Truly universal care
Universal care is a concept whose time has come, although response to the concept comes in many forms. In the United States, one response has been that a state legislature passed a bill recently, which provides that all employed persons will have minimum health-insurance coverage. Of course, most major businesses already provide such coverage for their employees, but the intent of the state is to have coverage extended to all its citizens and not to just a portion of them—regardless of how large that portion is.
In a relatively wealthy society, in which one measure of wealth is the care that is provided to individuals when they are ill, it does seem unconscionable that some would be left outside the circle of care to which many others have access. There is a profound and humane impulse that moves people in many countries to provide for their citizens.
Not unrelated, however, to this important question, Christian Science redefines and extends the spiritual potential of truly universal health care. Mary Baker Eddy rejected the common belief that some human beings are meant by God to have a better lot in life than others. In contrast to the religious doctrine of predestination and various social and economic theories that clearly divided people into haves and have-nots, she wrote and preached and taught that God, divine Love, is universal in His lovingkindness.
Mrs. Eddy believed that this conviction was thoroughly grounded in New Testament Christianity. She was not a political partisan or polemicist. Nevertheless, she did have definite and strong beliefs about justice, liberty, equality, and the right of the individual to worship God responsibly and freely. Her views regarding universal health care could, perhaps, be summed up in a passage such as this one from Science and Health: "Is it not a species of infidelity to believe that so great a work as the Messiah's was done for himself or for God, who needed no help from Jesus' example to preserve the eternal harmony? But mortals did need this help, and Jesus pointed the way for them. ... It is not well to imagine that Jesus demonstrated the divine power to heal only for a select number or for a limited period of time, since to all mankind and in every hour, divine Love supplies all good."
A spiritual understanding of God's unbroken relationship to His creation is embodied in the Christian Science way of healing. It is an understanding that is informed by Christ Jesus' example as well as one's own actual experience in being healed through Christianly scientific prayer. Christian Science is based on the truth that God is wholly good and wills only good. This is why students of Christian Science can be so confident that God's law heals through scientific prayer. There really would be no more effective way to miss the spirit of this movement than to believe that Christian healing is not meant to be universal. Such elitism would deny the very nature of God's universal love.
Legislating health care, of course, is quite different in many ways from the Christian method of spiritual healing. For one thing, it still anticipates the inevitability of illness. And it is at this basic level of what we expect from life and what we're willing to do to be spiritually and physically healthy that Christian Science comes into operation. Material health care doesn't guarantee health; and its scope is often tragically limited. While in military service as a chaplain, I had the opportunity to observe a system of universal health care within the microcosm of military society. Dedicated people did their best, most of the time, to cope with the health needs of military families. It still was inadequate. Any human system of care will be until it breaks loose from material limitations and begins to glimpse the actual spiritual nature of man.
Christian Scientists have much to offer to a humane society searching for a way to care for one another. Mrs. Eddy hints at what is required, though, to meet the demands for truly universal health care: "Whoever reaches the understanding of Christian Science in its proper signification will perform the sudden cures of which it is capable; but this can be done only by taking up the cross and following Christ in the daily life" (Science and Health).
Maybe in times past this demand seemed out of reach, even for many committed Christian Scientists. But the age in which we live is reaching out for higher standards of care. And students of Christian Science may now be entering into a period for which they have long prayed, a period when the absolute dedication of their lives to the ministry of spiritual healing will no longer be considered by observers as simply a religious preference. They may actually come to see it as the spiritual necessity that it is.
The passage of a universal health-insurance law in an influential state in the United States may suggest many things to many people—some quite controversial. But for Christian Science it could be taken as one more sign that their study of Christian Science has universal implications in responding to humanity's concerns.
Michael D. Rissler
