Always the unexpected. That might be the way we would have characterized the life of Christ Jesus if we'd been among those who were in Galilee or Jerusalem when he was. Just when you might have thought you had seen it all, something new would happen. When an angry mob was about to throw Jesus over "the brow of [a] hill," he walked through the midst of them. When he was in the house of a high-ranking member of the community, it was a woman of low rank that he praised. Men and women who had been bound to disease for years were told to walk or see or stretch forth a limb long withered by paralysis—and they did!

If you didn't expect such changes and didn't have the foggiest notion of the spiritual power and law that were being demonstrated in those events and experiences, Jesus' very presence would have been startling. In fact, at least once he was asked to leave a region because he had healed a man there. These events seemed to defy conventional reason.

Reason and logic are very strong in human thought. We are accustomed to ordering our experience according to what we've seen and known before. When something comes along that dramatically departs from past experience, there's disorientation, which we instinctively feel must be corrected. The reason and logic of the human mind—the material senses —can be a tremendous opponent to metaphysical healing under such circumstances.

I remember one of the first times I learned of someone's being healed in Christian Science. I didn't actually see the healing happen. Her family thought she had the symptoms of mumps and quite naturally didn't encourage visitors to their home. I heard of the healing over the telephone. So the question whether she actually had mumps lingered. Another friend, who was normally honest, had an engine block fall on his hand, but the hand was back to normal within half an hour. Then again there was the suggestion that maybe the injury wasn't so serious as first thought. Even the first time I was healed of a serious illness through the study of Christian Science, I initially wondered if this was really a healing like those recorded in the New Testament.

It can take time and considerable study of Christian Science—of both the Bible record and Mary Baker Eddy's book Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures—to begin to understand the divine law that underlies life and that is available to overcome discord. Mrs. Eddy wrestled with the same issue. She wrote extensively about the challenge of reestablishing primitive Christian healing—a challenge arising from the fact that such healing contradicts general material reasoning and faith in the solidity or dependability of matter.

At one point she observes: "Jesus demonstrated the power of Christian Science to heal mortal minds and bodies. But this power was lost sight of, and must again be spiritually discerned, taught, and demonstrated according to Christ's command, with 'signs following.' " And in the next paragraph she writes, "... I find the will, or sensuous reason of the human mind, to be opposed to the divine Mind as expressed through divine Science." ^{Science and Health, pp. 110-111.}

Here we see the use of the words Christian Science and divine Science in their original sense. They refer not to a religious denomination but rather to the deep, underlying law of divine Principle that Jesus demonstrated in healing the sick. The question that faces us is how we make the quantum jump from the "sensuous reason of the human mind" to the spiritual understanding of God's law that actually brings the power of God to bear on everyday human existence. The movement from material reasoning to spiritual insight is the sine qua non—the absolutely indispensable thing—around which every genuine healing issue revolves.

It is at this juncture that the presence and reality of God must finally be admitted in some major degree in our consciousness. This question of admission—let's call it spiritual receptivity—is the threshold upon which we stand today in an age that has witnessed the discovery of Christian Science. Healing in Christian Science, in which the evidence of the material senses is dramatically reversed by the moral and spiritual transformation of the individual, is actually the dawning event of a new hope for the future of mankind.

It isn't that human existence needs to be undone or swept aside today or tomorrow, but a new basis for reasoning is absolutely essential. Regarding the spiritual reasoning that leads thought out of evil and disease into health and holiness, Science and Health states: "For right reasoning there should be but one fact before the thought, namely, spiritual existence. In reality there is no other existence, since Life cannot be united to its unlikeness, mortality." ^{ibid., p. 492.} The whole question of right reasoning would be moot, and the accomplishment of spiritually scientific healing impossible, were it not for one fact: God really is infinite Mind, the true source of man's intelligence. If we are ready to reason from the standpoint of God's allness and perfection and the perfectibility of His idea, man, then we will steadily advance in the spiritual understanding that heals discord of every kind. This readiness, however, will involve the preparation of our hearts—sometimes, it would appear, as much by hardship and disappointment as by an innate innocence and a spiritual love for what is good and eternal.

Considering the precious nature and desirability of Christian healing, the truly incredible thing is that healing through spiritual understanding, or prayer, was lost sight of after the early Christian era. Actually, metaphysical healing is natural to each one of us. To live in this age, when Christian healing power has been restored through the discovery of Christian Science, is to be present at the birth of a new era. It is a time of tremendous portent, akin to living in the province of Judea when Christ Jesus was entering his public ministry and enlisting the likes of Simon and Andrew, James the son of Zebedee and John his brother, and all the others. The crucial question is, "Have you and I the spiritual insight and boldness to take up the present-day invitation to be a part of this new beginning for mankind?"

Michael D. Rissler