Healing for every illness—even "incurable" disease
Barbara Vining
For well over a century, people have been healed of illness through reliance on Christian Science—even of diseases thought to be very difficult to overcome, and in some cases considered incurable. Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer of Christian Science, referred to her own caseload as including "hopeless organic diseases of almost every kind."
In this chat, Barbara Vining, a teacher and practitioner of Christian Science, discusses how it's possible to uproot disease from human consciousness and understand that health is not held captive to material laws.
Using experiences from her own life and more than 40 years in the public practice of Christian Science, Barbara answers visitors' questions on longstanding ailments, overcoming fear, hereditary disease, mental illness and the importance of forgiveness in healing. "Take a strong stand," she says, "and rise in rebellion against disease!"
spirituality.com host: Hello, everyone! Welcome to another spirituality.com live question and answer audio event. Today we’re going to talk about “Healing for every illness—even ‘incurable’ disease,” and our guest is Barbara Vining, a teacher and practitioner of Christian Science from Toledo, Ohio. Barbara has been in the public practice of Christian Science for over 40 years and has taught Christian Science since 1985. She has published more than 200 articles and editorials on how to apply Christian Science to meet a variety of human needs, including physical healing. She’s been a guest speaker on spiritual issues at Christian Science Churches, community organizations, and interfaith gatherings.
Barbara, do you have some thoughts to get us started?
Barbara Vining: I do, and I’m so grateful for the opportunity to discuss this important topic. Christian Science has been healing very serious physical diseases for many, many years, and there are documented cases of it through our periodicals and so forth. But I think one of the things that I’d like to bring up is that when we talk about cure, some people think that spiritual healing is just sort of easing the human mind and regenerating human thought but not healing the physical disease.
But spiritual healing in Christian Science means cure. Cure in the dictionary means, “elimination of disease from the human system.” So what I’d like to address in our discussion today is how Christian Science eliminates disease from the human system. Actually, it eliminates disease from the human mind, and that removes it from the body. So I’d like to give our attention to how that healing occurs.
We go to the healings of Jesus, and, of course, all of Jesus’ healing work occurred through prayer. It was entirely spiritual. And he did it not through his own human expertise, but through his understanding that God is the only power. He told his followers that they would do the works that he did, and even “greater works than these.” And he said that would happen because, “I go unto my Father.” In other words, he was going unto the source of true health. And that’s how his healing was occurring.
He also said that he would send a Comforter, and that that Comforter would explain how his healing work was done, so others could do it as well. Mary Baker Eddy discovered that Comforter, the laws of God, or the divine Science of God. And its application to the human condition is Christian Science, because it follows the teachings of Jesus. It’s compassionate and tender, and it reflects the divine Love which makes man and all of us—men, women, and children—in His own image, and shows us the true nature of God, that He’s entirely good. He makes us perfect in His image. And this truth is what Jesus said would heal. He said, “If ye continue in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed; And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” And this truth is the ever-present Christ. The opposite of it, Jesus called the devil, [which] Jesus said is “a liar” and the father of lies.
So the truth that Jesus taught, and that Mary Baker Eddy discovered the laws behind, removes lies, or misconceptions, about God and His creation, and pictures and predictions of disease from the human mind. It’s like light removing darkness. And you know what it says is, that God is our life, and disease has no life—it’s just a lie. So you and I and everyone, we’re always going to outlive disease, because we’re going to be awakened by this spiritual truth. That’s what transforms the thought and brings healing to the body.
I’d just like to share a healing, for example, in the Christian Science textbook that Mary Baker Eddy wrote. In the last 100 pages called Fruitage, there are healings of people who have been healed by reading her book, which teaches about this truth of Jesus and how it heals. There’s a healing in here on page 603 about a woman who was healed of a fibroid tumor that she said she had had for 18 years. And that it weighed about 50 pounds, and she had had continuous hemorrhaging from it for 11 years. She said that she had really sought to understand God, but until she read Science and Health, she wasn’t getting what she wanted. When she started to read Science and Health, which someone had given her a copy of, she said, “The revelation was marvelous and brought a great spiritual awakening.” She said this awakened sense just was with her all the time. It never left her.
Then one day, she said she just thought to herself, “I am healed.” There wasn’t any physical evidence that she’d been healed, but this was a conviction that came in thought. And she told a friend of hers that she was healed. They thought that was an amazing statement. But the tumor began immediately, then, to disappear, and the hemorrhaging ceased. And she regained her strength and was permanently healed.
So that shows pretty much how healing occurs, whether it’s something considered to be serious or whether it’s something fairly minor. The divine Mind transforms, enlightens, and regenerates the human character and human thought, and heals the body.
spirituality.com host: The nice thing about that experience is that it just shows how in essence the change came first in her thought, and then the physical condition yielded to that thought.
Barbara: Yes, and that’s so helpful—it helps to take away our fear and know that the safest thing we can do is to turn our thought to God, rather than be fixated on the problem, which is such an easy thing to do. It’s just so safe to turn to God and let that light of Truth illumine our thought and show us the unreality of disease. The results are always healing.
spirituality.com host: This is from Gianna in Spokane, Washington. She writes, “Turn on the TV, and we’re inundated with ads trying to convince us and install fear of the reality of sickness and disease, and the fact that there is only one way out of a particular set of symptoms or a particular disease. What can you suggest as a counterfact to these aggressive mental suggestions in an effort for one to gain spiritually?”
Barbara: That really ties in with what I was just talking about, because if you turn your thought to God, and you’re learning that God is the only power, and that He made you spiritually perfect in His image and likeness, then you have some authority, some understanding and equipment, to keep these images from imbedding themselves in your thinking. Of course, if they’re there and they’re causing you fear, you have the authority and understanding to say no to them, to eliminate them from your thought, to turn your thought to the cure. There really is only one permanent cure of disease and that is to uproot it from human consciousness. That’s not just a human effort, of course. That’s the discipline of letting God govern your thinking. And it is the cure for any disease.
spirituality.com host: Now Judith from Nyack is asking a question that ties in somewhat with Gianna’s. She says, “I’m new to Christian Science, and I have a question because I’m still trying to really understand the whole idea of being able to heal things like cancer. I’ve had a number of close relatives suffer greatly through this disease and the enormity of it scares me.”
Barbara: I understand exactly where you’re coming from, and these things can raise a lot of fears. I think that it’s just so helpful to realize that God is Life, that God is infinite Love, that He does not create disease and suffering. No matter what someone has gone through, or others have gone through, there is always this ever-present Christ, Truth that’s here to remove these impositions from the human mind and to bring healing to the body.
I know that in the society that we live in, where sincere people are devoting themselves daily and hourly, very sincerely, to eliminating disease through material procedures and medications and so forth, that it seems perhaps incredulous that one could be healed simply through prayer. But when it’s understood that prayer based on spiritual understanding brings the power of God into the equation, and that all things are possible to God, then we can feel the Comforter. We can feel the comfort of God, the presence of the Christ, Truth, just like people felt when Jesus was right there with them. And it does bring healing.
spirituality.com host: I think one aspect of this, too, is that because Christian Science is a Science—it isn’t something where you’re just kind of hoping that God will come through, right? It’s a little bit more than that.
Barbara: Exactly. One thing I’ve been thinking a lot about lately is man’s innocence as a child of God—that because God is innocent of causing disease, man is innocent of disease. When a person is accused of something that they’re not guilty of, they would hire a lawyer to defend them. Well, what Christian Science does is teach us that there is this law of God that we can utilize in our defense to show our innocence. So we can really take a very strong stand; we can “rise in rebellion” against these impositions that would try to convince us that we’re just captive to these predictions of disease and what they can do to us and so forth. And we can take a mental stand on the side of God and of our innocence as His child, and fight for our defense.
spirituality.com host: Margaret in San Francisco says, “I have a friend who asks why it is not okay to mix health,” and she may be talking about medical, “and spiritual systems. I am new and want to explain it better when asked these kinds of questions.”
Barbara: That’s an excellent question, because certainly anybody who’s going through any kind of a difficult physical experience, or any other problem—often people just naturally pray. And yet they would be taking medical treatment and so forth, and so they say, "Well, if Christian Science is treatment through prayer, then why couldn’t you just have both?" But Christian Science treatment is a specific kind of prayer that is designed to remove a person’s reliance on and belief in material systems. In fact, it challenges and destroys in human thought the belief that you and I are created to be material organisms and to be captive to material laws. It shows that really, Life, Truth, and intelligence are entirely spiritual, and that our existence as God’s child is spiritual.
So if a person were having medical treatment, and then wanted Christian Science treatment, that specific kind of prayer designed to remove those impositions from the thought, actually, you would end up with no treatment, because the Christian Science treatment would be counteracting your faith in the medical treatment. So it really is important for the patient to have made a choice of which kind of treatment they’re going to rely on, and then the treatment will be effective. Of course, if you’re going to have medical treatment, you want to cooperate with the medical procedures and so forth. The same, of course, is true with Christian Science. So the patient needs to make that choice in order to have the right kind of results.
spirituality.com host: Vivian in New Jersey says, “If an individual who has been symptomatic of a serious illness has had it named by the medical profession as an incurable disease, how can they begin to dispel the myth?”
Barbara: Well, what they’re saying is they don’t know of a cure for that disease, and they’re being very honest about their observations and their training. But that is not the kind of conclusion that a Christian Scientist would come to. A Christian Scientist is never examining the body and then making conclusions about the results. The Christian Scientist is utilizing what we call spiritual sense. You know, we all have this spiritual sense. If we didn’t have it, we wouldn’t know there was such a thing as love or purity or justice and mercy—those things can’t be known through the material senses.
Through the spiritual sense, you can understand the allness of God, that He is infinite, that He is good, that we are made in His image. You can understand that disease is a misconception of health, a lie about the health, which is the spiritual consciousness that God imparts to His creation. So we don’t ever have to be afraid of any kind of physical diagnosis. It’s the spiritual reality that we’re interested in, and that’s how the healing occurs. I hope that’s helpful.
spirituality.com host: Oh, I’m sure it will be. And of course, we’ll be continuing to come back to these topics as we go along here. Tonia in Cleveland, Ohio—one of your neighbors almost—says, “A very dear friend of mine has just been given a medical diagnosis of AIDS. She is not a Christian Scientist, and so I’m wary of going full steam ahead with giving her healing ideas. Can you suggest ways I can help her, especially now that she’s very fragile emotionally?”
Barbara: That is such a tender subject, isn’t it? The first thing, of course, this dear friend needs to feel is love. Love, just that unconditional love of God that doesn’t judge a person. In Job there’s a wonderful passage. Job was suffering all kinds of miserable things physically and otherwise, and he had several friends that were trying to convince him that he’d done something terribly wrong. He called them “miserable comforters,” because that didn’t help him at all.
Then, another friend came along and started telling him of his uprightness as God’s child. And telling him that his flesh would become fresher than a child’s if he listened to the messenger of truth. And you know, we don’t need to be reluctant at all to share, if we have this kind love, and we know that this Christ-cure is here for everyone. But we don’t have to make a lot of promises to people and say, “We know you’ll be healed,” and so forth, but just to say, “You know, this is something that has helped a lot of people. It’s helped me, and I know that it’s cured some very serious things. I’d like to give you the opportunity to explore it, and one way to do that is if you’d be willing to have a copy of this book by Mary Baker Eddy, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures." If you approach it that way, and the love is felt, I’m sure there will be an opening there that you can trust God with. And that’s it: you have to just trust your spiritual intuition and your love to guide you to just exactly the right way to share with this dear one.
spirituality.com host: Bonny in Riverhead, New York, says, “Having been raised a Christian Scientist, I’ve witnessed and experienced many physical healings. However, two women in my life, one of whom was my grandmother, who were dedicated Christian Scientists, have passed away from breast cancer. Sometimes I’m aware of my own fear of this reappearing in other family members or myself. How can I better challenge the claim that this is an incurable condition and is often hereditary?” That’s a good question.
Barbara: Yes, it certainly is. It’s a very prominent thing in our society today. I myself was healed of lumps in my breast after studying Christian Science and learning that God is the only true substance. I have no idea what that would have been diagnosed as, but the healing was immediate, as I accepted God as my true substance.
But, you know, the thing is, it is not the truth of God and His creation. It is a form of erroneous belief and it manifests itself in a very frightening way. Many people have not been able to overcome it, but that doesn’t mean that it has to be for anybody because God is our life, and error or sin or disease is not the truth of God’s creation. That truth, illuminating thought, is always the victor. These dear ones who have gone on, they’ll awaken, they’ve awakened already, from that belief that that disease killed them, to realize that God is their life, and that the disease did not destroy them.
Now we’re interested in what happens right now, and we’d rather have the healing take place right here instead of hereafter. One of the ways to do that is to realize that it certainly is not hereditary, because God is our creator. Your mother and your father—everyone’s mother and father—are really children of God, so the only line of inheritance is directly from God. And when we understand that, and that it’s a law to our being, and that human heredity is not a law, then we begin to see that we have authority over it. When we exercise that authority by taking the stand, having one God, as the Commandments that Moses gave us—that first Commandment, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me”—when we realize that you can only have one God if that God is infinite and He’s entirely good, then whatever is not good is not from God, and it has no reality, no real substance. It is not inherited, because it doesn’t come from God.
So you can obey that Commandment, you can obey the Second Commandment that says, “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image”—you can refuse to let an image of disease take hold of your thought or keep hold of your thought. You have the authority as God’s child, you have the dominion to say no to it. And that will help to prove it, not just for yourself, but for generations to come.
spirituality.com host: Barbara, I want to go back just a little bit to the beginning of your answer where you talked about realizing that the lumps were not true substance.
Barbara: Yes.
spirituality.com host: I wonder if you’d talk a little bit about spiritual substance, or what substance is, and how that helped you.
Barbara: Well, yes. In fact, what had happened was I had gotten hold of a copy ofScience and Health, and I had also gone to church with my grandmother, who was a Christian Scientist. At the end of the service, they read what’s called “the scientific statement of being” from Science and Health, along with the first three verses of I John, third chapter, which says, “Beloved, now are we the sons of God….” And I came across this scientific statement of being in Science and Health and started to explore exactly what Mary Baker Eddy, the author, was explaining here. It says, “There is no life, truth, intelligence, nor substance in matter. All is infinite Mind and its infinite manifestation, for God is All-in-all.” And then it says that, “Spirit is immortal truth; matter is mortal error.” And that, “Spirit is the real and eternal;” and “matter is the unreal and temporal.”
I had a little trouble with the word real, because I thought real was something that you could touch and feel—discern with the material senses. But obviously, that was not true with what she was talking about here. She said, “Spirit is the real and eternal;” and “matter is the unreal....” So I really thought about that: What is real? And I was helped somewhat by another question she asks about, “What is substance?” And she says that “Substance is that which eternal and incapable of discord and decay.” So I decided that what she was saying there is that spiritual ideas, spiritual substance, cannot be destroyed. You know, just like the number three, for example. You can put it on a blackboard or write it on a piece of paper, and then you can erase it or crumple the paper up, but you haven’t done anything to the three. The three has substance.
Well, spiritual ideas and spiritual qualities that make up our real being as God’s children are real. They exist. They can never be destroyed. They cannot be diseased. And when I realized that, I thought about it and prayed about it one evening until I was absolutely convinced that that was true, and therefore, that those lumps didn’t have any real substance at all. And I came to that conclusion. You know, I didn’t know that it was going to heal me. I had no idea that it would heal me. But when I woke up the next morning, that understanding was still with me, that Spirit is real, that it is my real substance, and those lumps were completely gone. So that was a new idea about substance that I’ve found actually has stood the test of time for me for over 50 years.
spirituality.com host: Wow. That is very helpful. Thank you. Anne in Ohio says, “How do we get past the feeling that we can’t heal? Sometimes I feel guilty that I’m even sick.”
Barbara: Well, what a great question, because in a passage from Science and Healththat I find really helpful—Mary Baker says, “…self-condemnation and guilt…are unsuitable conditions for healing the sick.” You know, I’ve thought about that, and I’ve thought, Well, certainly she doesn’t mean that no one can heal the sick if they’ve ever done anything wrong and they feel guilty about it. I’ve come to realize that what she means by that is that feeling guilty and condemning oneself are not intelligent ways of thinking. The intelligent thing to do, of course, is to recognize if we’re thinking wrongly or have thought wrongly or done something that we shouldn’t have done. But the intelligent thing, then, is to correct it and to go forward.
That’s just such a wonderful release, because, you see, God is the healer and His unconditional love. He sees us as absolutely free of any history of wrong thinking or of sinful behavior. He sees us perfect like Jesus did when the adulterous woman was brought to him, and they were telling him to condemn her. And he said, Well, anyone who has no sin, throw the first stone. And of course what he was doing was getting them to engage their better selves, their true selfhood, to see their conscience and say, Oh, I need to correct my own way of thinking. And so they didn’t throw any stones. Then when she asked him, “Aren’t you going to condemn me either?” Jesus said, “No, go and sin no more.”
The remedy of guilt is to change our way of thinking. If we don’t think we can heal, then we’re thinking that we’re leaning more on ourselves. Jesus didn’t say, Ye shall know the truth and your knowing of the truth is going to make you free; he said, “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” When we know what’s true, we just love it, and it heals us.
spirituality.com host: That’s brilliant. Thank you for saying that. That’s a very helpful thought. Renee in Washington State says, “How should we react if we feel a fatal disease is developing in the body?”
Barbara: What a wonderful question that is, because of course we all have to deal with that sort of thing, whether it’s something serious or whether it’s just the thought that a cold might be developing or something. But that’s the wonderful thing—it’s like a wake-up call for us. It’s to wake up to what’s really true and take our stand for it; because it’s entirely controllable through prayer and through putting our thought understandingly under God’s government, aligning ourselves with His law. Matter doesn’t make laws for us. I know the body tries to tell us that, but, you know, if the body’s complaining, I always think maybe I shouldn’t give it anything to complain about. And the way to do that is to let my thought be corrected by God. His love is just all powerful.
spirituality.com host: Anthony in Geneva, Switzerland, has a little bit of a longer question. He says, “I would appreciate your insight on dealing with a so-called incurable condition where the challenge does not come so much from the problem itself, but from the sense of frustration that it is not healed when so many other issues are, the sense of being worn down by constant reminders that it is not healed and by its apparent challenge to the promise Jesus gave that it is God’s good pleasure to give us the kingdom?”
Barbara: I think that it comes from just always kind of looking for the evidence of the material senses for confirmation of our health. Some situations do seem to take a great deal of persistence on our part. But I think it really is helped when that persistence shifts from a sense of wanting the healing and wondering why it hasn’t taken place, to that transformation of thought.
You know, Jesus’ teachings are all geared to helping us be more spiritually minded, and to loving our neighbor as ourselves, and so forth. And I think that we can turn our thought away from an anxiety about whether we’re going to have a physical healing or when it’s going to come or why it hasn’t come—turn our thought more to “How much do I love God consciously and actively? Am I loving good?” “Is that more important to me? Is that the most important thing to me?” Because Jesus said, “Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.”
So what he’s saying is put first things first. If the thing that is most important to you is to know and do the will of God, and you love doing that, then these other things will all come along. It goes along with a passage that I find very helpful in Science and Health. It’s on page 162. “Christian Science brings to the body the sunlight of Truth, which invigorates and purifies.” She says that, “Christian Science acts as an alterative, neutralizing error with truth. It changes the secretions, expels humors, dissolves tumors, relaxes rigid muscles, restores carious bones to soundness.” And then she tells how that healing happens. She says “The effect of this Science is to stir the human mind to a change of base, on which it may yield to the harmony of the divine Mind.”
That’s especially helpful, not just for a new person, but for somebody who’s been studying Christian Science and praying with it for a long time, because the suggestion comes in that we ought to know how to do this. But it still is not an activity of the human mind. So we can always go to God each day with a sense of expectancy, like a child does, that we’ll have some new understanding, and expect it to come into our daily experience. There’s a passage in Science and Health that I don’t know what page it’s on, but I find it so useful. She says, “If divine Love is becoming nearer, dearer, and more real to us, matter is then submitting to Spirit.” If we know that Love, that God, is becoming nearer and dearer to us each day, that we’re loving expressing God’s love in our daily life, then we lose our anxiety about what’s going to happen physically. We just know it will. And it does.
spirituality.com host: You know, as I was listening to you, I was thinking about the sense of frustration, and how that is really the thing that is arguing that it is not healed. It’s a distraction from what you were just saying about having Love nearer and dearer. Every time that feeling of frustration comes to maybe say, not like a formula, but to think, “Right now, Love is becoming nearer and dearer, and I am not frustrated,” or something like that—to just turn thought away from that feeling of frustration.
Barbara: That’s exactly right. There’s another passage in Science and Health on page 425, where Mrs. Eddy talks about the healing of lung disease. And she says that we should “discard all notions” of the disease from the human mind. She says that, “…mortal mind, when instructed by Truth, yields to divine power, which steers the body into health.” Isn’t that wonderful?
spirituality.com host: I love that. Eileen in Philadelphia says, “I often get healings when I pray, but with physical difficulties, sometimes the problem returns. I have read that there is no relapse, so can you shed some light on this issue? Here’s an example: My husband was suffering from back pain. I prayed, and he said he felt better. The next day he complained of the same pain. This has been going on for more than a week. He says he is better and then the pain returns. Please help. Thanks.”
Barbara: I think what helps me with that, and I’ve seen helps people, patients, very often, is to not think about, “I was sick and now I’ve been healed.” The real healing comes when we realize that we were never sick. Now that may sound a little strange. I don’t mean that you weren’t experiencing the symptoms and so forth, but that it wasn’t a reality. In other words, that health really is spiritual consciousness. It’s the consciousness of the reality of God and His goodness, the reality of wholeness. When we realize that, then we see that the disease was never a reality. So instead of then thinking, “Well, I was sick, now I’m healed,” take it one step further: “I was never sick, and now I’m awake to my health.”
spirituality.com host: That’s very helpful. We have a follow-up question from Temple in Oregon who is responding to one of our other answers. She says, “You say, ‘Turn your thought to God.’ How do you do that, and what does that mean?”
Barbara: It means a lot of things, but to start with, I think it is a sincere desire to open one’s thought to God to gaining a new understanding of what God is and what He does, and what we are as His image and likeness. It’s that sincerity. For example, there’s a passage in Science and Health, and I’ll read this to you in a minute—but I was thinking of Jesus’ Beatitudes. And those all start with “Blessed are…”—“Blessed are the pure in heart…,” “Blessed are the merciful…,” Blessed are the peacemakers….” It’s what’s in our heart. In other words, preparing your heart to loving good. And this passage in Science and Health is on the very first page of the chapter on Prayer, where she says, “Desire is prayer; and no loss can occur from trusting God with our desires, that they may be moulded and exalted before they take form in words and in deeds.” So it’s even turning in your prayers to ask God, “Prepare my heart to receive a better understanding of You, and how You love me, and how You love all of Your children—what Your nature is.” That’s just sincere desire. And when you open the Bible, or you open Science and Health, or when you just open your heart in prayer with that sincere desire to let God mold your thoughts anew, that’s going to bring healing.
spirituality.com host: That’s very helpful. And that may not always happen…for some people it happens really quickly, and other times, it’s a gradual process and suddenly you realize that you’re totally different.
Barbara: Well, that’s right. But it doesn’t mean, though, that we have to somehow accumulate a storehouse of understanding before we can have a release from physical disease. The power of healing is in the truth, and when we open our thought to it, that is how it comes. It is a discipline. I was thinking of Second Corinthians, chapter ten, four and five, where Paul is talking about “the weapons of our warfare.” And he says, “They cast down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God.” I found in J.B. Phillips, a wonderful translation of those two verses. It says, “The very weapons we use are not human but powerful in God’s warfare, for the destruction of the enemy’s strongholds. Our battle is to break down every deceptive argument and every imposing defense that men erect against the true knowledge of God. We fight to capture every thought until it acknowledges the authority of Christ.” And so it is a discipline to bring our thought into accord with the truth that is the Christ-cure.
spirituality.com host: Ron in Holland, Michigan, says, “Many stories in the Old Testament established that any disease can be healed, just as Elisha healed Naaman of leprosy. Please give us some examples of how Christ Jesus was following these Old Testament healings with his own healing works, and how we can use these healing examples today.”
Barbara: They are so encouraging, aren’t they? Because even though they happened many, many years ago, the spiritual truths that they proved and illustrated are with us every day.
You know, when Jesus was baptized, he heard that wonderful voice of God saying, “Thou art my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” And of course, Jesus was the Son of God. But you know, that was the Christ, Truth, speaking to Jesus, and it is the same Christ, Truth, that Jesus employed in his healing work. It was saying to each of those dear ones that he healed, “You are God’s beloved son, in whom God is well pleased.” That same voice of God, that Christ, Truth is with us today. When we read these examples in the Old Testament, and we read Jesus’ healings, we get glimpses of that truth. Mary Baker Eddy’s discovery of the laws of God, the Christian or divine Science underlying those teachings, helps us to understand those examples even better. So that is, in fact, how Mary Baker Eddy was first healed, and how she discovered Christian Science, through her own exploration and her prayers regarding Jesus’ healings. So that’s where it has its foundation.
spirituality.com host: We have another follow-up question. This one is from Tom in Spokane, Washington. He says, “Could you give a brief summary of just what ‘treatment’ in Christian Science means?”
Barbara: Wow! Well, that would take a lot of explanation, but I’ll try to keep it simple, because it is simple, although it certainly is not simplistic, so we don’t want to give the impression that you could learn all about Christian Science treatment in a few sentences.
Basically, it includes certain elements. And one very basic one is to start with God as All-in-all, as the only creator, as infinite good. And that all of His creation is included in God, who is also divine Mind, another name for God, which helps us to understand Him better. His creation is His idea, and all of His ideas, all of His loved creations, are in that divine Mind and governed by that Mind. So you start treatment by recognizing and acknowledging that God is the only substance and power, the only Mind, the only creator. And then, that necessarily means that if you’re going to say God is infinite, and He fills all space, and He’s the only creator, that there can be no other. That since God is Spirit, matter is not a real substance, and that evil is not real. You cannot have infinite good and evil existing at the same time. Just like you cannot have light and darkness. When you let light into a room, darkness is gone.
Christian Science treatment really is to understand that allness of God and the nothingness of whatever is unlike God, and then to address in thought the specific suggestions and manifestations of disease and evil that are claiming reality and existence for the patient. For instance, if it’s a belief in accident, well, God governs by law; and so you would understand that in all of God’s kingdom, there has never in actuality been an accident, so the patient cannot be a victim of accident. Those are the basic elements. Through the understanding of God and the nothingness of evil, you destroy the specific lies that are trying to make themselves so real in the patient’s experience.
I once had a Sunday School student ask me, “How do you know when your specific prayer, called Christian Science treatment—how do you know when it’s complete, when you can just trust it and know that you’ve done your work?” And there was a time when I was asked that question that I thought to myself, “Father, you’re going to have give me the answer to this one.” Well, He did. I asked the young man, “Do you often have two voices speaking in your thought, and they disagree with each other?” Of course, he said, “Yes. We all have that.” And I said, “Well, when you give a Christian Science treatment, you’ll know that the treatment is complete when there’s only one voice left. And that’s the voice of Truth.”
spirituality.com host: Very nice. Gale in New England asks—this is a little bit of a complicated question: “In relation to childhood abuse, plus all the efforts I successfully sought for help, I was left suffering from numerous physical and emotional issues. Though they have steadily improved over the years, under the care of wonderful practitioners, it is easy to get discouraged that I will never be completely on the other side of this. I am very strong-willed. Any encouraging thoughts?”
Barbara: Certainly. And I have all kinds of compassion for what you’ve had to deal with. It’s important, of course, and I’m sure you’ve worked with the understanding that you’re not a victim. And that’s hard to deal with, perhaps. But it’s overcome through the Christian approach of forgiveness. That’s so important, isn’t it? Because if we think that we’ve been injured by another person’s behavior, even if it’s mental or physical abuse, or whatever, it leaves its scars until we can honestly forgive. And when that forgiveness is based on an understanding of our spiritual nature, that in the eyes of God, and therefore in the eyes of ourselves as His children, we are untouched by any kind of hatred or neglect or anger, by physical abuse, because we, in reality and very practically are the spiritual image and likeness of God. There’s a Beatitude, “Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.” Well, that purity of heart is seeing ourselves as God sees us, letting God inform us.
One of the things that comes along, I know, with the condition of being abused is that maybe “There must have been something wrong with me, that I caused this.” People have quite a time with that one, so it’s so wonderful, then, also to forgive ourselves. We probably didn’t do anything to cause it, but even if we did, that is not the way God knows us, and it is not the way we are as His children. We are innocent, and we can fight for our innocence. We can rise in rebellion against the belief that we somehow are not worthy of God’s love, because we are. And we can see ourselves in that same pure light that Jesus saw people in. He saw people in their state of spiritual purity that God informed him of and that God informs us of, of our purity. It just lifted people right out of their sense of being pulled down by these illegitimate thoughts that try to convince us that somehow we just aren’t worthy of God’s love. We definitely are.
spirituality.com host: I just want to let you know, our dear listeners, that we’re going to run a little bit overtime, because we have a number of questions left, and I’d like to be able to answer everything I’ve got on my screen right now. So we’ll see how we do. If you don’t hear your question answered in this hour, come back later when it’s on the website, because whatever I’ve got on my screen now, we will go for it. This is from Elizabeth in Ontario, and she says, “I’m very attracted to Christian Science, but also have a belief in good nutrition. It seems as if Science and Health says I can’t be practicing effectively if I believe in nutrition. But I can’t believe God wants me to feed my children doughnuts all day. Can you shed some light on this?”
Barbara: We’re getting right now down to the basics of everyday living. That’s so important. You know, we can get so fixated on these, what claim to be such difficult problems, that we forget that it all boils down to how we’re living each day. Well, we all want to have a balanced diet—that’s sensible. And we don’t want to have all kinds of hang-ups about nutrition and so forth. Jesus said, “Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat or what ye shall drink.” I don’t think he meant that you should just ignore it, but certainly he meant not to have a lot of anxiety about it, and to be measuring it all the time. I think we’ve gotten so fixated on how many calories, whether we’re having trans fats, or whether we’re doing this, or whether we’re doing that, and measuring it all the time that it becomes an obsession—and that is not helpful. I find it really helpful where Mrs. Eddy says in Science and Health that the patient needs his “rightful nutriment, such as peace, patience…,” and love, and so forth. To just love having a balanced diet is fine, and I do it. I love my vegetables and my protein and what have you, and I try not to eat too much ice cream—that’s one I have to work on a little bit. But you have to have a little bit of a lightheartedness about this. So if you just don’t get an obsession with it. I think that’s what Mary Baker Eddy was talking about there.
spirituality.com host: Thanks. Brenda in Waldorf, Maryland, has written: “I’ve been reading and studying Christian Science for over a year and have been to a Christian Science church. I’m on medication for a condition that gets seriously out of control, even when one dosage is missed. How can I stop the medication without serious consequences? I really, truly want to get off the drugs.”
Barbara: No one is saying to you, you should just drop your drugs right now. You need to study the Bible and Science and Health, and pray for guidance on this. And I think as you gain in your understanding of God and how He governs and how healing occurs, that it will come about for you in a very natural way. Some people have just come to this realization and just completely dropped all their drugs right there. Others have done it with a much more gradual kind of process. But it comes when the Christ, the truth of God and His creation, makes an impression on your thought that changes the way you think. It’s not you willing yourself to think differently or to do something differently, but it’s gentle…it’s like the dawn, you know? You can’t stop it. The dawn is just going to happen, isn’t it? The dawn of spiritual truth in thought sometimes comes gradually, and sometimes it comes like a full-blown sun. But it will come as you continue to open your thought in prayer and in your study.
spirituality.com host: Ela, in Alliston, Canada says, “How do you pray about a belief in an inherited personality disorder?”
Barbara: Oh, good question. What a condemnation that would be, to think, for instance, if I had a bad temper that my children would inherit that from me, or that I could inherit such a thing from someone else. It’s the belief that we’re born into matter, and that Mind is in matter, and that personality traits are materially formed and that they can be passed down through this inheritance. Again, we go to the direct inheritance that we all have from God. In Science and Health, Mrs. Eddy says, that “…man is in a degree as perfect as” the Father. In a degree means a direct descent. And so you have this direct inheritance. You know, the problem is that we can’t use inheritance as an excuse any more, and that’s a tough one for a lot of people. But at the same time, there’s a freedom that comes. We realize that God gave us the ability to know and do what’s right, to control the way we think, the way we behave, to control our characteristics. And to realize that He only gave us these spiritual qualities to express. God is patient and loving, and His nature is our nature by direct inheritance. We can learn how to express the good qualities that counteract those negative ones that claim to be inherited. I’ve had to work on those things.
I remember one time when I was a kid, I was considered to be a stubborn child. I always wanted to do things my own way, my mother said. “Do it myself,” I’d say. And I used to think until I took up the study of Christian Science…I rebelled against that—I thought, “I’m not stubborn.” But I was a little bit stubborn about not being stubborn. And when I began to study Christian Science, I was so relieved to realize that that was not a quality of God, and therefore, it wasn’t part of me. I began to be trusting of the will of God and let His will be done. And that fell away.
spirituality.com host: Even if it was a more serious personality disorder of some kind, that same discipline of thought would really work just as well, wouldn’t it?
Barbara: Yes. Even if it was something that claims to control you to the point that you can’t control it yourself. If it says you’ve inherited a chemical imbalance or something that makes you behave this way…but that’s not the truth of God and His creation. And since the healing doesn’t come through a human sense of control, it comes through a willingness to let God be in control as He really is, then that healing is absolutely possible.
spirituality.com host: Right. Thank you. Now this is from Lory in Alaska, and she says, “A friend whose husband passed on suddenly from a heart attack told me all about the symptoms he experienced on the last day of his life. I know she meant no harm, but now every time something seems abnormal in my chest, that story comes back to me and plays over and over in my thinking, making it difficult to think and pray clearly. How can I stop this?”
Barbara: Well, certainly not just through human will. It helps me to think in terms of obedience, obedience to the First and Second Commandments, for example, as I talked about earlier. There is only one God. He did not create disease, and we have the Commandment not to bow down to graven images. And that’s exactly what that is. Now that individual perhaps didn’t know how to defend himself against those kinds of things, and suffered because of that. But you don’t have to go through that same thing. And for the sake, not just of yourself, but for all humanity. It really helps when you realize that when you’re defending yourself against these kinds of things and clearing your own thought of it, throwing it out like trash, like garbage that spoils—you don’t want it around because it doesn’t have any right to exist in your thought or in anyone else’s—and so it’s a love not just of God and of yourself, but for humanity that you would remove that imposition from your thought in obedience to the First and Second Commandments.
spirituality.com host: It’s just like it’s an ad on the TV, in a way. It’s made itself personal because it’s a friend, but if you saw an ad on the TV about something like that, you would be able to step away from it more quickly, because it’s “Oh, it’s just an ad on the TV.” And maybe a little bit to look at it that way, too—it’s no more real than an advertisement.
Barbara: Yeah. Use the remote and mute it. Do even better than that—remove it completely. Like I said, when you let the light of Truth into thought, darkness disappears.
spirituality.com host: Right. Now this is a little bit off the subject, but Henri in Surrey in the United Kingdom says, “As the silent prayer in church is for the congregation, why, especially in a longstanding, unhealed condition, can’t we use more than one practitioner in seeking healing?”
Barbara: That’s a good question. Why would you need more than one practitioner is really the question, though, because the healing doesn’t come as a result of one human mind healing another human mind, or several human minds healing another human mind. The healing comes from the divine Mind, and so to think that you need more than one practitioner is really thinking that you’re just one among many minds, and the more people that are praying for you, the more powerful that prayer will become. Actually, it’s the prayer that opens up to the all-power of God that brings the full power of God to heal. And so it would be a detriment rather than a help to think that you needed more than one practitioner.
spirituality.com host: That’s very helpful. Thank you. This is from Ruby in New York City: “I’ve been a Christian Scientist for a long time. I have to say that it sounds like it’s very easy for you to have healings. It’s not always so easy for me. What am I doing wrong?”
Barbara: Oh, God bless you. So often people say, “What is wrong with me?” They even get into sort of a witch hunt to try to examine the human mind. But it really is a trap. It’s the trap of the material senses. It is, again, letting the material evidence of discord and disease try to tell you how to think, and then saying to you, “You must not be thinking right.” And so what is wrong with you? But the whole scenario is wrong. It’s like if you were in a dark room and you wanted to find something. Well, you would have a much better opportunity to find it if you would turn on the light. Even if we’ve been studying Christian Science for many, many years, and we say, “Oh, others have healings, why don’t I?” it may be that we’re looking too much at that material evidence and at ourselves and our own expertise.
How wonderful if we approach our prayers and our study of the Bible and Science and Health as if it were totally new, and do this each day, like a little child, so expectant of some new thought. And that truth then illumines our thought, and the healings will come. But again, it’s when we’re not primarily looking for the healing, but we’re really primarily looking for understanding God and following His guidance in our daily life; and letting it change the way we think and the way we behave. Let it transform our character.
spirituality.com host: Thank you. DJ isn’t telling us where he or she is, but has written, “My son has the claim of disability, and has recently renewed his study of Christian Science. He says sometimes he’s afraid to be healed, because he would lose government income, and then how would he support himself? What would you say to this?”
Barbara: Oh, well, that is an imposition that really needs to be removed, isn’t it? That somehow we’re dependent upon a sickness. I certainly have the greatest compassion for what you’re asking there, because that is really what is most needed in our prayers, is to realize that God supplies all our needs. That we are dependent on God and on nothing less. That’s a wonderful, freeing thing. Now how exactly that might take place in your son’s experience—certainly he should feel free to let the healing go forward, and the healing…along with it will come the opportunities to be of service. So I guess you could ask, “Why do you want this healing? Just to be free of it?” Probably not. A person would like to be a contributing member of society, would like to be of service to God and man. Believe me, the opportunities for service will open up in very unexpected ways, and that service will be rewarded with income. We don’t know the answers from a human standpoint, but we do know that we can depend on God, and that we are not dependent on any kind of limitation.
spirituality.com host: Very helpful. And now our last question is from Freida in Naples, Florida. She says, “I had been thinking wrongly early on, and since having an eye exam in order to comply with updating our diver’s license, a belief of a terminal condition has developed and I’m somewhat fearful. I haven’t told our family, because they’ll insist on medical treatment and I don’t want that. Those thoughts keep intruding and I’m somewhat fearful. Also being bombarded by the media and people of this intrusion.
Barbara: Yes. Yes. So what is it that casts out fear? Fear is such an insidious imposition, isn’t it? Divine Love casts out fear. The Bible tells us that “God is love,” and that “there is no fear in love.” And divine Love is where we turn, and there should be no fear about relying on divine Love, or about what others will think if we want to rely on divine Love, because it’s what you’re relying on in your own heart that you know you can trust. Really, divine Love is the only condition of existence. Divine perfection, spiritual wholeness, is really the only condition. There can be no terminal condition. The Bible tells us that God is “Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending.” In other words, we know the end from the beginning, because there is only one beginning. And it is God, His goodness, as the only creator. So that’s the only condition that really has a hold of you and can make any laws for you. It is the only law, and it is provable, so it can take away your fear. It can set you free mentally right now and lead to your physical freedom.
spirituality.com host: Thank you, Barbara. And I just am so grateful for all the answers and to all of you for all of your questions. Barbara, do you have some final comments you’d like to make?
Barbara: Well, I think we’ve covered so much, and the questions have been wonderful. I was thinking of a passage in Second Corinthians in chapter four, verse 6, where Paul says, “For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.” I think that wonderful sense that this light is in us because we’re God’s children. It shines right out of where the darkness claims to be. And it transforms, it illuminates and regenerates our thought, our characters, and our body. I just think that that wonderful Christ-cure being right here for everyone is what we want to go away with today. And know that it makes us realize what God is communicating to us. That’s really what we can listen to. There’s a passage in Science and Health—maybe this would be a good thing to end with. It’s on page 367. She says, “The infinite Truth of the Christ-cure has come to this age through a ‘still, small voice,’ through silent utterances and divine anointing which quicken and increase the beneficial effects of Christianity.”
As we each individually pray earnestly to listen to that “still, small voice” of the Christ, Truth, then we realize that we’re God’s innocent children, and we have the authority to defend ourselves with God’s law, and be free.
Citations used in this chat
Science and Health
- 604:4-24 (to 3rd .)
- 391:7-13
- 468:8-15
- 468:16-24
- 455:3-6
- 162:4
- 239:18
- 425:32
- 1:11
- 365:31-11
- 337:10
- 367:24
King James Bible