In her published and unpublished writings—and in her teaching, as recorded in the reminiscences of her students—Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, thoroughly elucidated the method of Christian Science healing. And in one sense, all of her instructions and explanations reduce to something just this simple: that it is the consciousness of God’s love—His love reflected through man—that heals and restores human lives.

As Mrs. Eddy wrote in her textbook on Christian Science, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures: “Jesus aided in reconciling man to God by giving man a truer sense of Love, the divine Principle of Jesus’ teachings, and this truer sense of Love redeems man from the law of matter, sin, and death by the law of Spirit,—the law of divine Love” (p. 19).

The healing power derived from the understanding of God as divine Love was repeatedly demonstrated in Mrs. Eddy’s own life. One day she encountered a man sitting on a sidewalk near her home in Lynn, Massachusetts. To mortal sense, he presented a distressing sight. His limbs were twisted and distorted. Affixed to his collar was a note that said, “Help this poor cripple.” She leaned down and whispered three words in his ear. Three words we use often. Sometimes, perhaps, too casually. But she grasped the full and profound import of these words. She said, “God loves you.” He immediately rose up straight and well, and ran to the house of a friend—and with what joy we can only surmise. A history of crippling discord erased with the simple recognition of God’s love (see Yvonne Caché von Fettweis and Robert Townsend Warneck, Mary Baker Eddy: Christian Healer, Amplified Edition, p. 89).

If the vibrant sense of divine Love that Mrs. Eddy so naturally felt seems remote to us—if Love sometimes seems like nothing more than four black letters on a white page—then the comfort of the Scriptures can infuse this grand word with an inspired sense. Throughout the Bible—by example, analogy, and parable—God’s tender affections expressed through man are illustrated: through Joseph’s forgiveness of his brothers; through Ruth’s fidelity to her widowed mother-in-law; through Christ Jesus’ gentle ministrations to the sick, the sinning, and the sorrowing; and through his self-sacrificing love on the cross.

Perhaps the most comforting of biblical analogies is that of the shepherd guiding and guarding his flock. The prophet Ezekiel, for example, speaks of a shepherd—symbolic of the Christ, the full manifestation of God’s love to mankind—seeking out his sheep that are “scattered in the cloudy and dark day” (34:12). When we wander off, the shepherd searches us out. When he finds us, he plucks us out of the thicket of life’s untoward circumstances, places us on his shoulders, and carries us safely back to the green pastures and still waters so beautifully described in the 23rd Psalm. And so it is that though we may seem for a time to be lost in the wilderness of mortal beliefs, we are never forsaken by divine Love.

But there’s more. A human shepherd would be obliged to leave the ninety and nine other sheep to find the one that is lost. But not so with the Christ, the true Shepherd, who perpetually abides with and guards each of the sheep. Divine Love, infinite Mind, is continuously conscious of each of His children, and is caring for them. Each one has divine Love’s undivided attention every moment through all of eternity. No one is ever separated from God’s protecting care. No one is ever outside God’s awareness. No one is ever excluded from God’s tender contemplation. No one is ever outside the range of His health-giving impartations of grace and love. God’s infinite capacities, including His uninterrupted attentiveness to each one of His children, leave no one out, no one lost, no one alone in a wilderness of sorrow, ill health, or deprivation. His love keeps all safe and sound.

To every one of us, the sheep of His pasture—in every aspect of our ex­perience—God imparts the blessing bestowed on the patriarch Jacob: “And, behold, I am with thee, and will keep thee in all places whither thou goest, and will bring thee again into this land; for I will not leave thee” (Genesis 28:15).

No one is ever outside God’s awareness. No one is ever excluded from God’s tender contemplation.

Some years ago, during a business trip to India, I learned what it means that God, through His lovingkindness, “will keep thee in all places.” I was scheduled one morning to give a talk at a United States consular facility. Although I was feeling perfectly well as the day began, I was impelled before leaving my hotel room—inexplicable by human reasoning—to tear out the page listing Christian Science practitioners in India from the copy of The Christian Science Journal I had with me. I put it in my pocket and proceeded to the consulate. Not long after arriving, I was taken suddenly and severely ill. Happily, the office I was staying in before my talk had a cot in it and was in a deserted part of the building—evidence of God’s provision. I spent the entire day there.

The kindly consular official who was my “handler” for the visit asked how he could help. I gave him the page I had torn out of the Journal and asked him to call a practitioner. Although he was not a Christian Scientist and must have been a little perplexed at my request, he nevertheless cheerfully obliged. I later learned that he reached the last practitioner on the list, who lived on the other side of the country, was home, at the ready, and able to help.

For the rest of the day she prayed faithfully, and I, as well, prayed as best as I could under the circumstances. I held like glue to a much-beloved sentence from Science and Health: “Pilgrim on earth, thy home is heaven; stranger, thou art the guest of God” (p. 254). Though half a world away from home, resting in a deserted wing of a building I’d never been in before, and knowing only my handler in this city, I felt completely embraced in God’s love. I sensed the presence of the Comforter—the healing law of divine Love—as I never had before.

At the end of the day I sufficiently improved so that I was able to go home with my handler, whose kindness I will never forget. He and his wife fed me a bit of dinner and put me to bed. The next morning I was perfectly well. The couple, having seen other visiting Americans deal with the same symptoms, said they had never witnessed such a quick and complete recovery. I was able to give my talk that morning.

Sometimes our prayers are deeply reasoned protestations of truth. In this instance, it was just the sense of God’s presence and love—the “I will not leave thee” of God’s promise to Jacob—that sustained and healed.

Some years later I met the practitioner, who was on a lecture tour in the United States, and learned that she had been working with the very same passage from Science and Health that had been my mainstay through that entire day—“Pilgrim on earth, thy home is heaven; stranger, thou art the guest of God.”

The word wilderness—which describes circumstances like this that would claim to beset human experience—is deeply significant. It was to the wilderness, in times of distress, that the ancient prophets repaired to hear God’s voice most clearly. It is a state of receptive consciousness, where, through God’s abiding love, we make the transition described in Mrs. Eddy’s definition of wilderness: “Loneliness; doubt; darkness. Spontaneity of thought and idea; the vestibule in which a material sense of things disappears, and spiritual sense unfolds the great facts of existence” (Science and Health, p. 597). It is there, in what she calls “the desert of earthly joy,” that our prayers are heard: “In the desolation of human understanding, divine Love hears and answers the human call for help; and the voice of Truth utters the divine verities of being which deliver mortals out of the depths of ignorance and vice. This is the Father’s benediction” (Miscellaneous Writings 1883–1896, p. 81).

Thus, we can be grateful for the hand—the Christ—that reaches out to us in the darkness, to reassure us, “Lo, I am with you alway” (Matthew 28:20); for the Comforter, who is always present defending us; for a God whose compassions are as new today as in all of eternity; for a God who hears us wherever we are; for the inestimable blessing that we are the children of Him “that marks the sparrow’s fall” (Mary Baker Eddy, The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 226).

And thus can we have confidence that above the tempest of all the human beliefs and theories and doctrines ever imagined by mortal sense, above all our doubts and sorrows, in the midst of our sometimes lonely, earnest searches, His voice is heard: “I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee” (Hebrews 13:5). This is what it means to be loved by Love. To gain a truer sense of divine Love is sufficient unto the human need, bringing victory and healing.