Prayer about pain

In this chat, Caryl Farkas talks about her own experience of overcoming chronic pain through a deeper understanding of divine Love, and shares other accounts of healing. She says that God never sends pain and that pain is not an authority that can define our lives or dictate what we can or cannot do. Pain is a mental image that is without life and substance. Through her answers to questions, she describes how each individual can prove this for himself or herself.

Site visitors' questions covered a broad spectrum of issues: how to pray about pain, what Christian Science has to say about "pain management," how to gain fresh inspiration and hope when dealing with long-standing problems and pain. Are some people luckier than others in the ability to deal with pain? Does pain make us better people? How to help a son who is addicted to painkillers.

The transcribed text has been edited for clarity.

Rosalie Dunbar: Hello, everyone. Welcome to a Christian Science Sentinel live question and answer audio event. My name is Rosalie Dunbar, and I’ll be your host for the next hour. Our topic today is “Prayer about pain” and our guest is Caryl Farkas, a practitioner and teacher of Christian Science from Madison, Wisconsin. Caryl holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from Rutgers University, and worked as a performance artist before going into the full time healing practice of Christian Science. Caryl, do you have some thoughts to get us started?

Caryl Farkas: Yes, I thought I’d open with something Mary Baker Eddy had to say about pain in a collection of her essays called Miscellaneous Writings. She wrote: “. . . pain compels human consciousness to escape from sense into the immortality and harmony of Soul” (p. 85 ). Those words are a very accurate description of an experience that I had some years ago, when a healing that brought me back into Christian Science came about. I’d been away from it for some fifteen years. There were a number of things that were all healed at that time, but one of the things that I’d been living with was chronic pain associated with a condition called endometriosis. The doctors that I’d seen, they all referred to these intense sensations as “phantom pain,” which seemed to suggest that somehow it wasn’t actual. But if there was one thing I was sure of at the time it was that those pains were real. On many days they were the most real thing in my life. One day when the pain was especially bad I was at a doctor’s office, doubled over. And I asked him if could tell me what was causing this pain. And he replied, “If I knew that, they would put my name on a plaque in every medical school in the country.” And he said he believed that I was feeling the pain, but it didn’t have any physical cause that could be observed or studied or measured. So that was pretty frustrating and depressing for me. This condition went on for a couple of years. It would vary between chronic discomfort and really acute agony. And it just really took over my life.

Now, when I woke up the morning after having had this middle of the night epiphany about the power of divine Love, I’d been up earnestly thinking through what I believed to be true and real in life, and I’d suddenly seen that it was all about Love, divine Love. Now I’m hardly the first person to have experienced that spiritual sense of Life. In fact, when you read the Bible you see that recognizing spiritual power is pretty much what the whole book is about. But that morning when I woke up, I felt like a child. I felt free, and so connected to God’s goodness. And it felt so fresh and new, like my life was new. I think in retrospect, what had happened was Truth, with a capital T, God, Truth, had just trumped the whole material sense of myself as sick, and pained, and wiped out. I hadn’t set out that night to metaphysically treat pain or sickness. I’d just earnestly, desperately, really, wanted to figure out what was actually true about me, what governed me, what I was made of. Was there someone there beyond the physical sensation and emotional reactions that had filled up my days of illness? And looking back, I would say that the lessons that I learned from this experience, were first, that God is very real, very present, and wholly loving and good. And then, that there’s nothing more powerful than God. And God does not send pain or disease, but rather enables us to recognize that His love is Principle. It’s the real basis of our lives. It’s always there and it’s all-powerful. So this taught me that pain is not an authority. Pain is not definitive. And pain is also not an objective report of truth. Pain is really a mental image, without real life, truth, intelligence, or substance. I’m paraphrasing something else Mary Baker Eddy wrote in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, which she called “the scientific statement of being.” The thing to do when we’re dealing with pain—what I learned from this experience is—you want to get with, and keep with, the thought that God is just the biggest thing in the room. So I thought that was a place to start today.

Rosalie: Well, that sounds like a wonderful idea, and a marvelous experience of healing as well, and that kind of fits in with some of the questions. We have a lot of questions today, which is great. One of the questions is: “How do I get bodily healing after praying and believing?” This is from Bongas in Nigeria.

Caryl: That’s a great question. I think it’s helpful to understand healing as really a side effect of prayer and believing. And when I say prayer and believing I’m not talking about a petitionary prayer where you’re begging God to fix something. Or, well, if you think about it, if you’re starting from that point, you’re sort of assuming that this mess that you’re in, is somehow God-created, and then you’re asking God to come in and fix that mess. Prayer, in Christian Science, is more a recognition of God, as described in Genesis 1—the God that made everything and made it wholly good. So prayer that opens the door in thought to this divine Life and Truth and Love as the real and only authority and power. And belief, when you talk about belief, not that kind of gritting your teeth, willing yourself to accept a thought that might not be yours, but rather the faith that plants itself on your recognition that this Truth, this good, that you’re seeing that is God, is reality. It’s what you’re about. It’s what is most real. And healing happens when that happens.

Rosalie: So it’s not really about willing yourself to deal with the pain, or even willing yourself to make the pain go away, but rather growing closer to God and understanding that that is where the presence of Love and power and restoration is?

Caryl: Yes. I think we may read the Bible or Science and Health, and we may love the sound of those spiritual facts. But sometimes we seem disconnected from them. I think the good news is that we are always capable of a reality check, that will show us that we are really permanently tied-in to what divine Love is doing. Just about eight months after I’d had that healing experience, I woke up in the night with strong pain in my side, exactly where the old, phantom pain used to be. And it was pretty intense. But during those eight months, I’d been doing some really serious study of Christian Science. I’d read the textbook cover to cover three times. Each time I was making notes in the margins, and each time finding more understanding of this new/old idea of what God is. What I was finding, as I studied, was that this book not only described what I had been learning myself about how things really work, but it pointed me to deeper, broader implications of God’s love. I’d also been through class instruction in Christian Science, and that two week in-depth study of the nature of God and man had helped me learn a more consistent way to keep growing spiritually. So when I woke with that pain, I snapped on the light on my nightstand, and I grabbed the Bible that was sitting there, and I just opened it, feeling that I would find God’s Word there, and that His Word, the spiritual sense of Life, would be all I needed to meet the challenge of pain. I’d opened to the book of Job, that story of how a good man suffers all kinds of terrible things, but never curses God. Job only wants to have an explanation. He knew he hadn’t done wrong, but he didn’t know why he was being plagued with problems. And the passage my eye fell on when I opened the book to chapter 38 was where it says: “Who is this that darkenth counsel by words without knowledge? Gird up now thy loins like a man; for I will demand of thee, and answer thou me. Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding” (verses 2-4 ). It goes on. It finishes with that wonderful verse, “When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?” (verse 7 ) describing God’s creation. I just had to laugh when I saw it—“Who is this that darkenth counsel by words without knowledge?” To me, it meant, “What is pain, that it claims to tell you what’s going on, when it doesn’t know anything?” And that was such a liberating thought. What does pain know? Pain can’t possibly know what God knows about life and about me. At that moment, I remembered what I knew in my heart. And I think when you’re talking about prayer and belief, real prayer and belief is a recognition of what God has written in our heart—that nothing could be bigger or more real than God. At that time it just felt so good to recall that, that I didn’t even think about my body at all for a few minutes, and then I noticed the pain was gone.

Rosalie: There you go.

Caryl: I turned off the light and went back to sleep, and the sensation never returned and that was seventeen years ago.

Rosalie: That was perfect. Now this individual hasn’t given us a name or location but they say: “In health class at school I was taught that pain is a warning sign of something wrong, and it should not be ignored. How does Christian Science think of pain?”

Caryl: Oh, that’s a great question, and it’s interesting that she’s been taught in health class that this is what pain is. Actually, in the medical community, there is no consensus like that. I had a doctor explain to me that there were a whole host of pain-related diseases. They all had different names, but really all these names were nothing more than fancy Latin words that meant “it hurts everywhere all the time,” and they couldn’t really figure out why.

I think of a doctor who’s done a lot of writing on the subject of pain, Jerome Groopman, he was once a patient himself, dealing with pain. He had been training for a marathon, and he ruptured a disc in his back. The best advice at the time was: “You better have surgery.” He had the surgery, and it left him in acute suffering that no doctor seemed able to help. And he talked about feeling just trapped inside this pain. If he tried to move outside its limits, the pain would hurl him back. If you think about that idea that the pain is giving him a message, “something’s wrong,” his whole life was lived with a sense that there was something really wrong. And he’d kind of abandoned all hope of a tolerable life until a friend of his persuaded him to visit another doctor who was treating pain very differently than the traditional pills and surgery strategies. And this doctor actually told him: “You’re worshiping the volcano god of pain.” People interpret pain as a signal to stop an activity because there’s something wrong. And he told him, “What you need to do is move past it.” And these were his words, “To ignore pain, to reeducate his muscles, to relinquish their memory of past pain.” And this is very interesting. This is a—at the time, this is the late seventies, it was a whole new medical perspective and that field has just opened wide up. But what this doctor had him do was working through the sense of pain, and remembering that he needs to move through it, so his body can let go of this old form of memory and get—I love this—“a new narrative.” So, over time he discovered he could actually teach his body to be comfortable, and it seemed to him nothing short of miraculous.

Now with Christian Science—actually there’s one other thing I wanted to share about that. He wrote a book about it called The Anatomy of Hope. And he said “Hope is not about positive thinking. Hope is rooted in unalloyed reality.” And this is where it starts to sort of dovetail with what Christian Science teaches about pain, and how to deal with that. It’s not about willing yourself to feel better, or even necessarily to train the body, because really what was going on in this case was his thought about what was possible was opening up and changing. As soon as he didn’t have to worship that “volcano god of pain” anymore, the healing began. And so, to the notion that we need to see pain as a sign that something has gone wrong, that is not the best way to look at it. And it does seem that even now the medical field is heading in this direction, and working with thought more than with physicality.

Rosalie: Now, Jan in Texas has written a long question which I’m going to have to condense into a few words because we have so many questions. She says: “I would like to know what a person can do to heal extreme pain spiritually, without taking any medicine. And do you think, if someone takes medicine, they weaken their ability to heal spiritually?”

Caryl: Two good questions. Yeah, I absolutely think that pain can be healed spiritually. When you look into how pain seems to work, you immediately run into the highly subjective nature of it. How a person with a slight hurt can feel like their pain is a ten, and someone who’s been seriously injured might not register pain at all. I remember a story some years back about a thirteen-year-old surfer who was attacked by a shark. She described the experience of the shark coming up and grabbing hold of her arm, and she said she felt a little pressure and looked down and the water was full of blood. She’d lost her arm just below the shoulder, and she said, “I think I figured out that if I panicked, then things wouldn’t go as good as if I was calm. And I just started praying to God to rescue me and help me.” And she got to shore, and they got her to the hospital. And I remember in the news story, her mother said, “When I saw her, she looked pale but she had this brightness in her eyes, that I could just say I know she’s going to be alright.” It was interesting to me—first she made a decision, a conscious decision not to panic. And we’re all capable of doing that—being conscious of our own thought process. And that she prayed for help. She prayed to God. And recognizing in times of need that God is a source of strength and help, is a very powerful thing. So, it’s useful to know that pain really is a mental phenomena. And it has a lot to do with what you think and believe about yourself. What was the very last part? Give me the last part of that question again, will you?

Rosalie: “Do you think taking medication weakens one’s ability to heal spiritually?”

Caryl: I think that it requires you to wake back up to the realness of God’s power, because something that happens when you do find, or try to find, material means to solve these problems, is that your thought is starting from a place where God seems distant—or even absent. We have to work our way back to the very natural, real connectness we have with divine Love. So there’s nothing sinful or unrighteous about having taken medicine. We’re all trying to work out our own salvation. Mrs. Eddy, in Science and Health, addresses this question. She says: “If patients fail to experience the healing power of Christian Science, and think they can be benefited by certain ordinary physical methods of medical treatment, then the Mind-physician [the practitioner] should give up such cases, and leave invalids free to resort to whatever other systems they fancy will afford relief.” Then she says: “Thus such invalids may learn the value of the apostolic precept: ‘Reprove, rebuke, exhort with all longsuffering and doctrine.’ If the sick find these material expedients unsatisfactory, and they receive no help from them, these very failures may open their blind eyes. In some way, sooner or later, all must rise superior to materiality, and suffering is oft the divine agent in this elevation. ‘All things work together for good to them that love God,’ is the dictum of Scripture” (pp. 443-444 ). So I think whatever road you’ve gone down that didn’t work, it doesn’t separate you from God. The minute you turn toward God, like the Prodigal son coming home, God, like the father in that story, is running down the path to embrace you.

Rosalie: Ginny from Victoria, British Columbia, in Canada, says: “If you feel you are in pain, what do you do first in terms of prayer?”

Caryl: Well, I think that experience I had opening up the Bible that night illustrates what needs to happen. In some way, you want to open thought to the presence of God. For me that night, it was just opening the Bible, because I felt that here is the book with God’s Word in it. I can find spiritual sense here. You might find it in a hymn. You might find it in a psalm, a Scriptural verse you know by heart. There’s all sorts of ways to come home to the reality of God’s love and presence right where you are. But that is the key to it—that whatever you choose, you’re choosing it because you want to come home. You want to come home to divine Love.

Rosalie: Caz in London says that she’s been dealing with a painful condition for more than three years and can’t see a lot of improvement. She thinks it might be an arthritic back problem. And what she wants to know is: “Who is actually doing the work?” She says she has heard that according to Mrs. Eddy, the patient should not necessarily be asked to do the work, that it’s the practitioner who does the work. And I wonder if you might have some thoughts on that?

Caryl: “The work” is a very interesting phrase. “The work” in Christian Science is whatever it takes to get to that recognition of God’s omnipotence. Now, a patient who calls a practitioner, and is ready—open mind and open heart—for that good news, for that Gospel of Truth to come in, will find healing a lot faster than someone who has lots of caveats, lots of reasons why they think maybe this can’t work, or it hasn’t worked before, they weren’t able to find success with this method. And it’s not really about the method. It’s about how receptive we are to God. So who is doing the work? In a way, the patient has done work the minute they pick up the phone, because they’ve chosen to seek spiritual help. And of course it’s best if when you pick up that phone, that really is what you’re doing. You’re not just looking for an intermediary between you and God, or someone who’s got a magic wand you imagine that can wave that wand for you. A practitioner isn’t a life coach, or a talking cure, or a twenty-four hour pharmacy. A practitioner—their work is to be in that place in thought where, when the patient calls, they’re meeting you with Truth. They’re transparent to what God is, and what the Christ has to say. So there is really work on both sides going on, but all that work really has to do with the recognition of, and the embrace of, God’s omnipotence and realness.

Rosalie: Barbie in Delaware says: “Our world seems to be so medically-dominated, more-so than at any time in history. We hear a lot about what the medical community calls ‘pain management.’ How does Christian Science approach this issue?”

Caryl: Oh, that’s great. We were touching on that before. “Pain management” is a huge field in medicine now. They use visualization. They use MRIs, and seeing if people can work to control the way they are experiencing things. Of course, Christian Science has a very different sense of control. It’s not a matter of will-power, doing something with the human brain. Mrs. Eddy, in Science and Health, has got wonderful—like one of the longest sentences in the book, but she talks about how Christian Science works. And she says: “ ‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me.’ (Exodus xx. 3.) The First Commandment is my favorite text. It demonstrates Christian Science. It inculcates the tri-unity of God, Spirit, Mind; it signifies that man shall have no other spirit or mind but God, eternal good, and that all men shall have one Mind. The divine Principle of the First Commandment bases the Science of being, by which man demonstrates health, holiness, and life eternal. One infinite God, good, unifies men and nations; constitutes the brotherhood of man; ends wars; fulfils the Scripture, ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself;’ annihilates pagan and Christian idolatry,—whatever is wrong in social, civil, criminal, political, and religious codes; equalizes the sexes; annuls the curse on man, and leaves nothing that can sin, suffer, be punished or destroyed” (p. 340 )—“nothing that can suffer.” So this First Commandment sense of God as All-in-all to us, leaves “nothing that can suffer.” It totally removes pain.

Rosalie: Eileen in Mount Morris, Michigan, says: “I have often heard that when people are discussing why others are not being healed, they believe that the reason for this is that the person who is not being healed is just not receptive enough. And those who are healed are more receptive. Sometimes this makes me feel as if some are just born luckier to have receptivity and others are not. What makes some more receptive than others, and does receptivity have anything to do with healing?”

Caryl: I think that sense of some being more receptive than others is very much a part of the Genesis 2 description of life. In Genesis 1 we had God creating everything, all wholly good. And then in Genesis 2 we have the Adam and Eve story. And it sometimes does seem like that’s the description of our lives—that we are walking around as individual personalities and agents in a material world, and reacting to whatever happens there. Now the spiritual sense of who we are, of course, would preclude the idea that some of us are more receptive than others. God made us all and He made all very good. Then receptivity is something that is natural to us. So there isn’t an unreceptive man. When I’m taking a call from someone who says, “I don’t feel like I’m very receptive,” that’s the first thing as a practitioner I would handle. I would utterly deny that. “No, that’s not who you are. You are God’s child, and you know it.”

Rosalie: Then Linda in New England says: “I’ve had daily muscle pains, sometimes fairly incapacitating, from a tick bite for two years.” And she says she’s called practitioners who have helped her, and she’s noticed that when the last practitioner had prayed, the pain was gone and it hasn’t returned. “Over the two years I’ve written out a lot of prayers for myself, studied citations on pain in Science and Health, but realized feeling the pain was keeping me fearful and less trusting. So I decided to get more help in March. Any suggestions on how not to be impressed with pain when you feel it personally? I would like to get better at healing.” And she says she’s so grateful for the healing and for help from practitioners.

Caryl: She actually says it herself right there. She doesn’t want something to come between her and her trust in God. And that is the key to it. There’s that saying, “Sweet are the uses of adversity.” And it is true that sometimes it seems that it’s a long road to get to this understanding of God’s allness that we want to get to. And yet, every step of the way God is with us. With each attempt to bring ourselves in line with what we understand in our hearts to really be God’s will, His Way, and you find that in the Commandments. You find that in Jesus’ teaching. But these efforts don’t leave us where they found us. And so, I would say things are changing. Spirit is moving. God is taking you with Him. Mrs. Eddy once made this statement that when something ceases to bless it would cease to be a problem (see The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 143 ). And it’s not that she was condoning suffering, or saying suffering was appropriate, but that there is a blessing there. I think many of us have experienced long term healings where you are so grateful for what you learned at the end, that whatever the struggle was that got you there, it was as nothing, it was as a dream. So, keep working.

Rosalie: Ray, from Ventura, California, is asking: “Does God bring the pain to get us to be better?”

Caryl: God, who is Love, would never send suffering to His creation. The sense of God that heals, makes it very clear that pain and suffering have no place in His creation. I made that remark that that epiphany that I had of Love’s power—I certainly wasn’t the first person to have that experience. You read about experiences like that throughout the five-thousand-year record of the Bible, and in many accounts of Christian Science healing. And what comes through so strongly from all these accounts is God’s utter goodness. It says in the New Testament that God’s not a fountain that sends forth sweet water and bitter (James 3:11 ). God is wholly good.

Rosalie: Mary, in California, is saying: “What about the times, like in the Old Testament, where God sends pestilence and suffering to people?” She goes on to say: “Does that mean that God is not really loving, or do we have a wrong concept of love? And can we be reformed through difficulties, or do they bring us down even further?”

Caryl: I think we absolutely can be reformed through difficulties. I think that that’s exactly what we were just talking about, those “sweet uses of adversity.” Step by step we do find that God is “. . . a very present help in trouble” (see Ps. 46:1 ; Science and Health, p. 444 ). Now the Bible, of course, is not a book by one author that was written at one time. It is a collection of writings that span about five thousand years. You don’t hear of God referred to as Love until you get to the book of Micah, which is the end of the Old Testament. When you get to the New Testament, there’s quite a bit that talks about God as Love. So I think you need to understand the Bible, first of all, as a record of how our consciousness of what God is, has grown and evolved, beginning with Abraham who had a sense of God as very much like the tribal deities that he was accustomed to seeing in the world that he was living in. And then as time goes on, you get the Psalmist, you get David, and this beautiful sense of spiritual power and God’s care. And then, of course, in the New Testament, the sense of God as divine Love embracing His creation, His children. So yeah, we’re not thinking of God in Deuteronomy as the same God you that might be reading about in the book of James. You’re really reading the different senses of God that have been expressed over that Biblical time span. Mrs. Eddy talks about the spiritual, “the inspired Word of the Bible” [see e.g., Science and Health, p. 497 ]. So all of these accounts help us see what God really is.

Rosalie: This question is from the Midwest and this is how it goes: “How do you seriously make a dent in mental pain that has caused too many thoughts about death and suicide? I know all the Christian Science pat answers. But what can you do when those don’t stop the pain, the anguish? What is going to get me to actually be able to change my thinking, hold to it, and gain peace of mind—something that works? If I can’t do it, can a practitioner do it for me?”

Caryl: I don’t think a pat answer ever helped anybody. But an inspired answer helps every time. The questioner reminds me of a healing that’s written up in Spiritual Healing In a Scientific Age by Robert Peel. And it was a testament of a man named John Ondrak, who was a New York City policeman, injured in the line of duty.

Rosalie: I remember that one.

Caryl: Yeah, his injuries had left him crippled. The doctors hadn’t been able to relieve the pain he lived in every day. He tried to be grateful for just being alive, but the pain was chronic and it was terrible. One day, when he was contemplating suicide, his wife asked him to read Science and Health. And he hadn’t had any interest in religion up to that point. And he had looked at the book before, but he said it just hadn’t made any sense to him. And I guess it must have looked to him like a bunch of pat answers. But he said, “A few weeks after I had again tried reading Science and Health, as my wife had suggested, I was in such intense pain that I threw the book across the room and told my wife, in some very coarse language, what I thought about her religion. She simply picked up the textbook and said, ‘You are not reading it correctly. All you want is a physical healing.’ My answer was: ‘I have been in agony all these years. I’m entitled to a healing. Why must I suffer like this?’ She answered, ‘You must forget about yourself and find out about God and your relationship to Him.’ ” And he said, “I almost exploded again, but as I looked at her and felt her deep love and compassion, I knew I had to try once more. I had to find an answer to this puzzle.” There again, is this earnest, almost desperate desire for what is really going on. It seems to me that that is when his thought shifted, when he realized it couldn’t just be about: Why can’t I get this healing that I’m entitled to? It had to be about having those words come alive with meaning. You can’t fake that. You can’t pretend they’ve come alive to you. He said he realized, “For twelve years [he’d been leaning] on doctors, hospitals, physical therapy, wheelchairs, crutches, canes, supports, and pills” (p. 65). And now as he read that beautiful opening statement in the Preface of Science and Health: “To those leaning on the sustaining infinite, to-day is big with blessings,” he realized it was time to lean on something greater than material means and human will. I think that’s the key element for the questioner. How do you do that? You decide you want that more than anything else. And then you support that desire with your action.

Rosalie: And with your thoughts. You really check your thoughts, and say, “Well, what am I thinking here?”

Caryl: Exactly, exactly. And if you’re in earnest, you will find that divine Love really is the one thing that can meet every human need (see Science and Health, p. 494 ).

Rosalie: I heard John Ondrak talk in a public meeting in which he told about that experience and there was not a dry eye in the house afterward. It was very, very powerful, and very sincere, and just a very impressive healing that I’m just so grateful for, that he put that on the record.

Caryl: And he started from a place where it really didn’t mean that much to him, and because he opened his thought to the possibility of good, that changed his place.

Rosalie: Totally.

Caryl: There was one last part of that question I don’t think I covered.

Rosalie: He asks: “If I can’t do it, can a practitioner do it for me?”

Caryl: Right, and I think this goes back to what we were talking about before about, “What is the work?” If you’re going to call a practitioner, then call a practitioner with the same sort of thought that John Ondrak brought to his reading of the Preface of Science and Health where he realized, “I need to lean on something greater than material means and human will.”

Rosalie: Yes. This one is—there’s no location or name, but here we go: “I have been dealing with chronic pain for many years now. I pray daily to overcome and heal it. I get some relief so that it is more tolerable, but I never get full relief, and it often comes back more aggressive than before. I do get some fresh insights and inspiration, but it never seems enough to bring the complete healing. Do you have any thoughts on how I can obtain a complete healing?”

Caryl: Yes, keep going. Mrs. Eddy said to her students: “What would you do if you had a case and you weren’t healing it?” And the student replied that, well, they would remember to handle animal magnetism. In other words, to take into account perhaps their thought was being influenced by other thought on the subject. And then she asked the student, “What if it still didn’t heal, didn’t yield?” And the student had another way that they might go at it. And Mrs. Eddy asked again, “Well, if it still didn’t yield?” And the student said, “Well then, I guess I’d give up the case.” And Mrs. Eddy told her student, “That is exactly what you should not do.” Don’t stop because the yardstick of material sense says you’re just not measuring up to perfect. The yardstick of material sense will never measure perfection, which is found through spiritual sense. Keep coming home to it and living your life from it. Healing is a side effect of that, and it is inevitable.

Rosalie: One of the other things that I, myself, have had experiences with chronic pain, and one of the things that I found really helpful was that when I was not in pain, to pray, because that’s the time when you kind of can build up your fortress. It’s kind of like where the arrows have hit the wall, well you, repairing the wall when the arrows aren’t flying, and you make it stronger. And I found that it made me—the more that I could really keep clear that I was spiritual and that I could not have these experiences and that they had nothing to do with me—the more strong I was when the time came when the pain did come, and I could more heartily say to it: “I don’t think so!” That didn’t mean I lasted very long the first few times, but each time I got stronger. So, if you are in a situation where the pain comes and goes, when it’s not there, take advantage of that time to strengthen your fortress. I mean that was my experience, anyway.

Caryl: I think that’s very true, and I think it’s also helpful to know that even in the midst of it, healing doesn’t depend on your just being this tower of metaphysical strength. The Bible is full of wonderful accounts of blessing and healing that came to people who were just at the end of their rope. I think of Elijah under the juniper tree saying, “All right just let me die. I can’t take anymore” (see I Kings, chap. 19 ). But he’s talking to God. If we keep talking to God, that door will open and we will see His goodness right there for us.

Rosalie: Mrs. Eddy talks about persistence winning the prize (see Science and Health, p. 462 ). I can vouch for persistence. You’re so right to say just keep at it, just keep at it. Now this is Sandra from Santa Rosa, California. She says: “I was diagnosed with diabetes seventeen years ago, and was told if I did not change my diet that my condition would get worse. It did. I now suffer from liver, high blood pressure, and chronic pain, which I had even before the diagnosis, which is called fibromyalgia. I study and read and try to put into practice what I learn but I realize I have not let go entirely of physical, sexual, and emotional abuse I went through most of my life from childhood. My business is suffering, and I will probably lose my home. With all these ailments I feel I can’t even think straight half the time. I know God is with me. How do I stay with the right thought, and not lose it, so I can move on? I truly believe I can be healed but need better direction.”

Caryl: Yeah, that fibromyalgia, there’s one of those fancy Latin words that means it just hurts everywhere. How can you go forward? In the description you just read Rosalie, there’s a real sense of being stuck with that material measuring stick. Here’s what I’ve been told, and sure enough, it seems to be coming to pass. I had an experience like that myself, not so much with pain but with disability, and it seemed as if my body was just fulfilling every prediction that had been made. And I couldn’t do anything about it. It was taking me somewhere I didn’t want to go, and I couldn’t stop it. If I’d stopped in the middle of that experience, before the healing came, I think I would have said at any point, “Well, I’m doing everything I can.” That was a very human assessment of what was possible to God. I was thinking of it in terms of what I was doing, as opposed to what God was doing. One of the things we want to do in these cases is, instead of adding up the darkness, you want to start counting on the light. This has to do with that change of base and thought, where you’re making the shift from seeing yourself as in front of this Mt. Everest of work that you have to do to get your healing, as opposed to seeing yourself as the witness of what God is doing. And there’s that First Commandment sense again. It really is all about what God, what divine Love, is doing. I know I’m missing parts of that question. Can you just go back and catch the end of it for me?

Rosalie: I think I’ve moved on to another question. But let me see if I can find it. Oh yes, here we go. She says: “I know God is with me. How do I stay with the right thought and not lose it, so I can move on? I truly believe I can be healed but need better direction.”

Caryl: The letter itself strikes me like the two psalms that are talked about in Science and Health. First, there’s man who’s days are grass and there’s a very material, mortal, bogged-down sense of life, and then the Psalmist talks about waking up in Thy light, in God’s light, and he can see himself in that light (see Science and Health, p. 190 ). And the end of this letter is so much like that Psalmist’s sense of spiritual possibility. That’s what you want to stay with. Keep your eye on what God is doing, and the fact that it includes you.

Rosalie: This is from Judy in Chicago, who says: “Do you have any suggestions on how to separate the suggestions of certain diseases attached to severe pain? Media advertising and promotion of disease is everywhere. I try to feel God’s love in the presence of pain and have had some progress in that area, but not enough to eradicate chronic pain or the fear attached to it.”

Caryl: I think a good way to describe pain—we talked about that—that it is a mental image, kind of a mental image gone wrong. It may be ignorant, like when medical students experience the sensations and symptoms of the diseases they study. Or it may be manipulative, like when drug companies parade symptoms before us in seductive advertising, and then we start noticing those symptoms in ourselves. But, in any case, the antidote is you want to get in touch with real intelligence, with Truth, and lean wholeheartedly on that. And even if we’ve been living with some unchallenged mental error that has become too big not to notice, that doesn’t mean we have to suffer from a mistake, from this error. I think there’s actually a great blessing, really, an opportunity that we have when we’re confronted with these situations, because it forces us “. . . like tired children to the arms of divine Love” (p. 322 ). It really makes us uncover our relationship to God.

Rosalie: I have a question from Grandma J. in California, who says: “How do I help a grown child, who is in great back pain and addicted to pain killers? How can I think rightly, and be a better help, rather than just worrying, until I get my spiritual balance and see him more clearly?”

Caryl: Here’s another wonderful opportunity to put the First Commandment into practice. Who’s really in control here? Is it the medication? Is it the picture of a pained and flawed individual, somebody suffering? Or is divine Love in control? If you’re going to work metaphysically, spiritually, about healing, then you’ve got to start with God’s omnipotence. And that means God’s complete control of the entire situation—including the grown child and your own concerns—that Love is enough to meet all of that. When you respond to that child or you respond yourself when you’re feeling like you’re up against whatever’s going on, respond to God. Don’t respond to what seems to be going on.

Rosalie: This is from Elizabeth in Boston. She says: “People are always talking about throwing away their pills and then finding healing. I’ve tried several times but the pain is so overwhelming that I end up back on pills. Is it possible to work for, and find healing, while still on pills for pain?”

Caryl: Well, it sounds like you are interested in finding healing, whether you’re taking the pills, or whether you’ve stopped. There are wonderful accounts of people clearing out their medicine cabinet, because they’ve realized that those pills were not the thing supporting them and giving them health and strength. Having said that, I know of people, who having read those accounts, then run into the bathroom and clear out their medicine cabinet, because somebody else did it, so I ought to be able to, too. Healing came in the original case because someone had a genuine recognition of the power of God right where they are. You can’t claim that recognition without recognizing it—if I can put it that way.

My mother, toward the end of her life, went through something like this. It was in her nineties, she hadn’t been to a doctor in fifty years, and suddenly there seemed to be a condition that was terribly painful, and she didn’t feel she could handle it in prayer, and resorted to medical assistance—which in this case, all they could really do for her was give her pain killers. And the side effects were so unpleasant that she wanted to get off them as quickly as possible, and try to get back to prayer, but getting off them was difficult for a variety of reasons. So she struggled with that. There was one morning where she said, “I’m going to stop. I should be able to. I’m practicing Christian Science. I should just throw them out.” And she threw them in the garbage, and the next morning she was in agony. I was praying with her through all this. It was in the midst of this that I went through Normal class to become a teacher. Coming home from that experience, and coming into the kitchen where she was, it was as if I realized she was never that person who had gone through all this agony—that she was God’s child. It was just so clear. She looked up at me from the table, and she said, “I’m done with this. I’m done with it.” And it was different. It was markedly different. It wasn’t will, and it wasn’t searching for healing. It was a real recognition that this has no power over me. She threw the things in the garbage, and there was no side effect, there were no bad aftereffects. She was done. So I think it is about seeing God’s presence and power in the situation as being the biggest thing. And then, yes, you can throw those things in the trash.

Rosalie: Yes. We have a good question here, but we don’t have a name for it. “Many times when someone talks of their desire for healing, what I perceive coming from them is a desire to get back to normal. Normal is to be just like others, and does not indicate any kind of progress. Can you speak on this?” I think that’s a very good question.

Caryl: It is a great question, and I think so often when we’re, especially in pain, we’re not thinking much beyond, “I just want to get back to life, business as usual.” And really, business as usual is not what you want to get back to. The adversity has given you an opportunity, and the opportunity is to learn and prove for yourself “. . . that all things [do] work together for good to them that love God. . . ” (Rom. 8:28 )—emphasis on loving God. So this isn’t about maintaining a pleasant, material existence. This is about finding out who we are, and where we really are, and what’s going on. And healing is a side effect of that, the spiritual truth that we discover. What was the very last line of that Rosalie, I’m sorry? I keep going back, I feel like I haven’t caught it all.

Rosalie: “Normal is to be just like others and does not indicate any kind of progress.”

Caryl: Yeah, I think we also want to be careful when we’re thinking about other people. Jesus said we should take the beam out of our own eyes and not worry about the mote in our brother’s (see e.g., Matt. 7:3 ). I think that when you’re thinking about progress for somebody else, the best thing you can really do is, as we were saying before, recognize God’s omnipotence in the situation.

Rosalie: I’ve got two questions here that are sort of related. One is from Alice in Seattle, who asks: “How do you find thoughts, inspiration, and hope when dealing with longstanding problems and pain?” And from Phil in Colorado, who says: “I continue to work on pain, but don’t seem to be making any progress. What am I doing wrong?” It seems like the “fresh thoughts, inspiration, and hope” are something that Phil maybe would like to have, too. That’s why I thought they might go together.

Caryl: Yeah. Some years ago—I don’t know if you saw this—but I was back in Boston for something, and there was a billboard on the way from the airport, and it said: “If God is your co-pilot, maybe you’re sitting in the wrong seat.”

Rosalie: Excellent!

Caryl: Yeah. That idea of “I’m working, I’m working about the pain, and I’m not getting anywhere,” and I think many of us have had that experience—that sense of yourself as struggling, trying to get up that Mt. Everest of work. When really, what is needed is that change of base. So how do we get that change of base? We talked about desire. [Mrs. Eddy] said desire is prayer, and it’s that desire to see things God’s way that makes a huge difference in the work that you’re doing, because then you’re starting from a different place. You’re starting from the foundation of God being the real authority, and you being the witness of His goodness. It’s not about you having to think good enough thoughts consistently enough, to get those brownie points that will get you healed.

Rosalie: That’s a good way of putting it.

Caryl: Because that’s just not the way it works. That Love is all around us, and we can open our eyes to it. When you read the account—we’ve talked about a number of healings today—read accounts in the periodicals and in the “Fruitage” sections of Miscellaneous Writings or Science and Health, all these people are having the same essential revelation as, “Oh, my gosh, God really is the biggest thing in the room. And I live in relation to that. Here I thought I’d been living in relation to my problem. But actually I live in relation to God, as His expression.” It’s a whole different sense of self, and it makes such a difference.

Rosalie: Well, I think one of the things that I was recalling while we were talking is, there’s an account in Twelve Years with Mary Baker Eddy, which is a biography of Mrs. Eddy, that where a woman was traveling out to Boston, I believe from the Midwest, with her two children. And the one child had a very painful boil on her head, and was suffering greatly. The woman had been praying for the child, and so forth. When they got there, she still was distressed because the child wasn’t healed. But the two children went ahead of her in the receiving line to see Mrs. Eddy, and when they got to Mrs. Eddy she smiled at them in a very special kind of way, and the woman had a vision of God’s love that was so incredible. She just felt this love everywhere—on the birds, on the leaves, on everything. And she felt that she didn’t have that love, she didn’t have that healing love. And yet she felt it so much so, that it just was with her for days afterward. She couldn’t bear to have anyone speak badly about anything. It was just a very holy experience. And of course the child was completely well and totally there was no problem. And it’s a very inspiring—if you are not a Christian Scientist, go to a Christian Science Reading Room, and ask to read that. It’s a wonderful account. And if you are a Christian Scientist, take the time to read it again. It really is a very inspiring thought. And the reason I’m bringing that in, is because you’ve been talking about Love as we’ve been going along here, but I think maybe we could just pause to talk about Love and the presence of Love just very directly, because that experience of that woman, she went on to become a Christian Science practitioner. And there’s just something really profound about understanding that it’s not that we’re climbing up to get to divine Love. Or that we’re appealing and saying, “Please, divine Love, be here.” It’s that divine Love is present. And I think in that experience where she was seeing it on the leaves and on the trees and on the birds and everything else, she was seeing that outpouring of Love. It was truly a vision of what is actually there. I think that to whatever degree, we can get to that vision of what is actually there, about us dealing with pain, is kind of where we get the breakthrough. But I realize I’m kind of making a lot of assumptions here, and I’m really happy for you to correct me if I’m wrong.

Caryl: I just love everything you just said. And that story is one of my favorites, as well. The sense of that woman saying that she’d felt she’d seen the real Mother-love and she didn’t have it. And then looking around, it was poured out on everything. And, of course, it was poured out on her. I think we talked about John Ondrak’s experience, and I recounted my own experience with that epiphany of Love. This is something that shows up in so many people’s experiences—not even just in the Bible, or in Christian Science testimonies, but it is a universal, human experience. People who have, so-called “near death” experiences, all seem to come back having recognized that it’s really all about love—and not just human love, but there is a divine Love that embraces us all. And those people talk about never being afraid again. They don’t fear death, they don’t fear anything, and they certainly don’t sweat the small stuff, as they say. And then they’ve seen that it’s all small stuff. So, you’re right. I think we want to emphasize that this Love does embrace us, and it is natural for us to perceive it. The thought of, “Gee, I’m not receptive enough,” or “Maybe this person isn’t progressing enough, they’re not receptive enough,” that’s not the creation that God has made and maintains. His wholly good, spiritual creation is going on around us every minute, and we can respond to it. And that’s really what Jesus taught us in those three years. He taught us how to respond to what’s real. Put God first. Put good first. “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Remember that it is God that you have to respond to, as opposed to fear or anger or sorrow, because Love really is bigger than all of that.

Rosalie: Yes, and I think the whole question of whether there has been an injury in the past, or there’s a disease, or whatever it is, those are all things that are really irrelevant in the face of divine Love.

Caryl: Yeah, that’s it—irrelevant in the face of divine Love. It’s not as if we’re minimizing what people feel like they’re going through, but it’s just that there’s something so much bigger than that. And that’s what you want to live in relation to.

Rosalie: Right, and by no means am I, as you said, by no means am I dismissing the struggle. But to whatever degree you can strive in that direction, to see the allness of Love, and that Love is there for you. You’re not somebody who’s separated, who’s not worthy, or in some way hasn’t known the right truth, and therefore is cast out. That Love, if it was on the plants, and the trees ,and the birds, it’s on you, too.

Caryl: Yes. I would just say one other thing in terms of someone who’s dealing with this. As I was preparing for today, I went back and looked up every reference to pain in the writings of Mary Baker Eddy, and she says quite a bit on the subject. But what I love about so many of the things she says, is they just cut through that fearful or sad or mad sense of human experience, and take us right back to what is absolutely, permanently, consistently true, and we can rely on it. So as you read these citations, as you study them, you’re not trying to download some intellectual information. You’re really letting these ideas open that door to take you to what God has already written in your heart.

Rosalie: Exactly. Well, Caryl, you’ve been just wonderful, and I wondered if you had any closing comments, that we’ve sort of diverged from the questions here a little bit, but I wondered if you had some further closing comments that you’d like to make?

Caryl: Rosalie, I would love to end on that note about Love, because that is what it’s all about. Let’s come back to the higher sense of what is in control. Mrs. Eddy says this in so many places. “When we come to have more faith in the truth of being than we have in error, more faith in Spirit than in matter, more faith in living than in dying, more faith in God than in man, then no material suppositions can prevent us from healing the sick and destroying error” (p. 368 ).

Rosalie: I think that’s really the answer. I’m so grateful to you for being with us today.

Caryl: It was a pleasure.

Rosalie: Today’s topic was “Prayer about pain,” and our guest was Caryl Farkas, a Christian Science practitioner from Madison, Wisconsin.