'How easily mends the moon'

I awoke one morning with sun slanting through my window, announcing a bright spring day. But I felt terrible and itchy. Throwing back the covers, I saw a rash running the length of my arms, legs, hands, and feet.

I grew up in a Christian Science household with parents whose first response to physical, social, and professional problems was prayer. They taught me that prayer is not about trying to get God’s attention and begging for help. Rather, it is about recognizing that we are included in God’s divine order of being, and aligning our thoughts and actions with His universal laws of wholeness, balance, and well-being.

Still true to this prayerful approach to problem solving, I tried to collect my thoughts and replace any feelings of irritation (in all senses of the word) with the idea of this divinely balanced being. I tried to steer my consciousness toward the Divine by making a mental list of everything I was grateful for, but I was so distracted by my prickly skin that I couldn’t bring a single uplifting thought into focus for more than a few seconds.

Frustrated, I phoned my sister, who had previously helped me pray through a wide variety of challenges. I don’t remember exactly what she said, but she began to quiet my anxious thoughts and stirred my hope with a promise to pray for me. After the call, I lay down on the couch, and my husband sat down beside me. He’s an open-minded agnostic, who supports my spiritual approach to health. He’s also a non-alarmist, so he was compassionate, not worried. But he was also curious.

“So what is this?” he asked, looking at the rash, and then ventured several answers to his own question:

“Do you think you got into some poison ivy? Or maybe you’re allergic to what we ate last night? Or is this a stress reaction?”

It occurred to me that all of the possible causes he mentioned were reasonable explanations from a physical perspective. But I wasn’t looking for material causes and antidotes. I wanted to better understand my spiritual identity as the effect or expression of God, who is the universal Cause of all good. My deepest desire was for a spiritual insight that would heal. While thinking more about this, I fell asleep.

All it took was calmness to restore the reflected moon to the wholeness of the original.

Night had fallen when I awoke to the sound of the phone ringing. It was my sister calling, and my husband answered, joking that whatever we were doing, “it wasn’t working.” When I got on the phone with my sister, she laughed, assuring me our prayers were working.  “But I still itch like mad,” I complained. She told me that no matter what I was experiencing, my fundamental God-given wholeness was intact and she was sure I would soon realize that. “Just rest in that idea and let go of anxiousness,” she said.

Clicking off the phone, I handed it to my husband with a comment about being blessed with a wonderful sister, even though her instruction to let go of anxiousness seemed a tall order.

“Yes, you are blessed,” he said, adding that it was time to go outside and go for a walk. At first I protested, but then I realized that I would be no closer to understanding my spiritual wholeness while sitting around, focused on my discomfort. So I got dressed and we headed out.

It was an extraordinary spring night—blue-black sky, brilliant full moon, air fresh as ginger ale. Strolling along the river near our home, we walked to the town’s landing dock. Standing there, I drank in the stillness. Then I noticed two moons: one in the sky above, the other exquisitely reflected in the glistening black water. The river, skimming quietly along its bed in the breathless night, was a mirror.

We stood there for quite some time without saying a word. Then, suddenly, a gust of wind ruffled the water, breaking the river moon into thousands of pieces. Startled, I glanced at the moon above. It remained intact—fat, round, and radiant. Almost as quickly as the wind came, it disappeared. The water quieted and the moon pieced back together.

“Wow,” I whispered.

I then told my husband about a haiku by “anonymous” that I loved from the moment I first read it, even though I hadn’t been sure of what it meant. It goes like this:

Back home, nestled in bed for the night, I thought about the haiku and what I’d just seen. All it took was calmness to restore the reflected moon to the wholeness of the original. All day long, I’d been worried and wondered, “What is this rash? Will it get worse?” But after I pictured the graceful reassembling of the moon reflected in the river, my thoughts quieted and my worries began to fade.

I recalled the line about the shepherd in the 23rd Psalm—“He leads me beside still waters”—and it took on new meaning for me: Still waters have clear reflection. I pictured still waters in countless forms and sizes, all reflecting the same moon—deep rivers, quiet coves, pools, puddles, and dewdrops. I felt profoundly that I am a reflection or emanation of God, of the universal, divine Principle of wholeness, balance, and well-being.

In Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, Mary Baker Eddy extensively explores the essential truth that we are “reflections of God … emanations of Him who is Life, Truth, and Love” (p. 336). Eddy explains, “Absorbed in material selfhood, we discern and reflect but faintly the substance of Life or Mind” (Science and Health, p. 91). To me, this means that only through spiritual mindedness—focusing on God and His divine order of being—can we glean the true substance of our identities as His pure “emanations.”

The calmness I felt as I lay in bed that night is a quality of being that Eddy encourages us to claim: “It is well to be calm in sickness; …” she writes (Science and Health, p. 393). But how do we do that?

Eddy guides her readers from turbulence to healing with this instruction: “Let neither fear nor doubt overshadow your clear sense and calm trust, that the recognition of life harmonious—as Life eternally is—can destroy any painful sense of, or belief in, that which Life is not. Let Christian Science, instead of corporeal sense, support your understanding of being, and this understanding will supplant error with Truth, replace mortality with immortality, and silence discord with harmony” (Science and Health, p. 495).

With my firm trust in these facts, all my worries and anxiety dissolved, and I slept peacefully the whole night. Come morning, the rash was gone, and it never returned.

Perhaps some might wonder if the condition would have disappeared on its own, without my sister’s prayers or the experience of seeing the moon mending. But without a prayerful reach for a spiritual insight, I would have missed the epiphany about reflection. It was a moment of clarity and grace that I’ve called to memory time and time again. Remembering this always calms my thought, clears my mind of unhealthy distractions, and awakens a sense of my spiritual essence, ever intact.