A luminous new chapter
For as long as I remember, I wanted to learn about God. My dad often read to me from The Child’s Story Bible by Catherine F. Vos. My grandmother was an avid student of the Bible and shared her love and knowledge of the Scriptures with me. She encouraged me when I began an at-home Sunday School for my two younger brothers.
Most summers I attended Bible school with friends. By the time I reached high school, I began teaching Sunday School in the local Episcopal church.
In college, I wanted to continue my spiritual education. I attended chapel services on campus and, infrequently, attended church in town. But I didn’t feel a strong denominational attraction.
Just off campus there stood a Christian Science Reading Room. Every time I headed to the college bookstore or the ice cream shop just a couple of doors away, I wondered about that Reading Room. I figured it offered the same reading sanctuary as a library. So one day I took my history assignment, The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, to read there. Thankfully, the librarian did not look over my shoulder! I remember looking around and seeing books marked with metal tabs and wondering what they were for.
At the end of junior year, I met the man who would become my husband. When I told a friend that he didn’t drink alcohol, she exclaimed, “He’s a Christian Scientist, and they don’t drink!” As he and I dated over the next year, it became clear to both of us that we wanted to spend our lives together. There was something special and different about the way he thought and behaved and how he approached challenges. While Christian Science came up in conversation from time to time, he never pushed his views on me, nor did his family. They simply lived an example that I admired.
A couple of years after we married, I encountered a physical crisis. A teacher at the time, I had been out of school a day or two with a fever that wasn’t abating. At two o’clock in the morning, my husband gently asked, “Should I take you to a doctor?” Without any forethought, I responded, “I want to try Christian Science.”
I’d been aware of phone conversations my husband had from time to time with a Christian Science practitioner. While I never questioned him about them, I had found it intriguing that, when faced with a problem, he would talk with a practitioner and often read from Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy, and that would be that. From an observant distance, I acknowledged several of his healings.
I’d opened Science and Health to read several times in the past but, frankly, found it puzzling. Now that I faced a physical challenge that was not yielding, I felt impelled to explore Christian Science for myself.
My husband and I called a Christian Science practitioner whom I’d met and whose friendship I very much appreciated. Today I cannot remember what the practitioner said. But I do remember it was calm, clear, and wonderfully reassuring. I have a vivid recollection of lying in bed after the call and thinking, “Dear Father, help me to be what You want me to be.” That was it—a simple, wholehearted surrender to a God-reliant, rather than self-reliant, sense of being.
By daylight, the fever had vanished. I was completely healed. I began to study Science and Health with an insatiable desire to understand more of what it could teach me. Every page was alive with truths that spoke to me, as if a light had suddenly been turned on to illuminate the book. I remember thinking that Mrs. Eddy’s words legitimized every spiritual intimation I had ever felt. After many years of yearning to know God better, but feeling that such knowledge was mysterious or perhaps even unattainable, I had opened a book that made God eminently knowable. Mary Baker Eddy’s words revealed God as ever-present Love and taught how spiritual reason and revelation can heal.
This healing marked the beginning of a luminous new chapter in my spiritual education and, more important, demonstration—applying the spiritual lessons I was learning to daily thought and action. My subsequent practice of Christian Science has been the bedrock of my marriage, parenting, and career decisions. I’ve found that there is no issue too small or too large to bring before the healing lens of Christian Science.