You Can Be a Healer July 4, 2011 Issue

Our column on how people have nurtured their public practice of Christian Science healing.

To witness God's care

Elizabeth Mata—Badajoz, Spain, and Boston, Massachusetts, US

You could say that Christian Science nursing found me, because at the time I discovered it, I was not looking for it and knew virtually nothing about. I was in my 20s and had been working in the commercial art field. But I was praying to know and feel the freshness and substantiality of God’s direction for me. These simple words filled my prayer: “God, if You want me to do art, then You will need to make me feel it in the deepest part of my being.”  

After moving across the country and starting some freelance artwork, much to my surprise (and I must admit, chagrin), I started working in the kitchen of a Christian Science nursing facility to make ends meet. I was a bit thrown by the inner nudges toward pursuing Christian Science nursing. I was sure there had been some mistake—“Just a moment, God, weren’t we just talking about art?” But there was an unmistakable impulsion to follow these promptings even as I battled my resistance to them. 

As I began my Christian Science nurses’ training, a passage in Science and Health opened to me what it meant to be an artist in the realm of spiritual ideas: “The sculptor turns from the marble to his model in order to perfect his conception. We are all sculptors, working at various forms, moulding and chiseling thought. What is the model before mortal mind? Is it imperfection, joy, sorrow, sin, suffering? Have you accepted the mortal model?” It continues: “We must form perfect models in thought and look at them continually, or we shall never carve them out in grand and noble lives. Let unselfishness, goodness, mercy, justice, health, holiness, love—the kingdom of heaven—reign within us, and sin, disease, and death will diminish until they finally disappear” (p. 248). This is more than good advice. It heals. It has been indispensable in my work, where the demand is to faithfully turn to the truth about God and man and away from sometimes aggressive pictures of illness, sorrow, and discouragement, even while caring for the human need.  

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