What makes healing in Christian Science thorough and indisputable?

It's that it is not about looking at material circumstances and trying to effect changes, as matter-based remedies attempt to do; but rather, it involves a complete shift of perspective. Gaining an exalted spiritual view is so deeply desirable that we find the persistent yielding required to achieve it well worth the pursuit. The outcome of exchanging the material for the spiritual viewpoint is called healing; it's actually the effect of God on us. And necessary adjustments to our experience just naturally follow. Spiritual healing is an awakening of human consciousness to the reality of God and His idea as the only fact of being. This mental awakening, this healing, does not refer to nor imitate the mortal model—a material process that includes steps, stages of repair, and most specifically, time.

The Christian healer's model is the Christ. Its centerpiece is Christianity. That is, it is about man's relation to God. It declares, as Christ Jesus articulated and demonstrated during his missionary years, that we have always been the beloved children of God, cared for and maintained now and eternally by our ever-present Father-Mother. The message Jesus delivered when he gave his Sermon on the Mount was an iteration of the divine covenant, God's promise that He is with us, caring for us, maintaining us, satisfying every need of His creation. "Fear not, little flock," Jesus said, "for it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom" (Luke 12:32).

Realizing that God's loving laws are the underpinning and source of government in our lives, brings the evidence of wholeness, health, and peace within and without. This activity, God's presence and power made obvious, was both the essence and substance of Jesus' mission. It makes sense that because Jesus fully accepted God's perfect love as the only fact, perfection is all he saw. As Mary Baker Eddy explains in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures: "Jesus beheld in Science the perfect man, who appeared to him where sinning mortal man appears to mortals. In this perfect man the Saviour saw God's own likeness, and this correct view of man healed the sick. Thus Jesus taught that the kingdom of God is intact, universal, and that man is pure and holy" (pp. 476–477).

To behold is to hold or retain in thought, to apprehend. And this is what Jesus did as people approached him and called out for his ministering love. He apprehended, understood them to be immortal men and women, God's perfect creation in Science, or under the laws of God. It's clear that this beholding was done in conscious thought, that is, without a process, and therefore the recorded healings in the Bible that he effected are often described as immediate, meaning "without a medium," such as time or matter. He saw what he knew. The perfection of all reality was understood to be present. Mary Baker Eddy sums up this divine apprehension in her chapter "Genesis" in Science and Health: "The divine understanding reigns, is all, and there is no other consciousness" (p. 536).

Some years ago, I had a healing of a debilitating physical challenge. Following this healing, for about a year and a half I was perfectly free and very grateful until suddenly I found myself again facing a period of declining health of an even more severe nature than my previous experience. I felt disheartened and feared I would not be capable of overcoming this more extreme attack on my health.

Yet, I'd had proofs all my life that God was my helper, and the source of sound health, of happy relations, of security, and supply. As a child, a teenager, and an adult, the truths of Christian Science were the center of my life. I'd experienced and witnessed remarkable healings, spiritual awakening and transformation in myself and in others, and accepted the power of God as a matter of course.

Even in the midst of this rugged period, it felt so natural to turn to God and the spiritual truths that were home and heaven to me. Around the clock I prayed to God to lift me up and out of this mental desert place. I watched the seasons change, and still I felt incapacitated and ill. Even so, nothing could thoroughly convince me that my situation was beyond God's help. I never lost hope that I would awaken to complete healing.

I continued to pray for others in my capacity as a Christian Science practitioner, refusing to give up on practicing Christian Science. Seeing healings through for others and taking thought of myself, felt in sync with true Christian practice. Through God's love, I felt a surety that the lie of disability would evaporate from my thought, and life.

And it did. Eventually, step by step, I emerged from a place of extreme weakness to increased ability, as fear and disorientation were conquered. I felt divine Love retrieving me, not all at once, but in encouraging ways, and I was again able to sit at my desk and get around the house. These encouraging signs of normalcy increased until I finally acknowledged that I'd experienced healing. However, after some time passed, there were still lingering reminders that I had been through a rough patch and had survived it.

Knowing that God's love is complete, actual, and the only reality helped me mentally tend to lingering reminders, or symptoms, of sickness. A reduction of weight and a lessening of physical strength were part of the residual effects, and I prayerfully reasoned that since evil had never actually had power or ability, it couldn't succeed in robbing me of full strength. In a description of a healing in the Christian Science textbook, the author, Mary Baker Eddy, uses a phrase that came to me frequently as I prayed about this. The phrase was, "without a vestige." A person, this phrase says, as a result of illness was starved and weak, until Christian Science rescued him from poor health. The full sentence is: "At this point Christian Science saved him, and he is now in perfect health without a vestige of the old complaint" (p. 221).

Without a vestige! I found this so powerful, and considered why. Why? Because the reality of God had been proved in the healing of this person, disproving the belief, a mortal supposition, that evil had ever been his expression or experience, even though the account mentions many years of suffering.

I was fully waking up to the fact that the story of illness and attack had never been mine either. It's never been yours or anyone's story. Evil is a mirage. When we understand this concept, then we also understand that there cannot be a trace of a mirage, an illusion. When we see the mirage that appears to be water on the road on a hot summer's day, we know that it is a trick of the senses. As we approach the place on the road, we don't expect to find mud there, because water has never been in that place. An illusion doesn't have the ability to follow us around, make an impression, or haunt our thought. When it is dismissed by the Christ, Truth, it is destroyed, utterly and thoroughly annihilated.

With patient, persistent prayer, my strength was renewed and my weight normalized. Disappointed memories of opportunities lost, or occasions missed, have left my thought completely.

In another place in her writings, Mrs. Eddy makes this point: "...the power of Truth must be seen and felt in health, happiness, and holiness: then it will be found that Mind is All-in-all, and there is no matter to cope with" (Miscellaneous Writings 1883-1896, p. 183).

When Christian Science healing takes place, the only echo of it is an increased understanding of the nature of God and His idea, a stronger conviction in the presence and power of the Christ, and the pleasant aftersmile of God's love.

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