Article October 27, 2014 Issue

Defeating mental interference

Debbie Peck

I was raised in a medically oriented household, so it wasn’t surprising that as a child I believed the answer for sickness was always found in a medicine cabinet or a trip to the doctor’s office. By the time I was a teenager, I knew the medical remedy for every common ailment.

However, when I first started studying Christian Science in my early 20s, I found it natural to turn my thought to God and seek Him for healing. The educated impulse to turn to medicine evaporated as I steadfastly strove to understand God and my relationship to Him. But the medical beliefs about how ailments should be treated would often pop up in my thought as I approached a challenge spiritually.

It seemed that I was my own worst enemy. Here I was, trying to pray, and I would hear an inner voice saying, “Just take a pill,” or “Apply that ointment.” While I was certainly free to do that if I chose and respected the choice of others to rely on medical means, these thoughts were interfering with my own desire to rely on Spirit. I recognized this mental battle as animal magnetism, a term Mary Baker Eddy uses in her book Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures to describe the deceiving, mesmeric influence opposed to Spirit, which suggests that there is life or intelligence in matter that can help or hurt us. Only if I went along with this false belief, however, could it reverse my efforts to draw closer to God, divine Mind, and gain the spiritual understanding that would heal whatever I was facing.

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