Tragedies, such as school shootings, gang rape, and other violent acts, present a picture so depraved that we may well despair that any human condolence or comfort can address the pain and heartbreak felt by individuals, families, communities, and even whole nations around the world. Yet, as opinions and reactions lash out at whatever is considered to have “caused” an unspeakable tragedy—guns, violent video games, broken families, untreated mental disorders, and more—we naturally sense the need to pray more deeply, more metaphysically, to bring about healing for all.
Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, certainly understood how human thought can fall into depravity—or what she called, in extreme cases, “moral idiocy” (Miscellaneous Writings 1883–1896, p. 112)—and she pointed out the path to healing. She recounted the following experience: “I visited in his cell the assassin of President Garfield, and found him in the mental state called moral idiocy. He had no sense of his crime; but regarded his act as one of simple justice, and himself as the victim. My few words touched him; he sank back in his chair, limp and pale; his flippancy had fled.”
Mrs. Eddy goes on to explain of moral idiocy: “This mental disease at first shows itself in extreme sensitiveness; then, in a loss of self-knowledge and of self-condemnation,—a shocking inability to see one’s own faults, but an exaggerating sense of other people’s. Unless this mental condition be overcome, it ends in a total loss of moral, intellectual, and spiritual discernment, and is characterized in this Scripture: ‘The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God.’ This state of mind is the exemplification of total depravity, and the result of sensuous mind in matter” (pp. 112–113).
