Article February 19, 1972 Issue

Reading Actively for Healing

CYRIL ALEXANDER BARBER

Probably most readers of articles in the Christian Science periodicals have a conscious need. Sometimes they are seeking a specific healing. Often growth is what they desire, the growth in spirituality that is the sole way to more abundant life. For one reason or another, they scan the printed lines in the hope of finding windows through which needed light will shine on them.

Every article embodies some aspect of the divine power to heal and regenerate. But does this mean that all readers inevitably receive the utmost help an article offers? Or is it possible for some of us to benefit even more from spiritual truths put into words if we learn to switch over from relatively passive reading to spiritually active reading? If words of Truth are to be effective in us, we ought not believe their vital import can be registered merely by physical sight, much as a sheet of blotting paper absorbs words written in ink. We need to feel them in depth. The ideas behind them have to be let into our inmost thought to remake us where our basic motives spring from.

When Jesus walked among men, demonstrating with unique power the healing and regenerating Christ, Truth, he was recognized by some as the Messiah, the Saviour who should come. But to others he was no more than a carpenter turned preacher. Seen by physical sight alone, he was much like other men, even if his deeds were surprising. It was only when his real, or Christly, selfhood was glimpsed by the awakened spiritual sense of God-illumined men and women that the truth of his being could be discerned.

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