Putting a stop to self-mutilation
While praying about the report, I was reminded of the Bible’s account of Jesus’ healing a tormented man who lived among the tombs. The description of the man’s condition indicates apparent self-mutilation. So even though this problem seems so modern, here is an example of Jesus’ healing it by spiritual means (see Mark 5:1–15).
To me, this means that spiritual solutions can heal people struggling with self-mutilation today. From my own experience with depression, I can honestly say that at first I didn’t find help in simply reading that I was, in reality, the image and likeness of God. It wasn’t a problem with the words, but with my ability to perceive them as applying to me.
The first thing that helped me give up harmful thoughts was realizing that I was created by God. As Spirit’s idea, I had never been born into matter, and so, as Mary Baker Eddy points out, I was “not subject to birth, growth, maturity, decay” (Science and Health, p. 305).
This conviction that God’s love was tangible and real justified my distaste for the concept of myself as mortal, fallible, and limited. This led to the realization that I had never been a mortal—satisfactory or unsatisfactory. A sense of eternality and God’s ever-presence began to permeate my thoughts. Light instead of dark visions began to fill my consciousness.
I still needed to stop thinking of myself as an unsatisfactory mortal and to see myself from the standpoint of God’s goodness and love. This came as I learned to know Christ, the spiritual idea of God, always with us and always enabling us to mirror the divine.
What has helped me is an old maxim that God can be served only with joy.
This better understanding of the man and woman of God’s creating as the very image of divine Love is what Jesus taught and what Mary Baker Eddy has revealed through her discovery of Christian Science. We find this true nature not through focusing on conditions in our lives, but through understanding Christ as a spiritual and mental phenomenon that reveals to us our true beauty and goodness.
Another insight I gained is that the human body does not perform, as we may think it does, much of a role in defining what we are. If you think of a friend, your memory seldom focuses on physical characteristics. What really defines them is the love, intelligence, joy, and so forth, they express. So seeing our bodies in this light means that we are going to be far less preoccupied with them, and as a result, less inclined to mutilate or harm them.
I’ve also found it critical to give up feelings of discontent. What has helped me is an old maxim that God can be served only with joy. To me this means that I must vigorously resist any temptation to destructively criticize myself. This enables me to keep my consciousness bathed in light and untouched by dark thoughts.
I realize that these may seem like “just words” to someone, even as they seemed like “just words” to me when I was trying to see my own way into the light. But the same Christ-love that enabled Jesus to heal the man alone in the tombs can reach you wherever you are. You don’t need to be trapped in a destructive pattern of thought or behavior. You are the child of divine Love, and you are already in a state of grace, beauty, and unfettered joy. And in that state there is nothing to despise or to mutilate. Only something very special to love.
