Several years ago, when our family moved to a different state, we started hearing a common theme around town: that allergies were really bad in the area, and that people would suffer from allergic reactions even if they hadn’t had problems living elsewhere. It was such a widely held belief that I knew I had to challenge that line of thinking. I’ve learned, through my study of Christian Science, not to accept the concept of a creation that is material and flawed, and I began praying to know that no one is susceptible to beliefs based on a false concept of reality.
As I prayed, I thought a lot about the concept of allergic reaction. To me that word implies that we have some say over how things affect us. In other words, when some thing or some thought or circumstance comes across our path, we choose how we deal with it. We can choose to react, or we can turn our thought to the unchanging spiritual facts about God’s creation. We can choose to accept the idea that God, Spirit, created all and called it good (see Genesis 1:31) and, therefore, that our spiritual environment is good, harmonious, and completely harmless.
The material concept of life argues that we must live in submission to matter. For example, if common public thought is convinced that certain plants cause negative reactions, we suffer accordingly. In Christian Science, though, we learn to challenge material beliefs instead of accepting them. The process of examining our thought and turning it around is prayer. In her book Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, Mary Baker Eddy wrote, “Metaphysics resolves things into thoughts, and exchanges the objects of sense for the ideas of Soul” (p. 269). So when something appears as an allergic reaction, we can find healing by taking the objects of sense—a material body separate from God that must suffer in a potentially harmful environment—and exchanging that material sense of things for the ideas of Soul: our real identity expressing the harmony of Spirit, and the spiritual universe, which is completely good. Prayer brings the sweet reminder that this is the only universe created by God.
