Have you ever wondered how a bodily illness, with its complex processes, could be fixed "just through prayer"? If we're honest, most of us would have to admit we've had a question of this kind at one time or another.

To take an example of something like flu, we might wonder how fever could be lowered, abnormal secretions changed, chills arrested, and so on. And yet Christ-healing, as understood in Christian Science, has frequently done all this.

But what about a more serious situation? A friend of mine, early in her practice of Christian Science, was asked for help through prayer to heal a punctured eardrum. She wondered how it could be corrected. It seemed so definite. But she turned away from the human mind's question and was obedient to God. She found that God, who Christian Science teaches is infinite Mind, wasn't put off by the question at all. And the healing followed.

Nowadays the body is often pictured in living color and vivid cross section in the media. There is not a great deal about the basic aspects of the body that people in the 1980s don't know, whether they want to or not! It's sometimes useful, therefore, to remind ourselves of key points about the Science of Christ and its healing action.

The question in healing is never primarily the sad state of affairs the body has got itself into. Prayer is not some sort of divinely powered scalpel and needle that must cut and sew the body back into health. Instead, prayer as understood in Christian Science enables us to recognize and come into possession of the health that already exists because God exists.

Where is this health if it doesn't seem to be in the body? It is where true wholeness always is and the only place it can be—in the spiritual consciousness of God's infinite, harmonious being. What we are learning about as we pray is not the mechanics of fixing up a broken body but how perfect man already is because he is the image and likeness of God, Spirit. And this spiritual recognition results in a normal sense of health.

For this reason there is no disease that is exempt from healing through the treatment that is prayer—nothing too complex, too rare, or too lethal. A review of the testimonies of healing over the years in the Christian Science periodicals, and in the literature of Christian healing among other churches, deepens one's conviction.

To most questions of the sort "Has such and such ever been healed?" we realize the answer is "Yes." The kinds of diseases and malfunctions of the body that have been healed include those with nine or ten syllables as well as those with simple "classic" names. The evidence is overwhelming that matter has a remarkable changeability under the influence of prayer. It makes us recall that when Christ Jesus sent out his disciples to preach and heal, ^{See Matt. 10:1, 5–8.} the Bible says he gave them power "to heal all manner of sickness and all manner of disease."

In the chapter titled "Physiology" in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, Mary Baker Eddy makes the following statements based on many years' involvement in Christian healing: "Human mind produces what is termed organic disease as certainly as it produces hysteria, and it must relinquish all its errors, sicknesses, and sins. I have demonstrated this beyond all cavil. The evidence of divine Mind's healing power and absolute control is to me as certain as the evidence of my own existence." ^{Science and Health, p. 177.}

What seems to be a material body—whether it has something wrong with it or not—is in fact wholly the extension of the human or mortal mind. It is a mental condition, for all its apparent chain of causes and sequential processes, its microscopic structure, its visible evidence and predictable events. And this is borne out when the mental condition is changed through the inspiration and spiritual influx that result from turning to the one actual Mind which is God.

The effect of this turning entirely away from the body to Mind has often been more precise than any surgeon's knife, more vitalizing than any specialist's regimen. We can rest in the assurance that Mind knows how to heal whatever the "it" may be. But of course what we are actually saying is that divine Mind expresses only goodness and harmony—and this spiritual realization brings healing.

The creator who is Love doesn't create disease and therefore doesn't know disease. If He did, we could never undo what He Himself knew. The truth is that a supremely just God has not created a matter man vulnerable to disease. As Spirit, He has made man spiritual, in His own image and likeness. To come to this realization requires continuous moral progress and arduous Christian and spiritual regeneration, but it is the only position that makes sense to logical, spiritualized thought.

For every mistake that can be made in mathematics the correction or resolution already exists. Diseases and breakage and malfunction of the body are at the deepest level errors—departures of thought from the reality of man's health and perfection expressed continuously by an intelligent and loving creator. There is no error that can possibly occur for which the healing truth does not already exist. We can therefore be sure that, in a manner of speaking, "Mind knows how to heal it."

ALLISON W. PHINNEY, JR.