October in India is full of festivals, and people are busy with shopping, giving gifts, decorating, and cleaning their homes. For many in my country, rituals are a way of seeking blessings, and people enjoy celebrating them. My parents, who do not follow Christian Science, also do these rituals. 

One day last year in late October, I was doing some cleaning work with my parents. While I was working alone, removing a big carton from on top of the almirah (clothes cabinet), a photo frame that was on top of the carton slid and fell, hitting my lip and cutting it deeply. My lip bled considerably and swelled. I immediately rushed to a bathroom and rinsed it with water. I went to my room and was going to call a Christian Science practitioner to pray for me, but the thought came that I am a class-taught student of Christian Science and had learned how to heal. Also, I had learned that God is “a very present help in trouble” (Psalms 46:1) for each one of us.

I decided to pray about this by myself, so I sat down calmly and started to do this. During this prayerful treatment, I recalled that the prior Wednesday, the First Reader at the Christian Science Society where I’m a member addressed the topic of rituals in the readings she shared from the Bible and from Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy. These readings prompted me to think about the fact that the worship of any gods other than the one God, divine Spirit, cannot actually bless in any way, nor can those so-called gods curse.