomfort. I went down to the kitchen and warmed up some pasta that friends had brought. I ate and swallowed with absolute freedom. I remember thinking that I was not sure how exactly the healing had come about, but I knew it was through divine consciousness, literally the ever-presence of God, Mind. The human mind was not the source of that knowing, but it had, at least momentarily, completely given place to divine Mind.
In hindsight, I reasoned that perhaps the very helplessness I had been feeling, and the simple focus on one statement of absolute truth, had helped with the yielding up of a personal sense of myself, and this had resulted in a willingness to surrender to God’s allness. It was God’s, Love’s, presence that had displaced the swelling and discomfort. There couldn’t be more than all! I felt like Moses, on holy ground, and had understood at least a little of how God is the healing, because “I AM THAT I AM” was enfolding me in the All-in-all.
St. Paul explained it this way: “So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory” (I Corinthians 15:54). And Mary Baker Eddy interprets, “With its divine proof, Science reverses the evidence of material sense. Every quality and condition of mortality is lost, swallowed up in immortality” (Science and Health, p. 215).
It’s not so much, then, that we get rid of a problem, but we behold the true light, the mandatory, harmonious, infinite All-in-allness of God. Perhaps this is what Mrs. Eddy was telling one of the early workers in Christian Science, Calvin Hill, to do when he was struggling with a fear of tuberculosis. She wrote to him, “Dear one, look on the cloud of lungs till you see the Father’s face—the sense of life not in nor of matter, and this spiritual recognition will destroy the cloud forever, it will” (We Knew Mary Baker Eddy, Expanded Edition, Vol. 1, p. 355). Instead of trying to have God get rid of something, she was helping him see that all existence just had to be translated back into Spirit.
There’s nothing to be afraid of or be afraid with. Spirit is right here declaring, as Jesus did, “Be of good cheer; it is I; be not afraid” (Matthew 14:27). And in this holy, sacred place of Mind’s self-declaring allness, there is nothing else to be conscious of and nothing else to be conscious with. We call it healing, but it is so much more—it is God.
