The link between gratitude and healing
We shouldn't wait until we're healed to give thanks to God. Praising God is a natural part of Christian healing, part of our awakening to man's spiritual perfection as God's child.
Am I one of the nine? This question arrested my thought while I was reading about Christ Jesus' healing of ten men who were leprous: "One of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, and with a loud voice glorified God, and fell down on his face at his feet, giving him thanks." But Jesus asked, "Were there not ten cleansed? but where are the nine?" Luke 17:15-17 .
Ten men were healed; only one "turned back" to give thanks. What prompted these different reactions? The one returning "glorified God." He returned not only to offer thanks to Jesus but to acknowledge the power behind this wondrous happening. Something more than an improved sense of physical health (as wonderful as that was) had occurred for him.
Actually, Jesus had demonstrated the verity that health is a spiritual quality—the normal state of man's being; the gift of God. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus had taught, "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect." Matt. 5:48 . Could a perfect cause create an imperfect effect? Naturally not. Jesus' active recognition of the spiritual perfection of God's creation resulted in a restoration of wholeness and purity.
But what of the nine? Surely they too were joyous in their newfound freedom, but evidently they did not realize the deeper implications of what had happened. They had been healed, but it would seem that their hearts were untouched by the profound meaning of their healing—that the Messiah, or Christ, had come to show humanity the saving power of God. The majority of the world's people today are still unaware of the ever-presence of the healing Christ that regenerates human thought and body and leads to a higher understanding of God.
Yet the Scriptures record many instances of such spiritual healing, both before the time of Jesus and afterward. The Psalmist gave his gratitude to God, "who healeth all thy diseases." Ps. 103:3 . The Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, Mrs. Eddy, seeing proof of this healing power in her own life and in the lives of others she had helped through prayer, purposed "to organize a church designed to commemorate the word and works of our Master, which should reinstate primitive Christianity and its lost element of healing." Manual of The Mother Church, p. 17 .
When we have come in contact with the healing message of Christian Science and have been healed of some disease or sin, have we returned to give thanks to God? Or have we gone on our way, taking for granted the discovery of the Science of Christianity, the Science that explains God as the only healing power?
It seems incredible to me that there was a time when I didn't think much about gratitude, but this was before I understood the nature of God and man as taught in Christian Science. Studying the Bible along with the Christian Science textbook, Science and Health by Mrs. Eddy, I began to see man's purely spiritual nature as God's reflection. I began to cherish the Godlike qualities inherent in man and worked to express them more fully. Gratitude surfaced effortlessly with my new self-knowledge, and healings followed.
To many, gratitude means saying thanks for some special favor received or service performed. This is preferable to the barrenness of ingratitude; but it falls short of the fuller significance of genuine thanksgiving. Gratitude should make our conduct consistent with our faith; it should be shown in our deeds, not in words alone. True gratitude comes of the heart's necessity to magnify God; it blossoms out from our real nature and purpose—to image our Maker. Gratitude bursts forth as we see what it means to have the Mind of Christ—the Mind that is God. Since God is Mind, we are actually His spiritual ideas, created to honor Him. Isn't the recognition of man's spiritual perfection as God's reflection a wonderful cause for gratitude?
Cultivate this gratitude! Counting our spiritual blessings helps us conform more closely to the harmony of God that is really just at hand.
Such gratitude is an important step in healing, because gratitude purifies thought and replaces fear, impatience, and disobedience, which manifest themselves as discordant mental or physical conditions. Complaints and destructive criticism are purged from consciousness when our grateful thoughts are given the right of way. So gratitude becomes a means of progress, signaling our growing understanding of what God and man are. The quality of our lives is elevated as we exalt Him, and live the Christ-spirit.
Before raising Lazarus from the dead, Jesus said: "Father, I thank thee that thou hast heard me. And I knew that thou hearest me always." John 11:41, 42 . Is our paean of praise being voiced before we see the evidence of healing? Is the thanklessness of ingratitude yielding to a humble acknowledgment, "Father, I thank thee"?
Ingratitude is a denial of God's ever-present goodness and allness. Recognizing God as the divine Principle of all goodness and man as the complete expression of good makes us more receptive to good. As we embody that goodness in our lives, we have what we humanly require. This is the way Jesus showed, the way of full salvation through Christ—not salvation from sin alone but from sickness as well, and eventually even from death, as the Saviour himself proved.
To accept and follow Christ, Truth, moves us to such thankfulness that we are impelled to glorify God in much more than a spoken tribute. We must live, not just verbally acknowledge, Truth. In doing this we discover that we are not unmercifully bound to sin, disease, and death. We rejoice in our God-given ability to meet challenges with divine Truth and Love and to prove that health and dominion are God's gift. The Science of Christ includes healing for all. What a cause for gratitude!
When I was a new student of this Science, I had a dramatic healing through giving thanks to God.
When I was a new student of this Science, I had a dramatic healing through giving thanks to God. I do not know what the diagnosis would have been if I had asked for medical help as I had done before, but the pain was excruciating. I can remember the tears falling down my cheeks. But gratitude flowed too as I declared silently, "'Father, I thank thee.' How grateful I am for the revelation of God as Love and to know that You are our Father and that You do not cause or permit suffering. No matter how real this pain seems, I am grateful to know that it cannot have its origin in God, good; therefore it cannot find a place in my thinking or being." At that moment the pain disappeared as well as the other symptoms that had plagued me for some time and did not return.
Another time, while reading the testimonies in the Sentinel, I was so overcome with gratitude for the staunch faith and spiritual understanding evident in the reports of healing that I was immediately freed from a headache. My thoughts were lifted beyond a false sense of my own self to a feeling of appreciation of others' steadfast trust in spiritual healing and of their prayerwon victories. Gratitude is a feeling—a rejoicing in what is true. It can't be expressed in words without the impetus of honest conviction.
Years later I was asked to speak to a group about why I have written articles for the Christian Science periodicals. I hardly felt qualified for this task, but as I prayerfully prepared, I clearly saw that gratitude had been what caused me to write from the start. Each article was further demonstration of dominion gained.
Pointing to the responsibility that students of Christian Science had to what was then the only periodical, Mrs. Eddy wrote of The Christian Science Journal, "They should take our magazine, work for it, write for it, and read it." Miscellaneous Writings, p. 271 . Perhaps you think this is a large order, and one you feel you can't fulfill, but with gratitude you can! In a letter to those students who had been writing to her instead of writing for publication, Mrs. Eddy gives us another reason for grateful sharing: "Methinks, were they to contemplate the universal charge wherewith divine Love has entrusted us, in behalf of a suffering race, they would contribute oftener to the pages of this swift vehicle of scientific thought; for it reaches a vast number of earnest readers, and seekers after Truth." Ibid., pp. 155-156 .
How do you begin? Write a testimony of your healing; tell what Christian Science has done for you. Everyone of us can do this—beginner or advanced student.
Really, an outpouring of thanks to God is inevitable when we come to see that God is All-in-all. As I pondered this truth, I found new possibilities in Jesus' query "But where are the nine?" I paraphrased it this way: "Where is this ungrateful mind? Where is this thankless man? Does man—or mind—exist apart from God, who is the only Mind? In God's creation there is no ungrateful mentality." Recognizing this, we'll be one who returns to give thanks again and again. Every day is a day to publish our thanksgiving by our thanks-living!
