Editorial June 16, 1980 Issue

What gets healed

GEOFFREY J. BARRATT

"In Him we live, move, and have being. Man's origin and existence being in Him, man is the ultimatum of perfection, and by no means the medium of imperfection. Immortal man is the eternal idea of Truth, that cannot lapse into a mortal belief or error concerning himself and his origin: he cannot get out of the focal distance of infinity"^{Miscellaneous Writings, p. 79;}—Mary Baker Eddy's strong declaration. Clearly, nothing can go wrong with the real man.

What, then, gets healed and regenerated through Christian Science? Not actuality but belief: the belief that man lives in finity, not in infinity; in matter and not in divine Life; in a physical identity, not in Soul. It is not even man's mentality that gets healed, since man—according to the Christianly scientific definition of him—doesn't have a mentality separate from ever-perfect Mind and can't lapse into thinking erroneously about himself.

But spiritually unperceptive thought, thought unlighted by the divine brilliance of the Christ (Soul's unfolding of true being), doesn't see man as the eternal idea of Life. It is that blindness which is the crux of all suffering, of war and maladies. And it's that spiritual blindness which Christian Science heals with the understanding of the omnipresence of divine Truth and Love.

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