Increasingly the subject of spiritual healing is being taken seriously in both religious and medical circles today. Under the direction of Dr. Herbert Benson last month, Harvard Medical School, The Mind/Body Medical Institute, and Deaconess Hospital presented a three-day conference in Boston called "Spirituality & Healing in Medicine." Representatives from a number of major religious groups, including the Church of Christ, Scientist, discussed the healing practices of their respective faiths. Doctors and nurses who have begun to incorporate spiritual healing in their practices also shared their experiences.

Attendants at the sessions included physicians, nurses, healthcare professionals, clergy, and people who had come simply to learn more about spiritual healing. For example, an attorney, who has experienced healing in his own life, traveled from Michigan to attend. He told me of his ongoing search and why he had been interested in the conference: "I think there are dimensions to the human spirit and capacities that we just haven't scratched the surface of yet. Probably, if I had one goal in my life, it would be to understand and to heal as Jesus did." (A report on this conference will be featured in next week's issue of the Sentinel.)

This developing interest in spiritual healing is, in fact, taking place in many areas throughout the world. And it isn't occurring only in the major metropolitan areas or at prestigious institutions of learning and research. It's also happening at small churches holding regular healing services and in the private offices of medical doctors praying with their patients. It's happening in towns and neighborhoods almost everywhere you look.

An example was a news item, which came across the wire service, from The Herald-Sun in Durham, North Carolina. The article carried the headline "Divine healing loses stigma." It reported on the growing involvement by a broad spectrum of mainline churches in providing healing services in their communities. "These services," the newspaper noted, "often are called 'services for wholeness' and the liturgy suggests that divine healing can be much more than a physical event."

The report continued, "It may have to do with shoring up broken minds and spirits or with confronting spiritual or psychological needs. Or as one minister puts it—an individual's greatest need for healing may be in the area of unresolved anger, or in general frustration about life." This minister also notes that such mental states may be the underlying cause of an illness and that this is why the church's healing ministry must address these aspects directly.

Another minister, Rev. William Lawrence, who has conducted classes at Duke Divinity School, is quoted in The Herald-Sun as pointing to the roots of spiritual healing in the work of Christ Jesus' early followers. He comments that "churches are discovering that services of healing have been part of the life of the Christian Church from the inception of the movement. There's lots of evidence, certainly in the ministry of Jesus, in the book of Acts and in the letter of James."

In 1875, Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer of Christian Science, wrote the textbook for spiritual healing, titled Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. This book is a vital resource for healers today. It explains the divine laws and spiritual truths of God and His creation, as well as specific rules for the practice of healing. Throughout the various discussions of prayer and healing in Science and Health, it is made clear that much more than a physical cure is involved. The deeper purpose is always spiritual regeneration and redemption. People's lives discover new meaning. Men and women are made "new" in Christ.

The result of this spiritual transformation is that our base of thinking is lifted beyond the limitations of believing that life is rooted in materiality, into the freedom of understanding the spiritual nature of man's real identity. We learn that our life is in and of God, divine Spirit—that, in truth, we reflect divine Spirit and have never actually been subject to matter and its limitations. The recognition of our inherent spirituality, goodness, and wholeness as the likeness of God is wonderfully liberating. Such a Christ-driven transformation of thought and character not only changes one's mental standpoint but also heals the sickness, physical discord, or malfunction in the body, which had resulted from some dysfunction in one's thinking—from some phase of the false belief in a power other than God.

Science and Health makes clear why it is so essential to uplift and transform the mental condition of anyone seeking spiritual healing. "Disease," Mrs. Eddy writes, "is always induced by a false sense mentally entertained, not destroyed. Disease is an image of thought externalized. The mental state is called a material state. Whatever is cherished in mortal mind as the physical condition is imaged forth on the body" (p. 411).

This fundamental element in scientific Christian healing—the demonstration of a change in thought, of spiritual regeneration, of a genuine wholeness of being—is perhaps a central reason why spiritual healing is receiving more serious consideration and appreciation today. The healing method that not only makes a body well but makes a life new and whole is the original Christian healing practiced by Jesus and his disciples. The Master healed all sorts of diseases: chronic, acute, congenital, functional, contagious. He healed blindness and deafness; he cleansed leprosy and restored strength and mobility to the crippled. And the healing he offered was also a spiritual renewal, bringing peace and joy. He told his followers, "My peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you" (John 14:27), and "These things have I spoken unto you, that my joy might remain in you, and that your joy might be full" (John 15:11).

When Mary Baker Eddy was writing about the effects of the healing work accomplished through the practice of God's laws, the Science of Christ, she affirmed that it was much more than simply "a phenomenal exhibition." She wrote, "Its appearing is the coming anew of the gospel of 'on earth peace, good-will toward men.' " She realized that its purpose had to be larger than treating physical disease, as indeed it was in Jesus' time. "Now, as then," Mrs. Eddy observed, "signs and wonders are wrought in the metaphysical healing of physical disease; but these signs are only to demonstrate its divine origin,—to attest the reality of the higher mission of the Christ-power to take away the sins of the world" (p. 150).

In the previous paragraph of this discussion in Science and Health, Mrs. Eddy had also written, "To-day there is hardly a city, village, or hamlet, in which are not to be found living witnesses and monuments to the virtue and power of Truth, as applied through this Christian system of healing disease" (pp. 149–150).

When spiritual healing frees someone from fear or sin, when it makes a person whole, when it produces lives that, in humility, bear witness each day to "the virtue and power of Truth," it earns—and surely deserves—the respect of honest thinkers.

William E. Moody