About two years ago, a man I had considered a friend cornered me and raped me. This happened on a trip with a group of my friends. Later that night I nearly jumped off the roof of our building, but instead I just sat down and cried. Since the man was friends with many of my friends, I felt completely alone and didn’t report what had happened. 

Not feeling that I could tell anyone, I put on a happy face and pretended that everything was OK for the rest of the trip. But in reality, I felt guilty and so very angry. I was angry at myself for not having been able to stop him—for having “let it happen”; I was angry at the man for doing it; and I was angry at my friends for not sensing that something was wrong. But mostly I was angry at God.

Growing up in Christian Science, I had been taught that everyone is a child of God, divine Love, and had been consistently reminded that God is good and is everywhere. After this experience, though, I couldn’t believe that. How could God have been present right then? As much as I still wanted to believe, I felt betrayed by the one I had always counted on. 

I truly wanted to find peace and healing, so I looked through the Sentinel and The Christian Science Journal online and found some articles about people who were protected from sexual assault. But then I felt even more angry. Why hadn’t God protected me? 

I thought about the story from the Bible where Elijah asks God to take his life. God told Elijah to go up into the mountain, where a wind blew so strongly that it broke the rocks. But God was not in the wind. Then an earthquake came, but God was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake, there was a fire, but God was not in the fire. After the fire came a still, small voice, which I understood to be God (see I Kings 19:1–12). 

What I took from this story was not very inspiring, though. How could God, Love, be everywhere, when it seemed to me that it says right there in the Bible that God was not present! I was angry still, because I’d heard about God being the still, small voice but never about how Elijah must have felt during the wind, the earthquake, and the fire. I felt as though I were in the midst of my own storm, and God was nowhere to be found.

I truly wanted to find peace.

During this time I stopped going to church and reading the Bible Lessons from the Christian Science Quarterly, and I didn’t ask for prayerful help from a Christian Science practitioner. I spent the rest of the year guilt-ridden and angry and struggling to not take it out on people I love. I had less patience and no motivation, but managed to pass all my classes and finish the year with my friendships intact. Still, I felt I was watching my life happen and wasn’t really participating.

Then I was invited to spend a pre-camp week at a Christian Science summer camp, helping the staff. As I was cleaning up part of the grounds and moving furniture around, I severely injured my back and was unable to move. A friend, whom I had confided in, decided I needed to do something about feeling so disturbed all the time. She read the Bible Lesson with me. The Lesson subject that week was “God the Only Cause and Creator” and included this from Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy: “All substance, intelligence, wisdom, being, immortality, cause, and effect belong to God. These are His attributes, the eternal manifestations of the infinite divine Principle, Love” (p. 275). 

My friend and I were so inspired by thinking about God in relation to effect. I have always known God to be the only creator, but thinking about effect as belonging to God was a brand new concept to me. It was freeing to think about God’s goodness and love being the only effect, and to think about cause and effect being attributes and eternal manifestations of God as the divine Principle, Love. Suddenly, all the resistance I had been feeling toward Christian Science started to melt away. 

The next morning the same friend woke me up early to make sure I had time to read the Lesson before starting chores. I read it (for only the second time in seven months) and made my way to the kitchen. I lifted trays, walked around, and suddenly realized my back no longer hurt. I ran up to my friend and said, “Look! I can touch my toes!” I was elated to realize that I had been healed. For the first time in months, I felt God was with me.

Since all the counselors at this camp have a church service on Wednesday evenings, I went along, too. I didn’t pay any attention to the readings from the Bible and Science and Health but did stand up and share a testimony of healing when the opportunity was given. After church that evening, a few friends and I sat around talking about the day and sharing some ideas. 

One of my friends shared this sentence from Science and Health: “Sorrow is salutary” (p. 66). This appears in the midst of a paragraph about trials and tribulations being steppingstones to spiritual growth. I had never heard of the word salutary before but learned that it means health-giving. It struck me as odd that Mrs. Eddy would refer to sorrow as health-giving, because to me, being sad never felt like a good thing. I had always felt that sorrow was in direct opposition to spirituality. 

I felt a weight lift off my shoulders. 

But then I realized that when I’m angry, I feel closed off. While I cannot feel or accept love when I’m angry, sorrow and the struggle for Truth leaves me feeling differently—ready to be filled with comfort and love. I knew I had more praying and leaning on God to do before I would be able to enjoy the peace I so desired. But letting go of anger, even while still feeling sorrow, left me more receptive to complete healing.

Later that summer, I was able to confide in another friend, who encouraged me to attend another Wednesday testimony meeting. One of the first things read was the Bible story about Elijah and the wind, the earthquake, and the fire. Suddenly, I felt so enveloped in Love that I started to cry, and I began to listen to this story in a different way—not as a sequence of events in which God had been “too late,” but as Elijah’s struggle to see past the aggressive portrayals of evil to hear the still, small voice of God that had always been there. 

The readings were given by a Christian Science practitioner, and I asked to speak with her after the service. She and I went to sit and talk in a scenic outdoor spot, and I told her everything that I had been dealing with. She started by telling me that she understood, and that she had actually also struggled with the same issue for years. I started listening. 

I had confided that I felt guilty because I couldn’t forgive the man who had done this to me. But I also felt I could not fully let go of my anger until I forgave him. The practitioner told me that when she was a child and asked her mom for help after being in a fight with a friend, her mom said this about the friend: “Leave her to heaven.” The practitioner and I understood this to mean letting someone work out their redemption through the present heavenly reality of Christ, God’s truth. The practitioner also reminded me that when Christ Jesus was crucified, he said about the people who had put him on the cross, “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34). I saw that I didn’t have to force myself to do something. I was free to leave the man who had hurt me to God’s correcting and move on with my life. 

We also talked about the spiritual fact that matter can never touch Spirit, which is God, and that we are spiritual. Science and Health says: “The temporal and unreal never touch the eternal and real. The mutable and imperfect never touch the immutable and perfect. The inharmonious and self-destructive never touch the harmonious and self-existent” (p. 300). At one point, the practitioner asked me a series of gentle questions that confirmed God’s goodness and helped me see that the assault never harmed who and what I truly am—which has never been in a material body. My identity has always been spiritual and established in Spirit, divine Love.

As our conversation came to a close, the practitioner gave me a big hug and reminded me over and over again that I am whole; nothing had been taken from me. I felt a weight lift off my shoulders. My feelings of guilt melted away, and the anger I had been clinging to dissipated. Knowing that in reality I had never been diminished in any way allowed me to let go and release the pain I’d been feeling. I felt free!

Soon I began to open up to my friends again, and increasingly began to trust God to guide me again. I am so grateful for the peace and receptivity that I have been able to enjoy since this time. I feel God at work in my life each day.