Editorial September 23, 1996 Issue

Gaining "skill in comfort's art"

Barbara M. Vining

When someone needs comforting—a spouse, a child, a friend, a fellow worker, or anyone else—most of us would like to be more skillful at recognizing that person's need and responding to it in an appropriate and helpful way. A poem by A. E. Hamilton, quoted at the end of the autobiography of the Discoverer of the Science of Christian healing, Mary Baker Eddy, turns us to God. It reads:

Ask God to give thee skill
In comfort's art:
That thou may'st consecrated be
And set apart
Unto a life of sympathy.
For heavy is the weight of ill
In every heart;
And comforters are needed much
Of Christlike touch. Retrospection and Introspection, p. 95 .