It's almost routine. After the spring reports about allergies and the summer warnings about the dangers of sun exposure, here comes the late-fall discussion about flu season. This year there has been much coverage of the difficulties encountered in the United States in getting enough vaccine soon enough. It's almost as if one should mark the calendar and count on the certainty of seasonal disease. Is there something wrong with this picture? We think so.

No one needs to live in the constant expectation of sickness; yet, this is often what people have come to believe is natural and normal. The depiction of disease as inescapable and inevitable shows up in public discourse, spurred on by reports in the news, and advertisements for pharmaceuticals. These messages, delivered day after day, imply that one should spend more time planning for sickness than for healthy, normal activities. They encourage a passive acceptance that getting sick is not so much a matter of "if" as it is of "when."

Good thing those messages aren't the final word. Just as with any other advertisement — and that's what they really are, even when they aren't billed as such — no one needs to accept the disease or buy the product. It is possible to remain free of communicable diseases. And over the 125-plus years since Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures was written by Mary Baker Eddy, countless people have been able to prove that prayer can both prevent and eliminate disease.

Far from encouraging passivity, this book puts health into readers' hands in a way nothing else does— by assuring them that no power can keep one from turning to the sustaining influence of the one great All-power for prevention and healing. Science and Health says: "Take possession of your body, and govern its feeling and action. Rise in the strength of Spirit to resist all that is unlike good. . . . Be firm in your understanding that the divine Mind governs . . ." (p. 393). Note those active words. "Take possession" of your body instead of letting disease move in. Rather than waiting for the body to tell you how it's feeling, "govern its feeling and action." When you are exposed to sickness or for some other reason feel illness coming on, "Rise in the strength of Spirit to resist all that is unlike good."

And the foundation of it all? "Be firm in your understanding that the divine Mind governs ...." Not the virus or the germ or the sick person who you may fear has exposed you to the disease. The divine Mind, God, governs your life. That Mind gives only good. Love is the only motivating power. And under Love's protection, disease cannot lay hold on you, because Love has given you a totally spiritual nature that cannot be a carrier for sickness.

Contagion, as reports make abundantly clear, is based on the view that we are all essentially material, physical beings — literally "hosts" in which disease can develop. But this isn't who we are at all. As the creation of Spirit, we actually are spiritual and immortal.

This knowledge not only uplifts our thinking to an enlarged understanding of life and a greater peace. It also furnishes a strong position from which to turn from sickness and drive it off through spiritual understanding. The essentials of life — love, intelligence, goodness, truth, beauty, joy, and so on— are not found in a material body, but in Spirit and therefore in our true spiritual being.

Science and Health makes clear that each individual has the right to know his or her spiritual nature now, and to experience the inviolable health that is part of that spiritual identity. Under Spirit's government, there are no microbes, viruses, or germs that can enter one's being and set up operation without one's consent. Anyone has the power, by means of prayer, to refuse consent and to maintain health securely.

No matter how vividly disease may be described through media or word of mouth, no one needs to passively submit to a destructive evil force in our lives. Instead, it is possible to be an activist for health and healing by cultivating trust in God, and by focusing on the spiritual nature that all of us reflect from Him. A nature that's immune from evil. And forever secure in God-sustained health.