Science and Health—the key to freedom
Emilio Castromán
Feeling imprisoned by sickness, a relationship, business? If these troubles make you feel boxed in—or if you or a loved one are actually in prison—you can find your freedom.
In this chat, Emilio Castromán, a practitioner of Christian Science who has been a volunteer prison chaplain, discusses these questions and explains how a fresh sense of God's presence can bring peace and healing.
Using examples from his own life and Christian Science practice—as well as his work in the chaplaincy—Emilio explains how to maintain your mental freedom and answers questions from site visitors about redeeming the past, overcoming mistakes, and dealing with life in prison.
The transcribed text has been edited for clarity.
spirituality.com host: Hello, everyone! Our topic is “Science and Health—the key to freedom,” and our guest is Emilio Castromán from Elsah, Illinois, who is in the full-time practice of Christian Science healing. A native of Mendoza, Argentina, Emilio has been a member of the Marin Interfaith Council in Northern California, and a volunteer chaplain in San Quentin Prison. He has also conducted workshops for chaplains in California and Illinois.
Today, we’re going to explore with him the ways that Mary Baker Eddy’s book, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, can help us gain freedom from fear, sickness, discouragement, and other troubles. Emilio, would you like to get us started?
Emilio Castromán: Sure. First of all, thank you for having me here in this program, and welcome to everyone who is listening. You know, today people really want to be reassured about freedom. What they want to feel is independence, a sense of being untied, unchained, unrestricted. And, in many instances, that only comes through what we might call spiritual sense. The Bible tells us, “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free”—that sense of freedom is more of a sense within us than an external sense.
The book, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy has wonderful ideas, freeing ideas. For instance, Mrs. Eddy said, “Whatever enslaves man is opposed to the divine government. Truth makes man free.”
spirituality.com host: And that enslavement could also be sickness or a difficult job or something like that?
Emilio: It’s anything that makes us feel we are tied or impeded—poor health or human relationships—just about anything. Mrs. Eddy also wrote in Science and Health, “The human thought must free itself from self-imposed materiality and bondage.”
So it’s interesting how more and more, through reading Mrs. Eddy’s works, we find a constant theme that brings liberation. In a way, it’s our hope and our trust in God that really brings a sense of worth that the outside world is unable to produce.
spirituality.com host: You know, that’s very helpful, because often people feel that events around them are out of control, and they don’t always know which way to go.Science and Health provides a way for people to know God and to feel God in a different way than they might have before. I think Mrs. Eddy talks about Him as “the All-in-all, forever near.”
Emilio: Oh, absolutely. That’s why it’s so inspiring for me after having read the book many times—and I still read it every day—that there is always a new, fresh message that reassures me about that sense of freedom, the nearness of God, and the protection of God. And it makes me feel safer.
spirituality.com host: Speaking of your having read the book many times, Joy from Oak Harbor, Washington, is asking, “Where did you first find your copy of Science and Health? How did that book come into your life?”
Emilio: Many years ago, when I was growing up in Argentina, one of my aunts gave me a copy. I was really taken by the logic. At the time, I was studying engineering, and I was pretty much in the mindset of scientific proof and the scientific method, and a lot of mathematics, logic, all those things.
I continued reading it and pondering it. Then things would happen where I would start reading, and I would feel better. And I would feel a wonderful sense of freedom. And during times when I wasn’t feeling well, I was led to think in ways that were totally different. Before, if I got a cold, or anything, I used to think I’d just have to accept it. But now this book presented a different view I had not heard before, and that was to resist, to oppose, illness, that sense of being chained to a disease.
The book was telling me that I was a spiritual idea of God, ruled by laws of goodness, of harmony, and that I could use those laws instead of accepting the mortal picture, or the laws of sickness. And when I did that, it brought healing.
spirituality.com host: That reminds me of the part of Science and Health, where she says specifically, “Rise in the strength of Spirit to resist all that is unlike good.” That is a very different attitude from accepting sickness as just part of the normal routine, isn’t it?
Emilio: Exactly. It was as if before I read the book I had been trained to be passive. Whatever was coming, I had to take it, because there was no opportunity for me to reject it. But now Science and Health was telling me that I did have a choice, a way out of enslavement, of sickness, and limitation. I could accept my identity as the son of God, and therefore that I could accept more good in my life.
And that was a new territory for me, because I had never explored that kind of thinking before. So I was just accepting a little bit, and then I was checking whether or not I was feeling better, and then I would continue working or praying and trying to feel that I was free. At times, the idea of being whole, of being the son of God—it was so vivid in my own thought that I felt many times totally free almost on the spot.
Those were not only physical healings that I had, but moments of awakening, moments of spiritual learning. I was learning about the presence and power of God that was always at hand.
spirituality.com host: Well, that sounds great, and because we’ve got quite a few questions here, let’s go to Fred from New Hampshire, who is asking, “If the ideas presented in Science and Health are the key to freedom, then freedom must be an idea or state of mind. Therefore, even one who is incarcerated or limited by physical challenges, oppressive government, or a relationship, can feel this freedom. With that said, how does the sense of freedom help to bring its reality into the day-to-day experience that we all live in?” In a way, you’ve answered that a little bit by the healing effect you mentioned before. But do you want to go into that more deeply?
Emilio: Sure. Obviously day-to-day experience is making all of us really consider how we are thinking. I love what Jesus said over 2,000 years ago to his followers. It’s a very simple direction, and almost a command, but it’s very practical. He said, “Watch and pray.”
Watching is really watching one’s thinking, or where our thoughts are leading us. And as we understand the thoughts that are coming to us, we make a selection, and when we choose prayer, we are making a selection for the right kind of thoughts. Science and Health is filled with instructions; how to pray better and how to use our thought to decide what to allow to stay with us. And that selection, that prayer—gives us that sense of being free, no matter where we are.
I worked at San Quentin for over five years. There I had many, many instances in which I was inside of the prison, but mentally, I was really free and feeling free, although humanly it appeared that I was surrounded by locks and big walls and elements that keep individuals inside a prison.
Prayer is the vehicle that allows us to have in our own thought the truth that brings freedom. And in the proportion that I have seen it, not only in others but in myself, I’ve been able to feel and to demonstrate that freedom.
spirituality.com host: Someone from Virginia is asking, “I have been reading Science and Health for more than two years. My thought still seems to be scholastic. How can I change it to be inspirational?” And she’s talking about Science and Health, page 256, where Mrs. Eddy contrasts those two ways of thinking about it. So she’s looking for freedom to be inspirational.
Emilio: That is a beautiful question. As I mentioned earlier, I’ve been reading Science and Health over 30 years, and there is no time that I don’t read something in Science and Health that brings inspiration and freshness.
Now, imagine reading the same book for 30 years. Someone may think, How can you do that? Well, the message has such a profound impact on one’s life, and it invites the reader to think deeply and in a spiritual way.
If I were to give an example, I would just read a paragraph or a line and try to see where are the spiritual ideas? Where is the freshness of the concept that Mrs. Eddy is writing about? And how is it helping me in my present understanding? In other words, what do I understand about this line or this idea? I let those words abide in me, to stay in my thought so they can lead me. If I start reading very quickly, and almost without paying attention, that makes it very hard for me to even want to continue reading.
spirituality.com host: Isn’t it also true that reading Science and Health isn’t just an intellectual process? It’s reading about God and how God works in our lives and in the world. Especially if you read it together with the Bible, you get a wonderful understanding of how God is a living presence in your life. So if you try to read it with an open heart, loving God and wanting to know more about Him, does that help to lift it out of the purely intellectual, do you think?
Emilio: Yes. It’s a discovery process. We can also protest the mental assertion that we don’t have the inspiration we need or the understanding we need, because God isrevealing to us who He is and the power and the love that He has for us. He is our Maker, and He has made us with the ability to understand Him, with the ability to feel His presence, His care, His guidance. And we can respond to that. We are responding.
spirituality.com host: That’s extremely helpful. And I think that feeling of God’s presence is so precious.
Emilio: Yes, and it’s a healing presence. So it’s not like an object that’s in the corner and then we suddenly discover it’s there. But God is Being, so He’s an active entity. He’s an entity that is Love and is Life—so He’s reaching and embracing us with His love.
spirituality.com host: We’ve got a couple of questions about politics. One is, ”How can the body politic in the United States be uplifted and healed through prayer that relies onScience and Health?” But we also have one from Buenos Aires, Argentina. Eduardo has written, saying—and we’re going to take this as one question that covers both topics—“Could you give me an idea about how to feel freedom in my country, when the laws the government is putting into force seem to go against our freedom?” That seems to be one that would help to answer both questions.
Emilio: Yes, I think so, because we’re talking about the body of politics, and again, sometimes even the physical body that we might fear that it’s not properly functioning.
In Science and Health as well as in the Bible, there is a prayer that the Master, Christ Jesus, gave to his disciples. At the end of that prayer, and I’ll read it directly, it says: “For Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever.” Mrs. Eddy gave a spiritual interpretation of that line in this way: “For God is infinite, all-power, all Life, Truth, Love, over all, and All.”
When I was living in Argentina as a young entrepreneur, I had to make some decisions, and I had to recognize that there was an all-governing power—the power of God—that was benign. That power was bringing only benefits, blessings. And it was able to make the human corrections right there in human government.
For instance, I was in charge of a building company, and on a Friday afternoon, we received an announcement from the government saying that the value of the peso was going to stay unchanged in relation to the American dollar. As I was praying, I just knew that was not going to be the case. That afternoon and on Saturday morning, I tried to use all the money we had for the company to buy important building materials.
The following Monday, many individuals were surprised to learn that the peso been devalued in relation to the dollar. It had lost at least three or four times its value, maybe more.
spirituality.com host: So that would mean that the materials you wanted to buy would have been more expensive?
Emilio: Yes. Actually, we probably would have had to go out of business without that. But the most important thought I’d like to share is that—this is echoing the Bible where it says, “In him we live, and move, and have our being”—we really are subject to God’s power; we are “tributary to God, Spirit, and to nothing else.”
spirituality.com host: That ties in very well with the question I have from Jon in Paradise, California, who says, “How can I be free from my past?” And you’ve just said we’re “tributary to God, Spirit, and to nothing else.” Does that help Jon get free of his past?
Emilio: Yes, I believe so. I’ve encountered this question in many prisons—people feel overwhelmed because of things they have done. They may try to use their own personal power or ability to maintain a grip on the present, and also the future. And that certainly is not what Mrs. Eddy saw. In Science and Health she wrote, “Man is tributary to God, Spirit, and to nothing else.”
The true government is the government that comes from God, and this replaces the memories, and the past, so that we are able to rise to a better future. It doesn’t mean that if we did something wrong in the past that now we just forget about it, and then behave as if we’re totally innocent.
Obviously, we need to confront errors from the past in order to bring healing and restoration. We need to learn from them and to be able to say, This is something I don’t want to do again, because now I know there is a better way. But we can’t do this alone. We need to ask God to help us.
spirituality.com host: Marcy is in Rochester, New York and she says, “I think a lot of my issues occur due to stubborn willfulness and fear. There have been times in my life when I have felt spiritual freedom, but then somehow my own human will gets involved and I experience once again a cycle of illness. Can you comment on distinguishing between human will and divine will?”
Emilio: It’s interesting that Christ Jesus—in one of the most beautiful prayers in the New Testament—said, “Not my will, but thine, be done.” And that’s like looking at God’s viewpoint in every event of his life, and not his own.
Sometimes what I have found helpful is when I’m praying in a situation, and there appears to be human will, is to recognize that there is a divine will, which is the will and wisdom of God. And that the will and wisdom of God bring a sense of confidence, of trust and relief. Instead of being tense, we feel at peace. Instead of feeling frustrated because something didn’t go in a way we wanted it to, we feel hopeful, thinking that there is a plan that is God’s plan—the plan of good.
spirituality.com host: So you’re really saying that Science and Health can help people learn to trust God and to rely on His government of events?
Emilio: Yes. And then as we feel the presence and the power of God as being right where we are, instead of feeling that we are separated. Sometimes in praying, we act as though God is far away, and we’re sending a message and waiting to see whether or not He is going to respond to us. Science and Health brings the idea that God is right where we are, that He is present and is willing to help us, and has all the power ready to help us, whatever the problem, to really turn it around so that it becomes a blessing.
spirituality.com host: Paula in Portland is saying she needs some help of that kind. She says, “No one loves me. I’m all alone and feel totally disconnected from my community. I have no true friends. How can I be free of all this?”
Emilio: I think I would start by thinking about the presence of God right there. This is the presence of divine Love, which is one of the synonyms for God that Mrs. Eddy uses. Think of that Love that is active, that is present, that is communicating with you, that is embracing you right now. This not only opens our thoughts to these ideas, but opens our hearts to the feeling of this presence.
This is not just an intellectual thing. God is here. It’s being able to pray so we can feel that presence—can feel that we are not alone or left out, that we’re included, that we have not been abandoned, that we are rescued, that our hope is in God. In my own experience, that is when I have found the certainty of belonging to God. Sometimes when we feel left out, it’s just that we have not actually included in our prayers that we belong to God, that we belong to the family of God.
So instead of looking at the community as divided and everybody looking after their own selves, many times I have looked at the community as being where my family lives, where I see my brothers and my sisters—the family of God, united in love. And then I have experienced changes, people perhaps looking a little friendlier than before. Perhaps I have been able to make new friends, and invitations have been originated because of this prayer.
So it’s really going back to what we said earlier, living in God, in God’s kingdom: “In him we live, and move, and have our being.” So we cannot be abandoned or left out, but we are included.
spirituality.com host: That leads us to Marti who’s writing from Ossining, New York, and the question is, “In your years serving as a prison chaplain, you must have run into many who have given up on the entire idea of God. How do you introduce Science and Health to those who consider themselves atheists, but nonetheless, are hungering and thirsting for hope and comfort?”
Emilio: Oh, that’s a wonderful, wonderful question. And Marti, you know, it’s very real what you just said. Sometimes their concept of God was very humanistic, very shallow, and therefore they lost their interest. They weren’t interested in that type of God. And to tell you the truth, sometimes when I have heard some of their concepts, I probably would have to agree with them. I don’t want a concept of God that is so limited.
But this book Science and Health changes the way we think, because it brings new ideas. Many times while working in the prisons, I just share what the book has done for me. I’m a witness, in a way. “So look, maybe you’re not interested in theology, but this is what I have found, this is how I have been healed by praying, by using these ideas.” I just tell people what is in my heart. And in many instances, that has been the bridge that they’ve needed--someone to simply tell them, “This is what helped me, and perhaps it’s going to help you, as well.”
Of course you know that the very first chapter is about praying in the way that brings results. Sometimes we invite someone, saying, let’s pray together right there. So here are a lot of wonderful ways that we can introduce Science and Health.
Many times, it’s not that the individual may reject the ideas or the book. Sometimes they just need a bridge to the book, someone that can say, “Look, let’s just read this page together.” Or “I’ll come back tomorrow and you can tell me about what you read.” You know, that little human touch, the sense of tenderness, the lovingkindness, that shows you care about what they read in the book. Not just dropping off the book and saying, “Well, probably I won’t see you again.”
spirituality.com host: You mentioned that chapter on prayer, and I think that it is helpful to just about anybody who wants to get some new ideas about inspired prayer.
Emilio: You said “anybody,” and really it’s for anyone who would like to improve the way they’re praying, or find new inspiration and perhaps find ways that they have not thought about it. And it could be for anyone.
spirituality.com host: Paula, who is writing from New York City, says, “I’ve sometimes felt a victim of my immediate circumstances, such as being unemployed, lacking supply. But as I listen, I want to know more about the active God who is governing my life.” This is something you’ve been talking about, Emilio. And she says, “I want to be unchained and free to hear His message to me. How can I do that?”
Emilio: That’s a wonderful prayer, because “desire is prayer.” That’s what Mrs. Eddy said. The very act of desiring to listen to God is perhaps one of the purest forms of prayer. We decide to really be still and to know God. We make that choice within us—“I’m going to stop all the human coming and going and thinking. I just want to know God and what He is telling me right now.”
And that’s a wonderful concept. Mrs. Eddy talked about the Christ as “the true idea voicing good.” She talks about it as “the divine message from God to men speaking to the human consciousness.” And that is a message of love, a message of comfort, a message of hope, that God continuously is sending. And it really helps us in our own prayers to find that stillness so we can receive that message and find the guidance that we need.
Science and Health certainly gives us all the tools, all the ways that we can pray, to receive that message and to feel that presence. We are guided by God, because God loves us. And He is right here. He has not gone anywhere. He’s active, He is Love, and He is loving us, caring for us, sending us the thoughts that we need, the strength and inspiration that we need.
spirituality.com host: We have a couple of international questions. This one is from Alistair in London, and it goes back to your prison work, Emilio. He says, “How do you impart a true sense of freedom to someone who may be in the midst of a 10- or 15-year prison sentence?” That’s a tough one.
Emilio: Freedom—sometimes we think of just physical freedom. I have met people who were walking the streets of San Francisco, but carrying their prison cells within themselves, because they were in the prison of fear, in the prison of limitation, in the prison of anger. So there are a number of ways. One that has been very useful to me is to speak from experience.
When you present healing, or a solution that you experienced, then you become that bridge, that witness: “This book Science and Health healed me of feeling imprisoned with this or imprisoned with that.” Then you are showing the individual an example of someone who read and prayed with the book and studied it, and found help and victory.
spirituality.com host: You know, I think, for the person who’s in prison for the long haul, having Science and Health does provide a way for them to find safety. Sometimes it depends on the prison, probably, but there are issues of safety and different kinds of things that can happen when you’re in there.
Emilio: I’m glad you’re bringing this up, because a major concern of the inmates is physical safety. Being able to see that God is right there with them, helping them, protecting them, shows them that they can demonstrate that sense of safety because they are praying, understanding, and using the healing ideas from Science and Health. The ideas that Mrs. Eddy wrote in Science and Health, she proved them first. She had to demonstrate that they were not poetry, not narrative, but are spiritual ideas that have spiritual power and can be demonstrated.
spirituality.com host: I’m trying to think of what it would be like to be in prison; day after day not having any control over anything. You’re just there, and that’s it. One of the things that would help me about Science and Health is that there’s always, as you mentioned earlier, an opportunity for discovery.
No matter how dreary your cell might be, you can mentally go into the book and explore it and find new ways of thinking. You know Mrs. Eddy talked about new views of goodness. And it might even be that your own circumstances would change. You might be less likely to react in a situation where normally you might have punched somebody or something like that.
Emilio: Yes.
spirituality.com host: And then gradually people see that, well, maybe you’re behaving better, so then maybe you get a few more privileges, and then your life is a little easier. And gradually step by step, that process goes along. I would imagine that it’s a bit of a learning curve in the sense that maybe you would still get mad and punch somebody, but you’d gradually work your way out of that. Do you think that the book could help that way too?
Emilio: Yes, and I’m glad you mention it. Sometimes it’s gradual—though I have seen many times that it’s so fast, that it’s almost instantaneous—how individuals change, how their character changed right where they were.
For instance, they would try to help other inmates, perhaps, with great need to receive comfort. So they found themselves actually helping others, and that was really a wonderful thing to witness.
spirituality.com host: And then after a while, the time passes more quickly because you’re engaged in doing good, doesn’t it?
Emilio: Exactly. I remember there was a fellow chaplain who had initially been an inmate, and he was so grateful for the good that he received, that when he finished his sentence, the next day he went back to serve as a volunteer in jail ministry, and he did that for 18 years.
spirituality.com host: Oh, my word. That’s a really dedicated person.
Emilio: Oh, he was so grateful.
spirituality.com host: We have one other international question, and this one is also from London, from TJ, and he—I’m assuming he, excuse me if I’m wrong—says, “Can you tell us how the ideas in Science and Health were helpful when the currency crisis hit Argentina a few years ago?” Maybe the experience you told us about was from that time, but I thought I’d ask it just in case you had something you wanted to add.
Emilio: Sure. That was one of them. I was in Argentina about six weeks ago, and I had the opportunity to talk to a businessman. He reads Science and Health here and there, and he finds the ideas very interesting.
He told me that he had an opportunity in Europe to sell Argentinean beef. Everything was ready to go, and then he felt inside the inspiration as he was praying that he shouldn’t do it. So he didn’t do it. Now humanly, everything appeared that he had a green light to do this wonderful business transaction. But internally as he was praying, he felt that he shouldn’t go ahead.
A few months later, the government cancelled the permits to export. He was so grateful, because it would have been really very damaging, if not a disaster, for his economic situation to have had written contracts, and then suddenly it would have become illegal for him to export the beef.
That’s a very direct, fresh testimony of how prayer—how spiritual intuition and how listening to God, being still—provides solutions. Even if we don’t know exactly how to pray or what to pray, we can just be quiet, be still, and perhaps just be able to say, “I’m here, God. Tell me what I need to know.” That simplest of prayers finds a way in which God answers. And then we are able to listen and to hear His voice.
spirituality.com host: Emilio, because you mentioned spiritual intuition, I’d like to bring in a topic that is very much in the news today. Seven bombs hit Bombay’s commuter rail network during rush hour. And I think that spiritual intuition, and the idea of protection and how we can pray to be safe, would be helpful. And this is also an opportunity to say a loving word for all those people who are dealing with that situation. Certainly our prayers are with the rescue people and all the different people who are involved in situations like this. But would you like to offer some warm, healing thoughts about this?
Emilio: I was praying this morning, embracing everybody there in Bombay and around the world. There is sometimes a tendency to use human means, such as violence, out of frustration with conditions. But when we’re using spiritual means, we’re using hope. We’re bringing a sense of tolerance. We are recognizing the presence of God. I was thinking about being able to bring a sense that God is present with His power and intelligence even in the midst of national and international terrorism.
And prayer can support the rescue workers, so they can feel the direction they need so their efforts are intelligent and useful. Families can feel that there is comfort coming from God, a sense of renewal, of hope, of healing.
As I was thinking about this, I was inspired to turn to this statement in Science and Health, where Mrs. Eddy talks about the First Commandment, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” She explainthat’s, “One infinite God, good, unifies men and nations; constitutes the brotherhood of man; ends wars; fulfils the Scripture, ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself;’ ….” The very practice of recognizing that there is only one God has a healing impact on the entire world, to the point that it “ends wars.”
So any divisions, any frustration—those thoughts can be annihilated, can be refuted and obliterated by the sense that there is one God, and that makes us all the family of God, brothers and sisters. It makes us able to fulfill, “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” which is one of the commandments from the Master, Christ Jesus.
As I was working with these ideas, I felt the love and stillness, the compassion and healing, that actually embrace the whole world. To embrace the world from the standpoint of the one God, one family, brings healing and comfort to all.
spirituality.com host: Thank you. That’s very, very helpful. And we have time for one last question. It’s from Jean in New York, New York. She says, “How does Science and Health relate to the Bible?”
Emilio: Oh, wonderful. Well, it’s the key to the Bible. Mrs. Eddy wrote it—she spent three years initially, in studying the Bible and then praying with the Bible, and feeling inspired. She wrote Science and Health as the inspiration that came to her. So it’s really based on the Bible, and it’s called the key to the Scriptures, because it helps us to see the spiritual perspective in Scriptures.
spirituality.com host: That’s great, Emilio. Do you have any summary comments you would like to make?
Emilio: Sure. This is—I’m paraphrasing a little bit—what is also in Science and Health, where Mrs. Eddy, with a wonderful sense of spiritual strength, wrote this beautiful paragraph: “Man is tributary to God, Spirit, and to nothing else. God’s being is infinity, freedom, harmony, and boundless bliss.” And then she added that “man is free ‘to enter into the holiest,’—the realm of God.”
Science and Health is really helping us to pray, to recognize that we have the freedom to enter into the kingdom of God, the kingdom of Love, of harmony, and of freedom. Exercising this freedom removes from thought the “self-imposed materiality and bondage,” and allows us to see ourselves in a different way, in a spiritual way.
Instead of feeling that we are subject only to the laws of matter, and circumstances, or perhaps influences from other individuals around the world, we are subject only to God. And that is the key to our freedom.
spirituality.com host: Thank you very much, Emilio. And, thanks for joining us today. It’s always a joy to be with you.
Citations used in this chat
Science and Health
King James Bible