While growing up I recall my mother wrestling with the concept of good and evil. How could a sweet little baby come into the world with sin? she wondered. What did they do wrong? It didn’t make sense to her. As a hospital delivery room nurse, she daily witnessed the love newborns inspire in us. She was deeply disturbed by her church’s stance that they were “sentenced” from the get-go. I was disturbed by the unavoidable outcome—that I was a sinful mortal who must be absolved of evil tendencies. So I regularly confessed to those deemed holier than I. The idea of being at the bottom of this hierarchy was disheartening. God felt out of reach.

By the time I finished my private school education, I decided that if God had created us this way—as fallen—I wasn’t interested. This was not a God I could respect or have any desire to turn to. I severed my religious ties. I would go it alone and find heaven another way.

The search for Truth (or what I termed limitlessness) took me in many directions. One period it was love of the absolute nature of mathematics; next, singing the highest, purest note, or pushing past limits in marathon running. The quest eventually became, What are the limits of love? I began studying meditation; worked with spiritual healers from New York, to Alaska, to Greece; threw myself into spiritual practices; made pilgrimages to places ranging from Navajo lands to India; and in one of my trips stayed in a Tibetan monastery in the Himalayas. I was probably like the baby bird in the P. D. Eastman book who goes to and fro asking the question, “Are you my mother?”

I found more and more peace but knew I couldn’t settle for a partial salvation, one that didn’t ring true to the core. I would give all of myself for a while, and wear the “clothes” (the beliefs and rituals) of one spiritual tradition as if they were truly me. Then the old, unsettled yearning for Truth would impel me on. Finally it dawned on me what had been at the core of my anger and restlessness since I could remember: I was not being taught the right concept of God, which I came to understand as Life.

While I was living in Greece and teaching meditation and alternative healing, a few instantaneous healings occurred. I understood these as either God hearing my cries or simply the freeing of a disturbed mind. But the focus on me as the healer, as the channel of blessings, felt wrong. I knew the spiritual force that did the healing was greater than me. In addition, how could the healing be consistent, and repeated, rather than an out-of-the-heavenly-blue miracle?

Those questions led to a shift away from manipulation of the body and its so-called “energies” to a desire to rely solely on the Holy Spirit. Deeper, more life-changing results were happening when I listened to and trusted God.

Christian Science was introduced to my family after we had moved to the US and settled in Boston. An acquaintance gave us copies of the book Science and Health. I was impressed with how the book claimed I could know God. Was that possible, to know a God who seemed abstract and remote, whom maybe I would meet in the afterlife? I was skeptical, but kept reading. The absolute nature of many statements came across like pile drivers, hammering concepts down with a relentless certainty. I was stirred up and almost couldn’t bear it—how could anyone make such definitive claims? I had studied books on spirituality. They talked spiritual. Gave glimpses of God. Even lifted me. This book came straight into thought and immediately began revamping my sense of life, and awaking a promise.

How could healing be consistent, and repeated, rather than an out-of-the-heavenly-blue miracle?

Then on page 332, I came across this: “Christ is the true idea voicing good, the divine message from God to men speaking to the human consciousness. The Christ is incorporeal, spiritual . . . . Jesus demonstrated Christ.” I was arrested. “Someone finally got it right,” I thought—understood and could explain the difference between Jesus and the Christ. I never had felt right about deifying and worshipping Jesus, but had left it there. As I’ve now learned in the Bible, Jesus constantly pointed us to the Father, not to himself. The love Jesus embodied by his pure life makes him the anointed one, the Christ. Yet the Christ, or Truth, didn’t begin with nor end with Jesus. I had found a way out of the conundrum and was elated at my discovery.

Every page of Science and Health opened my eyes wider and wider. How did the author know this, and that? I wondered. I was astonished in much the same way I imagine the disciples were when listening to Jesus. I knew these words were revelation. It also came to me: “If this is Truth, it can’t be wishy-washy. It can’t be given as plausible postulates. It must be stated as unequivocally and as absolutely as Truth is.” And it was. 

Any resistance I was feeling vanished. The clincher came in the chapter “Recapitulation,” where it says, “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).

These statements ripped the veil off my eyes, which had separated me from God. The karmic belief that I was paying for my sins (and the concomitant cycle of rebirth and death) melted away. The supposed dark side of my soul was exposed for what it was—the wrong way of looking at myself, a myth that God, good, created or allowed life opposite in nature from Himself.

The slate was wiped clean—I was innocent. An unimaginable lightness swept through me, and I wept. The door of heaven had opened. Without reading any further I closed Science and Health with the thought, I’m in! And since then, I have never stopped studying this book.

God was finally accessible. He was the Love always near, the Truth I could know. He was natural, logical, and inevitable. This same God whom Jesus worshipped and whom my heart had longed for since boyhood was revealed to me in Christian
Science.