Article December 14, 1974 Issue

Spontaneous Healing

CYRIL ALEXANDER BARBER

Why are we so often straight-faced and tight-lipped, like men going into battle against great odds, when we set out to affirm spiritual truths that deny opposing errors? Honor for God, the only true healer of mankind, is essential in our metaphysical work. But the rather grim approach, prompted by a seemingly deep or urgent need, may itself be an obstacle to healing. It misses two important guidelines to successful treatment.

First, it implies that the great truths of the allness of God and the perfection of man in His likeness—which we are trying to grasp in order to bring about healing and harmony in a human situation —are incompatible with buoyancy. This just isn't so. Every prayerful step in spiritual understanding is a step out of the gloom of materiality and into the joy-giving sunlight of spiritual wholeness. Moreover, to experience spiritual healing is joy-inspiring, not only because one's health or disposition or circumstances have been bettered but primarily because one feels the living presence of the loving Father more surely and consciously than he did before.

Second, a too stern sense of battling with evil, on one's own or another's behalf, tends to make a reality of the very claim whose falsity we are setting out to prove. Evil—error—is never more than nothing pretending to be something, impotence pretending to be power, falsity asserting itself as reality. Salvation from sin, sickness, and death depends on reducing this anti-God claim to its proper dimension—nothingness—through the understanding of the allness of Truth, divine Life, which Christian Science is bringing to mankind.

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