How I prayed after I got mugged
A friend and I were both newbie actresses in New York City, on our way home from an acting class. After going through the turnstile in a subway station, we headed toward the stairs that led down to the train platform. At the top of the stairs, a tough-looking teenage boy made an insulting remark to us.
To my utter surprise, my girlfriend hurled a terrible epithet back at him. I was stunned at her response. I knew her to be a thoughtful, intelligent, loving person. This knee-jerk reaction as an attempt to fight back didn’t seem at all like her.
As if to escape from her awful comment, we quickly walked away from the teenager, heading down the stairs and along the train platform. I didn’t say anything about the incident, and we both sat on a bench, where we chatted and waited for the train. A few minutes later, though, I noticed a group of teenage boys moving purposefully toward us.
I saw a gun and realized we were being mugged.
Before I knew it, they had us surrounded. I saw a gun and realized we were being mugged. Quickly, we found our wallets and handed them over, but before the boys left, they cursed at us, and I felt something hit me. There were bystanders further down the platform, so the group took off quickly.
I didn’t know I’d been hurt until my friend looked at me and cried out, “They hit your forehead with the gun!” She was alarmed by both the injury and the fact that there seemed to be some connection between the attack and the insult she’d hurled back at the teen just a few minutes before the mugging.
I put my hand to my forehead, and sure enough, there was blood and a wound.
What may seem surprising is that I wasn’t upset. I wasn’t angry and didn’t feel victimized. Based on my upbringing as a Christian Scientist, it was so obvious to me that all of us—the baiting teen, my unwise friend, the vengeful gang, and innocent me—were all playing parts in a sad story of different social worlds colliding.
But I also knew that, in fact, as real as it had all seemed, this was just a mistaken perception, a fable that was lying about our true identities. Even in that moment, I knew that every single one of us, in his or her own way, was a distinct, sparkling expression of God—of Love and Mind. I understood that if I’d known those boys individually, I’d have seen that they expressed qualities like loyalty, creativity, brotherliness, strength, and joy.
These were the qualities of their real, God-created identities that couldn’t be corrupted by the pressure of human circumstances. But given what had happened, I did have to clarify in my own thoughts that this was the truth about them.
How do you deal with negative thoughts that come to you, especially when all the evidence seems to point to those thoughts being legitimate? The Discoverer of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy, gave this very practical counsel: “Stand porter at the door of thought. Admitting only such conclusions as you wish realized in bodily results, you will control yourself harmoniously” (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 392).
That’s what I did. I refused to admit that they were “the bad guys” and instead listened prayerfully to what God was telling me about them. In my thoughts, I heard with great clarity that I could totally forgive these boys and love them—that I could insist on their inherent innocence and goodness. After all, Jesus taught us to “love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you” (Matthew 5:44).
That’s a pretty clear directive, so I just did it. Through the hubbub that followed—the police, first aid, and a detective interview—I kept my thoughts filled with love for those boys and their true nature and denied that hatred had power over any of us.
I didn’t experience any aftereffects the next day, though I’ll admit I was worried that I would have a scar on my forehead. To combat that fear, I asked a Christian Science practitioner to pray with me. In our prayers, we kept insisting on the spiritual fact that the teens were innocent, that I was innocent, and that therefore there was never any point of friction or any place where violence had occurred. I’m so grateful to report that the wound closed quickly and smoothly—so much so that when I visited my parents just a few days later, there was nothing to see.
I also never had any emotional trauma from the experience. It might sound funny, but the only thing that really stayed with me was the blessing of learning a little more about who each of us really is as God knows us.
