When you've got your health, you've got just about everything." So the saying goes, and there is truth in this sentiment. Genuine health is priceless—something we should never take for granted. But isn't there more to health than just physical well-being? Christian Science teaches that health and holiness are inseparable. Both are essentially spiritual conditions, not originating in the body or dependent upon personal gifts, but freely given to us of God.

In Christian Science we learn, as Jesus taught, that the love bestowed on man by God, his infinitely loving and wise creator, is unconditional. But this Love also demands from the Christian disciple an unconditional response—wholehearted obedience to the spiritual laws of Love, Truth, and Life, which rule out all fear of or obedience to any other so-called power.

"Give unto the Lord the glory due unto his name," we read in Psalms; "worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness." Hence the healing we seek must go beyond self-oriented desires to be physically healed or benefited. Our desire must be for holiness, to embrace what God, infinite Love, has already prepared for us and is constantly imparting. This holiness must permeate every aspect of our lives.

Mary Baker Eddy was a compassionate Christian healer as well as a staunch religious reformer. In her autobiographical work, Retrospection and Introspection, Mrs. Eddy recounts her own startling recovery from an apparently fatal accident (an event that proved to be pivotal in her discovery of spiritual healing in Christian Science). Describing the effect of Truth on her spiritually awakened consciousness, she speaks of "the gospel of healing" as " 'the beauty of holiness,'—even the possibilities of spiritual insight, knowledge, and being."

Through her own deep searching of the Scriptures, and through revelation, Mrs. Eddy made fresh discoveries of the nature of spiritual being and its relation to Christian healing. In Christ Jesus' healing ministry she found abundant evidence of the vitality and practicality of Jesus' spiritual teachings. The spiritual being he revealed was neither remote nor abstract but the very expression of the living God he knew as his Father.

It was Jesus' obedience to spiritual law, Mrs. Eddy realized, that endowed him with the spiritual power so evident in his healing works. Through his obedience to God, Jesus proved so-called material laws, with all their resulting affliction and restriction, to be without validity, without actual substance, presence, or power. In healing after healing he revealed man's actual innocence, purity, and freedom as the child of God, Spirit, who is never subject to material conditions.

It's interesting to note that Jesus' own teachings were based upon a spiritual understanding of the Scriptures—what Christians term the Old Testament today. When confronted with the resistance of the carnal or fleshly mentality to spirituality, his defense was often Scriptural. There is an Old Testament account of healing that has meant a great deal to me. It's about a man named Naaman.

Naaman experienced a powerful change as a result of insight into the spiritual fact that holiness must permeate our lives. As a result, a transformation brought about his own much-needed healing of leprosy. But his complete healing came only after he laid aside the stubborn preconceptions he harbored—preconceptions that would have severely restricted the spiritual regeneration he most needed. (See II Kings, chap. 5.)

Naaman was a Syrian and a distinguished officer in the Syrian army, but he was a leper. A young Israelite served in Naaman's household, and she assured Naaman's wife that there was a prophet in Israel who could heal him of his leprosy. That prophet was Elisha.

At first Naaman reached out eagerly for healing. Without delay, and perhaps not without some pomp and ceremony, he came to Elisha, convinced that the prophet would come to him "and stand, and call on the name of the Lord his God, and strike his hand over the place, and recover the leper."

Naaman was not only startled but indignant when the prophet did not come to him in person. Rather, Elisha sent a messenger to Naaman with the simple request that he wash in the river Jordan seven times. Naaman's first response was not a healing one. "He turned and went away in a rage."

Although the story is far from over (genuine spiritual healing for Naaman does indeed come), it is at this point that Naaman's lesson may well become our own. Humility and meekness may seem like great virtues until we are beset with a serious problem. In our ignorance of God's unerring control and our fear of His absence, the need for healing can all too easily be twisted into a list of prescriptive personal demands. We feel we know not only what needs to be healed but how God should heal it!

But our genuine need for spiritual regeneration, which lies at the heart of every problem we encounter, can never be recognized until we are willing to silence human will and listen for God's guidance. His will for us is always good—irreversible spiritual goodness that can never for a moment fail to meet our deepest human needs, including physical healing but encompassing infinitely more.

Naaman himself must have glimpsed something of his need for humility when his servants reminded him of the importance he himself had always placed on obedience. If the prophet asked him to do some great thing, they asked him, wouldn't he do it? "How much rather then, when he saith to thee, Wash, and be clean?" This time Naaman listened. He obeyed, relinquishing his stubborn outlining—his fear as well as his pride—and he was healed.

That a proud man such as Naaman could be reached by such a loving rebuke, that his humble yielding could shine through in that moment of spiritual healing like a shaft of sunlight piercing an ominous thundercloud, should stir within us great joy and hope of our own regeneration.

I have experienced more than one physical healing by pondering the story of Naaman and striving to make the spiritual lesson he learned my own. Perhaps not unlike Naaman, I have found it is the deeper elements of spiritual healing that have always called forth the greatest gratitude and joy, healings of stubborn character traits that would limit—even mock—the pure expression of spiritual good that identifies and defines each of God's children.

Mrs. Eddy writes: "When a hungry heart petitions the divine Father-Mother God for bread, it is not given a stone, —but more grace, obedience, and love. If this heart, humble and trustful, faithfully asks divine Love to feed it with the bread of heaven, health, holiness, it will be conformed to a fitness to receive the answer to its desire; then will flow into it the 'river of His pleasure,' the tributary of divine Love, and great growth in Christian Science will follow,—even that joy which finds one's own in another's good."

This insight into the genuine nature of prayer—prayer that must bring healing—is illustrated by a healing I experienced several years ago.

I had been suffering from eczema. As an infant I had had this condition (diagnosed at birth by the attending physician). My parents turned to Christian Science, and the condition disappeared. I was a teenager before I knew anything about the disease or the healing I had had as a baby.

Now I was a young adult, and similar symptoms reappeared. At the time, I was a mother of three toddlers and the wife of a graduate student who was not only working at a job but deeply involved in writing his doctoral thesis. Needless to say, we were both facing extraordinary challenges and demands. Added to everything else, the skin condition seemed more than I could bear. I was not only distressed by the physical discomfort but perplexed at the disease's recurrence. Hadn't I been completely healed of this years ago? The answer was yes, I had been healed. But as was true of Naaman, the healing I needed now, the deep spiritual regeneration, was far greater and more encompassing than the physical healing I wanted.

A lifetime of witnessing healings in Christian Science had convinced me that God never creates disease. So I knew I could trust God to heal me completely. But when healing didn't come, in spite of much earnest praying, I became discouraged, even resentful. At last prayer did bring me, as it did Naaman, to the "river of His pleasure"—to a deep yearning to know and do God's will—not in order to get what I felt I so desperately needed but in order to be myself, my only true and spiritual self, the precious identity I knew God made and maintains and would reveal to me here and now.

Now God's presence was no longer a remote possibility but a palpable reality. I felt the tenderness of divine Love bathing my every thought and desire in humility and gratitude. In the hush, the sacred silence that followed, all physical discomfort stopped. Within hours my skin took on a more normal appearance. Several days later there was no evidence of the disease.

But an even greater blessing awaited me—a conscious recognition that I had been healed on a much deeper level of a certain amount of willful outlining in accomplishing my duties as home-maker and mother. In fact, the demands on me had seemed so great that I had got into the habit of relying on sheer human energy and extraordinary effort to accomplish necessary tasks.

I now saw that I had been leaving God out of the picture. The mountain of things I thought I had to accomplish had obscured my spiritual vision of what God had already done. But fresh insight of God as the very source and substance of my being revealed a deeper need to acknowledge and obey only the divine demands of Spirit. My own activity, I now saw, however humble or mundane, could never be separate from the activity of Life, Truth, and Love—the one God and Mind— the only creator and sustainer of all.

Sooner or later we will come to the realization that we must bring our deepest desires to "the river of His pleasure," to this "tributary of divine Love." As we immerse ourselves in this river, this pure consciousness of Love, we will find ourselves cleansed. We will find the goals we have outlined for ourselves yielding to Love's higher purpose, and we will find that the health and holiness—the genuine spiritual wholeness—we desire are already ours for they are given to us of God. If we listen faithfully, He will always reveal their source, and ours, to be in Him.