Last summer, I went hiking with friends at the Parc St. Cloud on the outskirts of Paris. I traveled by Metro to meet them, and three stops before the terminus where I was to get off, almost everyone was disembarking to cross the platform to get on a different train. 

Finally, I decided to follow everyone else. But just as I put my head in the doorway of the new train to ask, “Is this train going to St. Cloud?” the heavy doors slammed shut on my head, on both temples. Metro doors close very quickly and forcefully, but stop a few inches before closing completely to allow people to pull their coats and purses from the small opening that remains. Well, my head is wider than those few inches, so—unlike subway and elevator doors in the United States that pop open when they come into contact with something—these doors continued to press harder to close.

Three men jumped up and pried the doors open, and I was able to stumble into the train car. I was quite startled, and there was a throbbing in my head, but a helpful passage on healing I had recently studied came immediately to thought. It was a statement from Mary Baker Eddy’s sermon Christian Healing: “Christian Science repudiates the evidences of the senses and rests upon the supremacy of God. Christian healing, established upon this Principle, vindicates the omnipotence of the Supreme Being by employing no other remedy than Truth, Life, and Love, understood, to heal all ills that flesh is heir to” (p. 15).