Editorial March 30, 1981 Issue

The Christian discipline teaches how to heal

BEULAH M. ROEGGE

Most of us feel a natural yearning to relieve others from suffering. Special credit goes to all who, from such motives, seek to learn healing methods. Mrs. Eddy, so motivated, founded the system of spiritual healing that is an integral part of the Church of Christ, Scientist.

Through the centuries most prayerful Christians have acknowledged, even when they have used some sort of human invention or material means, that it is God who heals. However, since divided loyalties rarely survive, the weight of trust has fallen in most instances to technology. Today, more is needed than just a balancing of the two trusts. The call of our times is to get out of a two part system into the discipline, the teaching, of the Christ. This teaching says that God alone heals; and its great Teacher, Christ Jesus, used no material means at all. Even when we read of him putting clay on the eyes of the man born blind, he appears to use the clay more as a means of teaching than of healing. The entire ninth chapter of John, which tells of this incident, is filled with spiritual lessons.

"Anciently those apostles who were Jesus' students," Mrs. Eddy notes in the Christian Science textbook, "as well as Paul who was not one of his students, healed the sick and reformed the sinner by their religion."^{Science and Health, p. 343.} Every true Christian, every follower of Christ Jesus, is essentially a healer. One cannot know God as Jesus taught of Him without healing fear, a basic element in all sickness. The prayer he gave his disciples is a healing prayer as many, even millions, have found when praying for themselves or using it as an intercessory prayer on behalf of others.