Article December 30, 1950 Issue

"BIND UP THE BROKEN-HEARTED"

H. PHELPS GATES

IN the great heart of Love, in the understanding of God as eternal Life, in the realization of man as Love's eternal likeness, there is no place for grief and no such thing as a heart broken by sorrow. In the study of Christian Science one learns that the argument, "I am brokenhearted," is simply another form of the admission: "I am believing in a power apart from God. I am denying God's eternality and man's indestructibility as God's reflection." Mary Baker Eddy clearly defines the need for restoring the broken in spirit as prerequisite to healing work in this simple statement on page 366 of the Christian Science textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures": "If we would open their prison doors for the sick, we must first learn to bind up the brokenhearted."

In Christian Science the healing of grief—the comforting and regeneration of the broken in heart—is accomplished by the selfsame means as the healing of any other false condition or mortal belief. Grief is not set apart as a special kind of problem, to be handled differently or requiring deeper understanding of Truth; it is just another aggressive mortal mind denial of the eternality of God, the allness of Love, the perfection of man.

Submission to grief is an acceptance of the subtle lies that God, Life, has an opposite, death, and that there can be something absent from the omnipresence of eternal Love. Yet the argument of grief and sorrow sometimes seems a stubborn one. Jesus, appearing a third time after his crucifixion, found his disciples still grieving and unwilling to accept the glorious fulfillment of his promise. In the Gospel of Mark (16:14) it is recorded, "Afterward he appeared unto the eleven as they sat at meat, and upbraided them with their unbelief and hardness of heart, because they believed not them which had seen him after he was risen."

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