Is it selfish to pray for ourselves, or do we contribute to the advancement of mankind when we focus on healing what is diseased or deficient in our lives? As I’ve thought about this question, what has kept popping into my thought is the idea of breaking a link in a chain, or of severing a cord. 

In Psalm 129 we read, “The Lord is righteous: he hath cut asunder the cords of the wicked” (verse 4). What does the Bible mean by “cords of the wicked”? I’ve learned in Christian Science that they can be anything, including sickness or sin, that would claim to separate us from the goodness of a righteous God. 

It strikes me that when we struggle and pray through one of these claims and heal it, we have just weakened the mortal chains of slavery that are being foisted upon mankind. We’ve seen God cut the cord, as the Bible puts it. Prayer by prayer, healing by healing, we can contribute to the removal of the chains that bind mankind.

So how will God “break the chains that bind his people” (Isaiah 9:4, The Living Bible)? That question can be answered by examining the teachings and works of Christian Science.

Prayer by prayer, healing by healing, we can contribute to the removal of the chains that bind mankind.

One of the most illuminating aspects of Mary Baker Eddy’s discovery of Christian Science is its elucidation of the biblical fact that evil is impersonal—an illusion—and that God, good, is the only reality of existence. Think of the immensity of this fact. Eddy has essentially shown us that God never created a cord attaching us to evil in any way. Evil in any form is never actually connected to the person who seems to be suffering from it or propagating it (see the parable of the tares and the wheat, Matthew 13:24–30). Evil has no actual reality and no link or correlation to the divine, and therefore it has no power to link itself to God’s creation, man. That is the good news of Truth.

The steps to make this good news applicable in our lives require that we extricate ourselves—decouple ourselves—from the illusions called evil, in the different forms it may try to take in our lives. As Eddy says in her book Miscellaneous Writings 1883–1896: “The consciousness of corporeality, and whatever is connected therewith, must be outgrown. Corporeal falsities include all obstacles to health, holiness, and heaven” (p. 309). 

In her seminal book on Christian Science, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, Mary Baker Eddy explains: “By universal consent, mortal belief has constituted itself a law to bind mortals to sickness, sin, and death. This customary belief is misnamed material law, and the individual who upholds it is mistaken in theory and in practice” (p. 229). She replaces this false idea of man’s connection to evil with man’s true connection to God in the following sentence from Science and Health: “The real man being linked by Science to his Maker, mortals need only turn from sin and lose sight of mortal selfhood to find Christ, the real man and his relation to God, and to recognize the divine sonship” (p. 316).

Christ Jesus obviously recognized his link to his Maker, referring to God as his Father; and he knew that healing is an important component in this recognition of divine sonship. The New Testament of the Bible is packed with accounts of his healing works and his instruction of his disciples as they too healed. 

Eddy saw how important healing is. She said: “In different ages the divine idea assumes different forms, according to humanity’s needs. In this age it assumes, more intelligently than ever before, the form of Christian healing. This is the babe we are to cherish. This is the babe that twines its loving arms about the neck of omnipotence, and calls forth infinite care from His loving heart” (Miscellaneous Writings, p. 370).

It is inspiring to see proof that our prayers for what appear to be our own personal issues reach out to heal the larger, universal needs of humanity, and weaken the chains that bind us to mortality in the process. One small incident in my life showed me that prayer blesses all in this way. 

Several years ago, on a day in which I was to fly across the United States to attend my annual Christian Science students’ association meeting, I woke up with uncomfortable physical symptoms. In the years before I had ever heard of Christian Science, I had struggled with a recurring bladder infection that the doctors had called cystitis, but it had been years since I’d suffered with it. The symptoms I woke up with were the same as I’d experienced before, and they were particularly inconvenient on a travel day. 

However, the truth I had already learned in Christian Science—that evil is not personal, so this disease did not belong to me (or anyone)—gave me the courage to go ahead and get on the plane. I knew that the spiritual growth I would experience during my association day would be irreplaceable, and I was not willing to let this picture of sickness—what Eddy refers to as a belief of “mortal mind”—keep me from attending. 

As I walked into the hotel where my association was being held, there was a large placard in the lobby welcoming an international symposium of medical professionals to meetings about cystitis. 

Healings prove that we are linked to our Maker.

“Nice try, mortal mind” were the words I said out loud as I stood in that lobby. I knew that I could not be bound to the beliefs of mortality, and that instead my healing prayers about what felt like personal symptoms would be a blessing to those attending the medical seminars. All symptoms disappeared in that moment and have not returned since. I feel confident that my prayers helped to weaken the hold of cystitis for others as well.

Science and Health says, “The divine nature was best expressed in Christ Jesus, who threw upon mortals the truer reflection of God and lifted their lives higher than their poor thought-models would allow,—thoughts which presented man as fallen, sick, sinning, and dying” (p. 259). Isn’t healing others something we are all required to do if we are to “go, and do … likewise” (Luke 10:37), as the Bible commands? And isn’t healing prayer for ourselves part of this requirement as well? 

As a result of praying for ourselves, we will be blessed, but the blessing does not stop there. Healings prove that we are linked to our Maker, or as Science and Health puts it, “… divine Science reveals the eternal chain of existence as uninterrupted and wholly spiritual; …” (p. 172). And the healings also prove that the chains of false belief do not have power to hold any of us. What holds us are the arms of divine Love, who meets our every need, and from whom we can never be separated. This oneness with God, Spirit, as Spirit’s expression is the missing link that mankind has been searching for since time began—the link that binds us to God, and that cannot be broken.