Healing’s deeper reward: Experiencing God

That Christian Science heals is attested to by a steady flow of healings of physical and mental illness, injuries, compulsive habits, etc. reported in the Sentinel. The Sentinel has been published for 123 years, so the healing accounts in this week’s issue add to many thousands of records of health restored.

But they record more than that. Each healing includes a shift in perspective—a thought turned Godward—that individually echoes the shift brought about for humanity by Christ Jesus. Through his spiritual discernment, his ever-present sense of God as his source—as Life and Truth itself—the blind regained sight, the lame walked, lepers were freed from the disease. Yet that pointed to something Jesus considered much more valuable. After his followers reported their experience of overcoming devils (evidences of evil), he said, “You should be happy, but not because the spirits obey you. You should be happy because your names are written in heaven” (Luke 10:20, International Children’s Bible). 

Gaining this higher sense of our “name” (our true nature) as God’s heavenly (spiritual and harmonious) offspring is a distinct feature of Christian healing, as Mary Baker Eddy explained. Referring to cures of disease and reformation of character achieved through the ever-existent divine Science she discovered, she said in her address Christian Science versus Pantheism, “All this is accomplished by the grace of God,—the effect of God understood” (p. 10).