What Can I Do to Help and Heal?

Ralph Camargo: Through the centuries the question has been asked: "What is truth?" And today many thoughtful people are wondering, "Is there a truth that can heal our problems?" As a Christian Scientist when I say Truth, I'm referring to the spiritual presence called God. I'm talking about the Christ-power which can touch and transform the thought of any one of us if we seek to understand it. To me this is the Truth that heals.

MUSICAL TRANSITION

Ralph: Carol, how can I help people most in today's world?

Carol Alton: Well, I think that the answer is both simple and compound and profound?—love them.

Ralph: Love them. Now it's very difficult to love the person that is vengeful.

Carol: I would say that it's pretty impossible to love what isn't lovable—the hateful, the vengeful, the dishonest, the selfish, and so on and so forth. They're not lovable and the great thing is that we're not really being required to love what isn't lovable, but really to help in a lasting way is to see one's fellowman from a spiritual viewpoint-

Ralph: Hmm.

Carol: —and not see him as, let's say, a hulk of flesh, five foot ten, hundred and fifty pounds, black, white, poor, sick. Just don't see your fellowman as any kind of a physical being—to see your fellowman as the image, the very image of what divine Love is like, is loving him.

Ralph: Of course, Jesus in one of his great commandments has said, "Love thy neighbour." Matt. 5:43  Have you had any neighbors that you—it was very difficult to love?

Carol: Oh, yes, (laughing) I certainly have. But I don't think anybody really escapes that because human nature is what it is. Lots of times we try to love humanly and we're making efforts at it but we still see ourselves perhaps as a person trying to like another person. But we don't really get to the scientific sense of love until we lift it up to the divine, the absolute, the warm, living, feeling Love—

Ralph: Hmm.

Carol: —and when we are united to that in our thinking, we can look at another individual and say, "This is the image of that Love—

Ralph: Yes.

Carol: —and so we can love him."

MUSICAL TRANSITION

Clee Snipe: In reading for a long period of time I would develop eyestrain and my eyes would start watering. Before my tour of the Army glasses were prescribed for me. When I was in the Army I was working as a crypto-teletype operator. And within the Communications Center where I was stationed at the time, I had a lot of young men from the South. And we didn't seem to be able to get along together because I was black and they were white.

And one of the underlying principles that I found out later on in Christian Science study was that every physical condition has a mental causation, and that poor sight is poor seeing, and this was what I couldn't see.

I couldn't see my sergeant and these guys in the Com. Center, the Communications Center, as the perfect children of God—irrespective of what they were saying to me—whether they called me nigger or inferior I should never reacted. "As a man thinketh . . . so is he" Prov. 23:7 paraphrase  as the Bible brings out. And so in wrestling with this I found that I had a mental resurrection in my thinking and I began to include everyone in my prayer and began to pray to love my fellowman.

When I got out of the Army, I was still wearing glasses but I was seeing a little better. I was on a subway station, a platform of a subway station in Harlem, New York, on my way to work on this particular day. And a blind man was walking along the platform and he was asking someone to assist him. And I had observed this black man coming in his direction, and he stopped and he looked at the man and he just kept on walking. And this black man would not help a white man, this blind man.

So right then and there I began to think about this in Christian Science and to pray to include all of us as children of God and not children of men, and to see that our nature is spiritual. And I began to see this quite clearly that I had to come to this man's assistance.

And I went over to him and I asked him if I could help him on the train and he said yes. We got in and we sat down and he pulled out his previous day mail and he asked if I would read it. And it was as though everything was so prearranged because here was an opportunity to love and to destroy hate. And so I read these letters and we talked a little while.

And, well, the next day I went to work, and I left my glasses. And I began to panic. I remembered one very beautiful statement in the writings of Mary Baker Eddy in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. She says in the definition of "eyes": "Spiritual discernment—not material but mental."S&H 586:3-4 And I began to hold on to this particular thought.

When I got to work I found that I had a complete sense of freedom and I wasn't feeling any impaired vision at all, and the next day I didn't put on my glasses. And about six months later I had a medical examination which was required at the time on this job. The physician examined my eyes and he had my photostatic copy of my medical records from the Army. And he said, "Gee, this is really fantastic!" He said, "You've had a complete healing. You don't have an eye deficiency. You're reading 20/20."

MUSICAL TRANSITION

Carol: The big need really is to become better acquainted with God, isn't it?

Ralph: Yes.

Carol: God is totally Spirit, infinite Love. It staggers the human mind really. It thinks in terms of a very limited kind of love, a changing love, a physical love—something that needs a physical object to be loved. But God loves like the sun shines—it's just—no physical object is needed.

Ralph: It's just there.

Carol: Just there.

Ralph: Yes.

Carol: Mrs. Eddy referred to the word "Love" this way. She said: "What a word! I am in awe before it."Mis 249:28 But she, of course, was referring to this divine Love, this divine energy, the Principle of being. In another statement she said: "If the Scientist reaches his patient through divine Love, the healing work will be accomplished at one visit."S&H 365:15

Ralph: Now just loving someone—that can heal them of disease, can't it?

Carol: If it's divine Love, yes, absolutely.

MUSICAL TRANSITION

Nate White: I was the editor of my college paper and the president of my fraternity, and this young man was a track star. And his coach thought he should improve his breathing and so without telling anyone they sent him to the hospital and had cartilage removed from his nose. But what no one knew he turned out to be bleeding internally—perhaps you could pronounce that fabulous name—

Voice: Hemophilia?

White: —hemophilia. And they typed the students at college and I can't remember now but for some reason or other I was the only person who typed my blood with his. And so I had to go over there for two weeks to the hospital. And in this two-week period I gave three quarts of my blood, and this was in the day before banks—it was the direct thing—

Voice: Yes, um hum.

White: —arm to arm—

Voice: Yes.

White: —but they couldn't stop it, the bleeding. And the doctor called me one night and said if you wish to see him: he's gone. He won't know you, but there is some breath. So I got two of my fraternity brothers and we hurried over to the hospital. This was in Memphis, Tennessee. And I saw that he was just gone or going. So I thought, Well, do I believe this, that God is here. This is a dedicated young man; he's not evil—or do I not believe it? So I decided, Well, you better stand up to what you believe. So I went over, and I put my arm under his head and I simply whispered in his ear, "God loves you, and, God is here and God will not let you go. God loves you now." And his eyes began to flicker and the bleeding stopped and they released him and he ran his race in two weeks.

MUSICAL TRANSITION

Carol: Didn't you ask the question, "What can I do to help?"

Ralph: Yes, what could I personally do to help people?

Carol: I think the way to help really is to be very sincere within ourselves, to examine ourselves? to say, well do I really love this individual or am I pretending? Am I saying it, or am I feeling it? And when we're really feeling that love rather than just talking about it, we do become allied to the divine energy that really does the healing.

MUSICAL TRANSITION

Ralph: I'm Ralph Camargo and you've heard some Christian Scientists talking. Carol Alton, a practitioner from Boston. Clee Snipe—he's a student at Principia College right now and Nathaniel White who gives talks on Christian Science.

"The Truth That Heals" is a transcribed series presented regularly by The First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston, Massachusetts, and the Churches of Christ, Scientist, in your community.