It’s a funny thing how wrapped up in oneself one can become while praying for healing in Christian Science, when the real need is to get all wrapped up in loving God.
Drifting into an underlying feeling that one is really good, really bad, or somewhere in between at this kind of prayer, can be the worst kind of stumbling block to healing oneself or another. And why is that? It’s because the human mind is not a “healing agent”—in fact, it’s not even “a factor” in Christian Science (see Mary Baker Eddy, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. x). Healing is all about the human mind yielding to God, divine Love, the Mind that casts out all fear, doubt, self-condemnation, personal pride, disease, and every other imaginable evil.
That doesn’t mean, of course, that a person should be passive, or rely on blind faith. Far from it. To treat disease or any other discord in Christian Science, one needs to be a thinker. One needs to embrace a fundamental spiritual understanding of God and His creation, and to take a firm stand in the face of material contradictions. But most important, one must be yielding to God every step of the way in order for the healing power of divine Love to be felt and experienced.
Yielding is the primary step in healing, which is why both Christ Jesus, the great exemplar of Christian healing, and Mary Baker Eddy, the discoverer of the divine laws of Christian healing, expounded on the need for childlike humility and love to inhabit one’s heart so that the spirit of almighty God can take charge of the case. After all, one is a “healer” in Christian Science only as one lets God take the lead.
Yielding to spiritual understanding
When one stops to think about it, yielding is no mystery; we do it every day in regard to understood facts. We know that the sun is not rising and setting, because it’s been proved. We accept that the rules of mathematics are governed by an unchanging principle, because it’s been proved. There is no room for negotiation with proven facts. They simply need to be accepted, and then we can move forward.
In like manner, it has been proved over and over again through Christian Science that regardless of all material sense evidence to the contrary, infinite Spirit, God—which is entirely good, leaving no room for even one iota of evil—is the fixed Principle governing all creation. That’s indisputable truth, and when one accepts it as indisputable, the way is open for divine Love to move one forward in the demonstration of holiness and health.
When one stops to think about it, yielding is no mystery; we do it every day in regard to understood facts.
Here then is the fundamental point to be understood: The material senses—eyes, ears, etc.—never tell the truth about anything. For truth, one needs to go to God. Starting with Spirit’s supreme authority, we can come to correct conclusions concerning the real and everlasting nature of the universe and man (meaning each one of us in our actual identity). The overarching example of this kind of reasoning is found in “the scientific statement of being” in Science and Health: “There is no life, truth, intelligence, nor substance in matter. All is infinite Mind and its infinite manifestation, for God is All-in-all. Spirit is immortal Truth; matter is mortal error. Spirit is the real and eternal; matter is the unreal and temporal. Spirit is God, and man is His image and likeness. Therefore man is not material; he is spiritual” (p. 468).
Understanding and loving God on this basis, we can faithfully, devotedly, and resolutely stand up for (not in for!) God—and not give credence or power to any so-called evidence of the lying material senses. We need to do this in every case where healing is needed. This is where firmness comes in.
Yielding with firmness
It may seem unusual to talk about yielding and being firm at the same time, but we’ve already established that accepting the proven fact that God is the supreme governor is an act of yielding. And now we have this statement in Science and Health in the chapter “Christian Science Practice”: “Be firm in your understanding that the divine Mind governs, and that in Science man reflects God’s government” (p. 393). To me that means I should be firm in yielding to God, and equally firm in not yielding to any other supposed power or reality. In other words, yield to God without reservation.
Yielding to God without reservation is truly the only way we can obey Jesus’ command to love God with all our heart (see Matthew 22:37), and thereby feel His love for us. And it’s through our active love for God that we can come to be as unmoved by material sense evidence, and as confident in God’s healing power, as Mrs. Eddy was. To her, God was the one and only tangible presence, with whom she mentally companioned moment by moment. And that explains the immediacy of the healings that came through her prayers.
So that our, and all of humanity’s, prayers may be equally beneficial, she taught—and still teaches through her writings—how to bring our thought into a state of conscious oneness with the living God and yield to His love. One aspect of this teaching is to treat whatever needs to be healed by mental argument—not argument with God, but argument for God, for Life, Truth, and Love, as the only reality of being. It’s actually the very same kind of reasoning that is illustrated in “the scientific statement of being” quoted earlier. The mental argument draws conclusions from indisputable spiritual Truth to refute, reverse, and replace specific claims of discord or disease that are apparent to the material senses and cause suffering.
The remedy is not in the letter but in the spirit of loving God enough to bring the argument to a conclusion.
The aim of mental argument in Christian Science treatment is to side wholeheartedly with God, and on the side of the patient as the whole and perfect reflection of God, until the perfection of God and man becomes so real to you that all evidence to the contrary loses its claim to reality in your thought. That’s when healing occurs. The argument itself did not bring the healing; it only brought thought into accord with the actual presence of health and holiness, which God perpetually maintains in man.
Sometimes the material evidence of sin or disease can seem so real to one who is praying for healing that the mental argument veers away from God, good, as the only cause, and falls to the level of trying to find a cause for the problem—in general human belief, or in the patient’s thought, or in one’s own thought. Then the difficulty seems more real, and the things of God less real. In an effort to get oneself out of this morass, the tendency is to let the argument drop into a repetitive, intellectual exercise, declaring over and over that Truth is real and material evidence is unreal, while all the time wondering why these efforts are not producing healing.
The remedy is not in the letter but in the spirit of loving God enough to bring the argument to a conclusion. The only real evidence is spiritual. God is All-in-all. Accept this truth as fixed fact, and then we won’t keep repeating it to convince ourselves that it is true. Then we can yield to Truth with finality and trust God with the outcome.
Yielding with finality
Jesus gave this very sound advice: “Let your Yes be simply Yes, and your No be simply No; anything more than that comes from the evil one” (Matthew 5:37, The Amplified Bible). In other words, cease entirely from judging according to the material senses. Love God wholeheartedly and stand up for Him decisively.
Of the material sense of things, Mrs. Eddy makes the important point that it “must finally yield to the mandate of immortal Mind” (Science and Health, p. 371). It’s easy to read that word finally and think of time—that the yielding may eventually happen, perhaps sometime in the distant future. But one dictionary definition for finally is “decisively; conclusively; irrevocably.” So why wait? We can yield to immortal Mind’s mandate, or authoritative command, at any time—with finality. Why not now?
