Unselfed love is vital to the successful practice of Christian Science healing. In fact, it’s vital to the welfare of all humanity. And it’s way more than just being unselfish! 

So, exactly what does it mean to have a love that is unselfed? Well, it’s all about the love of God being expressed in you and me. It’s about God being our source—the very reason we have the capacity and desire to love. And understanding that our actual self, or being, is what God is expressing in us, we can humbly put our full trust in divine Love, instead of trying to engineer an outcome. To help us understand that and why it matters, let’s begin with an analogy.

Imagine if you were a sunbeam: You wouldn’t have a single thought about your ability to shine, or your own worth, or whether you would be recognized or appreciated for shining. And you wouldn’t be deciding who deserved to be shined on. You would just shine—on everyone—and the sun’s light and warmth would be felt everywhere. All of this simply because that’s what a sunbeam does—shines out from the sun, its source and sustainer. And wherever it shines, there is no darkness.

A most beautiful teaching of Christian Science is that God is Love, and that man (each of us) is divine Love’s very own expression—the pure spiritual light of Love shining everywhere and embracing all. And this shining of divine Love is our true identity, an identity totally free of the limitations, vulnerabilities, and distressing inconsistencies of physicality and human personality. It has no concern about its worth, about being recognized or appreciated, or about who deserves to be shined on. It just loves. 

There isn’t a single person on the face of the earth who doesn’t yearn to feel loved. And this can happen when you earnestly study Christian Science, and pray to understand and feel the love of God—or when the love of God shines so brightly through another that you feel embraced by Love. But what if you don’t feel this love, or don’t feel that you know how to love in this way? I’ve known how that feels. And I’ve found that as I persist in study and prayer, and especially as I make sincere efforts to love God, and to love others as I go about my days, the light of divine Love begins to take up residence in my consciousness and make me feel warmly loved—and then the darkness of disease and sin begins to lose its foothold and disappears. 

Years ago, one of my adult children was in serious trouble and was not keeping in touch. Worry, including feelings of helplessness and being shunned as a parent, threatened to occupy me. But I persisted in letting God’s love fill my consciousness—and in loving this dear one as God loves. The difficulties were eventually resolved and we were reunited. Today, the fruits of that love are still felt by us both.    

When we feel God’s love this way, we yearn for others to feel it. We feel impelled by God to unself our purpose—to conform to our true identity as divine Love’s expression by divesting ourselves of a sense of being an imperfect, limited, sick, and sinning physical personality—so that we may become transparencies for divine Love’s saving and healing power. 

Unselfed love is when we yearn so deeply to bring another off a cross of suffering that we will pray all night.

Christ Jesus said to his followers, “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me” (Luke 9:23). Unselfed love is when we yearn so deeply to bring another off a cross of suffering that we will pray all night if we must until we feel ourselves yielding to God—and the patient feels and responds to God’s resurrecting love and is healed. 

Just as a sunbeam has no concern about its own worth or ability to shine, unselfed love has no concern about one’s own worth or ability to express divine Love. It doesn’t worry about being recognized or appreciated for the good it does, or about being scoffed at for expressing God’s healing love. Unselfed love just loves—shining out from divine Love as its source and sustainer. 

When mistaken views of God—and of our own and others’ true identity—begin to fall away in our own thought, the practical effects of this understanding begin to manifest themselves in reformation of character and physical healing. Then we just want to live to reflect God’s healing love, and we are willing to make whatever sacrifices are needed for others to experience it, too. 

Nothing is more thrilling or strengthening than to feel divine Love impelling you to put every needed effort into shedding worry and self-interest in order to become a better transparency for the love of God expressed by Christ Jesus—and to conquer whatever little or big challenges may come your way to keep you from being a successful healer. These challenges can be overcome through God’s mercy! As the Christian Science textbook, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy, explains, “The effect of this Science is to stir the human mind to a change of base, on which it may yield to the harmony of the divine Mind” (p. 162).

When Jesus said we should deny ourselves, he didn’t mean that we should deny that we have an identity, or that we should forget about our human needs being met. He meant that we should leave the mortal sense of ourselves and live as God’s, Love’s, expression, trusting that God’s reforming and healing power would unfailingly meet each and every need that comes along.

Shedding a false sense of ourselves—and thus being sanctified by divine Love—enables the love of God to shine through us on those in need of reformation and healing. Cultivating unselfed love in ourselves takes daily devotion and consecration. But think of this from Science and Health: “If the Scientist reaches his patient through divine Love, the healing work will be accomplished at one visit ... ” (p. 365).   

Barbara Vining
Editor