FOR VARIOUS REASONS, I've recently been contemplating the idea of not getting excited. I don't mean avoiding enthusiasm about seeing a good movie, or getting a nice gift, or seeing a friend or family member I haven't seen for a while. Rather, I see a need not to let my thoughts get stirred up over scenarios for dangerous events down the line—such as the threat of a pandemic or some natural disaster.

The word excite can mean "to stimulate." And I feel it might well have been in this respect that Mary Baker Eddy used it in Science and Health, when she wrote that when it comes to disease, "The predisposing cause and the exciting cause are mental" (p. 178). Clearly, if what's in our thinking can predispose us to disease or stimulate it, we want to be watching our thoughts carefully. We wouldn't want to get "excited" in a way that brings on sickness.

Yet how easy it is to get into a flap when something is front and center in the news night after night, as was the case recently here in the UK. Infected poultry was found—and culled—on a heavily populated turkey farm. Along with daily reports about practical steps being taken to contain avian flu, we were subjected to animated visuals of the supposed virus which, it has been feared, could mutate and threaten humans. There's a case of how exciting stuff can cross the threshold of one's thoughts in the worst possible way!

We can begin to resist the underlying urge to become fearful, however, by instead seeing such news broadcasts as invitations to be poised in the prayer that helps ease public concern. Prayer—healing prayer—can help support a calm confidence that all is under the one control that matters: God's control. This prayer reveals, for example, that no matter how impressive an animated blow-up of a virus might look, it merely represents a form of materiality—which, as Christian Science teaches, is subject to our understanding of spiritual truth. Having all power, Spirit, God, gives no authority either to matter or mortal belief to exist or to act, but excludes them from being a cause or effect.

One of the things I've noted in these recent reports on avian flu, at least in the UK, has been that the experts who are interviewed seem to be using less fearful language in describing the threat. I've been grateful for the wisdom in that. But it has also alerted me to look out for the opposite of excitement, complacency—not in these scientists, who are doing their best from their standpoint, but in me, as one of the many thousands striving, through prayer, to support the world's eventual complete freedom from pandemics and the fear of them. If I relinquish my prayerful watch, or lessen it, taking comfort in the idea we are relatively safe, then I am in effect negating my previous prayers, which have been reaching for the recognition that humankind's total safety is divinely assured. That is, my prayer is to better understand why we are spiritually safe, under God's law, and will remain so, immune to viruses of all sorts, as well as to the fear of them.

As Science and Health puts it: "So-called mortal mind or the mind of mortals being the remote, predisposing, and the exciting cause of all suffering, the cause of disease must be obliterated through Christ in divine Science, or the so-called physical senses will get the victory" (pp. 230-231). Every loss from disease anywhere represents a victory for the physical senses, and is a call to rouse ourselves to a greater grasp of the Christ—the understanding that all God's creation is entirely spiritual. Spirit and matter are simply mutually exclusive, and to see the spiritual nature of any individual, any creature, is to see their divine immunity to disease.

You could say the prayer that glimpses this truth with conviction furnishes some reason to get us excited—in a healing way. It's stimulating to know that God, good, outlaws sickness and all suffering. That's the beneficial kind of excitement that helps us undermine the threats of disease to frighten us now, or in the future. css