Article March 19, 1979 Issue

The Christian healer's oil

JAMES ROBERT CORBETT

Countless people today are receiving the benefits of spiritual healing in improved health and well-being. And they are discovering the power to heal others through total reliance on God. One who chooses this method of healing, the same method applied by the early Christians, finds that the spiritual substance implied by the biblical term "oil" is indispensable to his success. In the Bible we read: "Is any sick among you? let him call for the elders of the church; and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord."^{James 5:14;} Mrs. Eddy, whose discovery of Christian Science impels once again the practice of Christian healing, gives the spiritual significance of "oil" as "consecration; charity; gentleness; prayer; heavenly inspiration."^{Science and Health, p. 592;} Anointing with this oil needs no external phenomenon or ritual. Such anointing requires selfless prayer, bringing patient and healer together in Christ.

True Christian healing is a sacred event. Its sanctity derives from the spiritual consecration that goes into it. As we acknowledge God, infinite Love, as the only source of healing power and bring His spiritual goodness to bear on the case, we are lifted above the categories of transcendentalism, spiritualism, mysticism, psychotherapy, religious emotionalism, and away from mere concentration on the condition to be healed. Spiritual activity reveals man's true identity as the son of God, the idea of Spirit, in whose infinitely good creation there is no room for error or evil. The central sin-producing, disease-producing belief in evil as a concrete reality is challenged and effaced through such prayer.

Because it has a purifying effect, the Christian healer's treatment is intimately linked with salvation. The verbs "to heal" and "to save" both derive from ancient roots that mean "whole." The spiritual integrity or soundness of an individual constitutes his mental, moral, and physical wholeness. Primitive Christian healing shows that integrity dwells eternally in God, Mind, and a right understanding of integrity as the reflection of divine good heals both sickness and sin. An unbounded spiritual love—that charity referred to in the New Testament—is the only means pure enough to encompass this perfect expression of the whole man and bring it clearly into human view. The fact that there is often a direct correlation between sin and disease, between the mental cause and the physical effect, and that both are correctable by spiritual means alone, is underscored by our Saviour, who, through divine Love, quickly healed a man of palsy by declaring his sins forgiven^{See Matt. 9;}—that is, by recognizing man's sinlessness as the child of God.

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