Editorial September 20, 1993 Issue

Preaching the gospel to yourself

Mary Metzner Trammell

If there hadn't been so much love in the practitioner's face, her words that day might have sounded harsh. "Honey," she told my friend, "I think you're a little wrapped up in self." Now, my friend knew that this Christian Science practitioner, who'd been praying night and day to help relieve her of nausea and fainting spells, wanted only to see her healed. So she wasn't offended, just a bit puzzled.

After all, hadn't my friend given years of her life to helping other people—her family, her friends, her church, her students at school? It was just that she was so frightened, in the past few weeks when she'd been sick, that she honestly didn't care about anything or anyone else. She thought, was it really so bad to focus on herself—and her problems—at least until she felt better? Then maybe she'd be ready to talk about being a full-time good Samaritan. In the meantime, she just wanted to pray for herself and take care of herself.

As she thought about the practitioner's comment, though, she asked herself, "What is prayer anyway?" And all of a sudden she began to understand why the practitioner had urged her to turn away from self. Real prayer, she began to see, meant forgetting all about a shortsighted view of herself as a mortal "I"—with all its mistakes and rough times—and remembering instead the immortal "I am," who is God, the divine intelligence forever ordering the whole universe in seamless harmony. Real prayer involves a shift from self-centered love to God-centered love. It frees us from fretfully focusing on number one (ourselves!). And it helps us learn to care so deeply about all of humanity that we'd do anything to free children, men, and women everywhere from suffering of every sort.

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