HOW I FOUND CHRISTIAN SCIENCE May 24, 2010 Issue

I READ THE BOOK ...

MARLENE CHATTERTON

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE CAME into my life at about the time I left school, after the ninth grade. In the Sunday School I'd attended when I was growing up, I was told of a manlike God who created the universe as a sort of training ground for individual souls to advance to a more spiritual state of being. It was hard to reconcile this version of God and man with the teachings of Jesus in the New Testament. The Old Testament only brought more questions.

My early marriage to a young man, whose mother had been healed of a so-called incurable condition through Christian Science, brought Science and Health into my life. Like the Bible, the book seemed hard to understand. But also like the Bible, it asserted that God is Love and that He answers our prayers if we ask Him for help. I continued reading because I wanted to find out how Mary Baker Eddy could write with such confidence that we don't need to wait for God's help, or wonder if it is His will that we have access to comfort and healing.

Although the book directly challenged what I had been taught about the nature of God, it wakened a deep conviction that what I was reading came from some timeless source outside its words. Sometimes the truth of what I was reading seemed to illumine the air around me with what I could only think of as a divine presence.