Church Alive November 19, 2012 Issue

The following was written in support of Church Alive, a focus of The First Church of Christ, Scientist, that explores the meaning and possibilities of awakening to the spiritual basis and impact of Church.

First reader healed

Roger Gordon

When I was First Reader in my Christian Science branch church, one Friday a common cold I’d been ignoring and not praying about suddenly developed into something much worse. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to read on Sunday.

I then contacted a Christian Science practitioner to pray with me to heal this condition. The practitioner explained that we weren’t going to try to fix a physical condition but rather experience together more of what is real spiritually. To me that meant I should think more about the truth of being—the spiritual, scientific sense of God’s flawless, harmonious creation—than about the symptoms. I had an abundance of healing ideas to contemplate along those lines because the topic of the Christian Science Bible Lesson that week was “God the Only Cause and Creator.”

During this same time, I had been praying deeply about my identity, asking God to show me how I could best serve Him and be a healing influence in the world. The practitioner encouraged me to think about this statement in Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures: “In patient obedience to a patient God, let us labor to dissolve with the universal solvent of Love the adamant of error,—self-will, self-justification, and self-love,—which wars against spirituality and is the law of sin and death” (p. 242).