QUESTIONER: Love is a word that means many things. And perhaps most people would agree that what they call love has a beneficial influence on health and healing. We often hear the expression "love or perish" which is an indication of today's general awareness of the importance of love in peoples' lives. Now, what do you mean in Christian Science by the healing power of divine Love?

SPEAKER: To the Christian Scientist, the Love that heals is God, divine Love. This is our standpoint: that the great Physician is God, Love with a capital L. Through his understanding of this divine power, the Master, Christ Jesus, healed ailments of every kind —physical, mental, and moral.

QUESTIONER: Doesn't human love have a healing influence?

SPEAKER: Human love is two-sided. If it's governed by envy, for instance, or possessiveness, it often hinders the healing and can be harmful rather than helpful. Human love can be variable, but divine Love never changes. All that's really good in human love—the warmth, joy, honest affection, tenderness, altruism, giving without thought of reward, kindness, and loyalty—we trace to the pure, unchangeable source: God, divine Love.

I remember a little girl who came to her mother one day and said, "Mummy, wrap me up in you." Her mother took her in her arms, and she was soon sound asleep, confident in the love and the protection of her mother. Now if we had the same confidence in God's love that the little child had in the love of her mother, which is only a spark of the infinite Love that is God what would happen to worry, fear, and frustration? It would be eliminated, wouldn't it? Usually fear is behind a great deal of our troubles, and it's eliminated through an understanding of divine Love and our relationship to that Love. God is not just a loving God; God is Love. The Bible brings this out, In I John we read (4:16), "God is love." And the Psalmist speaks of God "who healeth all thy diseases . . . who crowneth thee with lovingkindness and tender mercies" (Ps. 103:3,4).

In "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," Mary Baker Eddy writes (p. 13): "Love is impartial and universal in its adaptation and bestowals. It is the open fount which cries, 'Ho every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters' "—that is, come to the source of good, come to the Love that is God.

QUESTIONER: This is different from a love-or-perish approach?

SPEAKER: Yes. Christian Science offers a completely different standpoint. The understanding of divine Love gives one the basis for mastering such things as apathy, indifference, fear, and hate. Now, these things are often at the root of so much sickness and sin. Through the understanding of God as Love we have divine authority to overcome fear, hate, and indifference. This spiritual standpoint revolutionizes our entire outlook. It saves and heals.

The Master healed by awakening men to their relationship to God, to divine Love. This relationship is emphasized in the opening words of the Lord's Prayer (Matt. 6:9), "Our Father," and in his parable of the lost sheep which concludes with these words (Matt. 18:14): "It is not the will of your Father which is in heaven, that one of these little ones should perish."

His understanding that man is the beloved child of divine Love, infinite Spirit, spiritual and immortal, gave him the right concept of man as the perfect child of God right where others saw only suffering and evil.

QUESTIONER: What does healing from this standpoint require?

SPEAKER: We need to be a living expression of the warmth and tenderness of divine Love. This requires our recognizing God as the very source of man's life, that God sustains all right action, and that no power can withstand the power of divine Love.

The more we recognize and understand what infinite Love is, the more readily we surrender the false concept of man as mortal, as cut off from Love, and replace this with the true concept of man as perfect, whole, loved, and loving —always in the very presence of that Love which is God.

QUESTIONER: But do we, humanly, have the ability to do this?

SPEAKER: We can't will our way to it. It is only the power of infinite Love active in consciousness that enables us to do this. Yielding our thoughts, our desires and lives, to this power, we touch the Christ garment, we feel the healing influence of Christ, Truth: and this transforms our entire experience. As Mrs. Eddy writes in Science and Health (p. 569), "He that touches the hem of Christ's robe and masters his mortal beliefs, animality, and hate, rejoices in the proof of healing,—in a sweet and certain sense that God is Love."

The experience of a young man from New York State, a former artillery officer, illustrates this. Toward the end of his tour of duty overseas, he served under a battalion commander whom he detested, and at this same time he was troubled by an old leg injury that occasionally would leave him completely incapacitated. At the Army hospital he was told that the leg condition couldn't be healed without surgery. But when he learned that this would deprive him of the full use of his leg, he declined to have the operation.

On his release from the service he went back to college where he soon had a reputation because of his bitterness, sharp tongue, and short temper. He had some interest in Christian Science, but he didn't turn to it for help until there was a crisis in his academic work. He became so worried about his poor grades that he discussed the situation with a Christian Science practitioner.

When the practitioner learned that the young man particularly resented the fact that his math instructor was a woman, the practitioner told him that he must stop hating. "Well," he replied, "I don't hate her. I just don't like her." The practitioner, upholding the standard of divine Love set forth in the Bible, said, "You are either loving or you are hating—you can't do both."

This gave him an entirely new standpoint, a standpoint of divine Love. He worked diligently with the practitioner's help to see what was true of man as the beloved child of God was true of his math instructor and of himself as well.

His study of the Bible and Science and Health brought a dramatic change in his disposition and his outlook. It wasn't easy at first, but he gradually began to express more love, more kindness, and more consideration of others. All the bitterness and hatred he felt when he thought of his old battalion commander and his service overseas faded away. His grades improved. And he established good relationships with his math and other instructors, with his family, and fellow students.

Very soon after this he realized that his leg was normal and functioning properly. He had no trouble working that summer in a forestry camp and since then has skied and participated in other sports freely. There's not been the slightest return of a limp or of any other trouble with his leg. He said that this healing taught him the value and importance of loving, of expressing the Love that is God.