Suppose a young mother were to tell you, as she told me, the following account. What would you make of it?

Occasionally things happen in the world that seem downright unexplainable. But this was different. This was quite explainable. It's just that the human mind isn't especially used to thinking in truly nonmaterial terms. Consider Christ Jesus' trip across the water—no sooner had he boarded the ship, than "immediately the ship was at the land whither they went" (John 6:21). Such a concrete example of freedom from mortal limitations! Or think of the crippled man who, in a moment, rose and walked and leaped when Peter, with John, healed him (see Acts 3:8). It might have taken most people years of rehabilitation, miles of laborious steps to reach this point of freedom. That is, if they were ever able to move at all. What a graphic difference between movement with a degree of freedom from time and a geographical kind of space, and the risky, sluggish, or materially measured movements within the limits of such time and space.

Mary Baker Eddy's Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures describes time as matter (see p. 595). And the book challenges the validity, even the reality, of matter. The Bible affirms that, "In him [Spirit] we live, and move, and have our being" (Acts 17:28). These truths bring us closer to reality than does a matter-time-space view of existence.

I would describe that incident with the child as a moment when a material sense of time and space yielded to what might be called a divine moment. In this moment of pure reality, all movement, all action, all being is harmonious, harmless, heavenly. In a matter-based view of reality, movement is measured materially. It can be obstructed, vulnerable, labored, uncertain. The mother's thought was adequately open to enough of divine Science that she entertained a more spiritual sense of reality than what the physical senses offered. And this view prevailed.

In trying to understand what this means, let's go back to basics. Most of us think the movement of an object happens within the context of time and space. Actually, it's a mistake to think this way. This limits what "movement" really means. True movement doesn't happen in time and space. It takes place only in the absence of time and space, only as we are free of material measurements, matter-based limitations.

If we try to figure out spiritual happenings from the standpoint of physics, we're likely to be puzzled. The complexities and boundaries of physics may cause us to miss the simplicity and beauty of spiritual truth. This incident was an event better understood by metaphysics. It revealed a touch of the Divine. You might say this could help illustrate something about our journey from earth to heaven. Traveling from material limits to spiritual freedom. Moving from mortality into immortality.

Most religious theories promise a heaven. But that heaven is always in the future. Harmony and perfection later, anytime but right now. One of the great lessons Christ Jesus teaches is that the kingdom of heaven is here, now, right at hand, right within us. Traveling from earth to heaven requires setting aside usual ways of thinking about how to get from "here" to "there." That includes relinquishing our conventional views of time and space—maybe even where heaven is.

When I walk to the grocery store a few blocks away, I need to cover about a quarter of a mile in just a few minutes (faster if it's about to close!). That's not quite the way it works in getting from here to heaven. Historically, people have imagined the pathway to heaven was through those moments called death. But Jesus challenged this perspective. He taught that the pathway was through life, not death—through the healing Christ, not through time and space. Here and now instead of there and later. The Bible reminds us, "Now is the day of salvation," (II Cor. 6:2) and that "there should be time no longer" (Rev. 10:6). I like to read that as, "There shall be matter no longer; mortality and limitation shall cease, now."

People talk about "living in the now." And yet, no matter how hard we try, as mortals, we live in time and space—not in the "now." We live in the future or the past—even if only the tiniest fraction of a second in the future or past—but not in the now. God is now. He is more than present. He is presence itself. Now is divine reality, immortality. Time and space place us in a supposed realm of being just before or just after "now."

Jesus had a vivid sense of God's allness, His nowness. And this enabled him to commune with Moses and Elijah, who were thought to exist in the past. But it's "in [Spirit, not matter] we live, and move, and have our being." This reality of "now" brought Jesus immediately across that sea, instead of time and space defining his travel. It enabled him to break free of past and future into the ascension which revealed to him all of God's presence and reality here and now. His journey from earth to heaven wasn't a matter of minutes and miles. It was a demonstration of the eternal divine moment, a freedom from restrictions and discords of material moments. So what is "now"? It is freedom from mortality, material measurements, matter. It is God's reality.

Science and Health offers this insight: "One moment of divine consciousness, or the spiritual understanding of Life and Love, is a foretaste of eternity. This exalted view, obtained and retained when the Science of being is understood, would bridge over with life discerned spiritually the interval of death, and man would be in the full consciousness of his immortality and eternal harmony, where sin, sickness, and death are unknown" (p. 598).

I believe the mother and child experienced a fleeting embrace of this "moment of divine consciousness"—this nowness. And the practical effect of freedom from time and space brought them into a divine sense of movement. Religious tradition would have us travel from earth to heaven by moving from the ground to the sky. The little boy's experience may suggest that moving from the sky to the ground can just as easily illustrate the true journey into heaven's protective presence!

We are all traveling. Every thought we think is part of the trip. To the extent we see our journey as breaking out of material moments into the divine moment, we will progress heavenward. That's really what Christian healing is all about. Is healing through prayer just for fixing up human problems? Really, it's more for waking up than fixing up. Waking into the nowness of God, seeing the divine reality as the only reality.

Spiritual healing is a way of life even more than a system of caring for health. It does care for our health. But no other system on earth is designed to develop our moral stature in the process—including compassion, forgiveness, patience, affections. No other system outlines the pathway to move from time and space into the divine moment. No other lifestyle opens the door to follow Christ Jesus out of mortality into immortality.

Every healing, whether minor or lifesaving, is a kind of spiritual travelogue. It describes our journey from earth to heaven. We should see healing more in this context. We should open our thought to the realism of moving out of mortality into immortality. As healing through the liberating Christ becomes more natural to us than living in the limits of matter, we'll find increasingly that the divine moment is now. It won't be just a fleeting glimpse. It will be forever.