Article January 6, 2014 Issue

The body's not the boss

Fenna Corry

Two years ago I was healed of an obvious challenge with my shoulder that required much focused prayer. One day, while reading Mary Baker Eddy: Christian Healer, Amplified Edition, a particular passage caused a major paradigm shift in my thinking. In a letter to a student, Mrs. Eddy wrote: “Your mind is all that determines the case whether you are better or worse. The body and its symptoms have nothing to say about it” (Yvonne Caché von Fettweis and Robert Townsend Warneck , p. 234).

Even though I’d read many similar passages before, Mrs. Eddy’s statement in this letter suddenly struck me in a different way. It dawned on me that this passage uses the phrase “the body” instead of “your body” and referred impersonally to “its symptoms.” So I tried to reset my thinking and instead of seeing “my body,” I thought of it as “the body.”

This was a new level of understanding for me. Even familiar passages from Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy took on fresh meaning. I started to notice Mrs. Eddy’s use of the wording “the body” often in her book. For example, “Become conscious for a single moment that Life and intelligence are purely spiritual,—neither in nor of matter,—and the body will then utter no complaints” (p. 14). Several months later, I attended a meeting, and it was fun to hear the speaker tell us that our body is just something we need at this point to get around.