Article September 22, 2014 Issue

What are we trying to prove?

Susan Booth Mack Snipes

During my early prayers recently, I had an epiphany. For over a year I had heard various people say either that healing wasn’t going on or that if we wanted to build up the Christian Science movement, we needed to do better healing. Perhaps I hadn’t paid close attention to these comments at first because I’d been seeing plenty of evidence of healing in my own life and practice. But I began to grasp that for some people Christian Science had become a kind of intellectual activity, without the full dimension of Christ-healing that Mary Baker Eddy expected of her followers. Mrs. Eddy herself wrote, “Less teaching and good healing is to-day the acme of ‘well done;’ a healing that is not guesswork,—chronic recovery ebbing and flowing,—but instantaneous cure” (Miscellaneous Writings 1883–1896, p. 355). 

Christ-healing from this standpoint relies on the laws of Spirit, not matter, and for healing to occur, a willingness to understand man’s full spirituality as God’s idea is essential. If our notion of healing has become that of the medical model, of merely “fixing” physical problems, in competition with other healthcare approaches, this approach would be following the carnal mind’s model by accepting the belief of life in matter. Trying to use Christian Science from the standpoint that matter and its ailments are real not only prevents the real effects of Christian Science—regeneration, spiritual progress, and healing—it also denies the very nature of who we are as ideas of Love.

Mrs. Eddy points this out when she says in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, “The determination to hold Spirit in the grasp of matter is the persecutor of Truth and Love” (p. 28). Within the “grasp of matter,” even if we devotedly apply ourselves to healing, we will eventually fail, or give up from guilt, fear, frustration, confusion. We cannot prove Christian Science from the standpoint of so-called life in matter because real life is the expression of Spirit. 

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About the author

Susan Booth Mack Snipes is a practitioner and teacher of Christian Science who divides her time between Orland, Maine, and Shepherdstown, West Virginia.

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