Article December 4, 1995 Issue

Insights into healing pain

Written for the Sentinel

Having read several articles about current medical research efforts to find more effective pain relief for patients, I recalled the experience of a Christian Science practitioner who had been asked to treat a woman suffering acute discomfort in the kidney area. She was unable to look after her own needs and had gone to a Christian Science nursing facility, where she was being cared for. The pain made it difficult for her to think for herself.

The practitioner explained that both he and the patient had shared an unwavering certainty that the power of God, divine Love, was more than adequate to meet this challenge. As any practitioner would, he turned in deepest prayer to God, knowing that illness was contrary to God's will and thus was illegitimate. It sprang from the fallacy that something could disturb the eternal unity of God and man, that something could mar God's own effect: perfect man.

In Science and Health, Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer of Christian Science, writes, "Christ presents the indestructible man, whom Spirit creates, constitutes, and governs" (p. 316). Christ, Truth, reveals a very different man from that presented by anatomy or biology. The Bible, in both the Old and New Testaments, refers to man as God's image. What is the image of Spirit? What is the condition of Spirit? What is the nature of Spirit? The answers to these questions tell us volumes about man. Spiritual man is not an abstract religious ideal; he is what God has actually created and what He maintains and sustains.

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