During the week when I was writing this editorial, some especially interesting items came across the desk. That's putting it mildly. Actually these were things that made you want to shout, "Yes, yes, yes, that's what Christian Science is all about!"

One was the manuscript of a religious article for The Christian Science Monitor. The first draft of this article had mentioned very briefly the lessons a family had learned about not being held hostage to terminal illness. The Editors asked for some further information, and back came a detailed account of a daughter's healing of medically diagnosed illness usually considered incurable. And tucked in was a letter by a neighbor who is not a Christian Scientist. It turned out that the neighbor, an M.D., now retired, had watched the daughter being healed over the course of four years.

Then there was a testimony of healing making its way through the verification process as it headed for Sentinel publication. It tells of the healing through Christian Science of a medically diagnosed autistic child. The diagnosis and prognosis were when the child was three and a half years old. The child is now in the sixth grade and, instead of being in a special needs class, is in a class for students who excel.

Finally, I was pleased to discover another new report of healing, this one written by a longtime acquaintance of mine whom I hadn't seen for some years. He told of cataracts that had been diagnosed by an opthalmologist and the healing that followed through his and his wife's persistent application of Christian Science. What a great way to catch up on what has been happening in a friend's life!

Naturally, reading of such healing is a deeply moving experience. When you yourself, or family members and acquaintances, have had healings through prayer, accounts like these can strike deep chords of recognition. You know how these people felt. You know that much more is involved than being released from pain or fear or incapacity. There is new assurance of God's presence and of the actual existence of the law of divine Love. You certainly want to live much closer to God and can't wait to try to live more consistently on the new basis of one spiritual and scientific reality rather than a misled material sense of existence.

But why is it that specific healing through prayer of sickness and sin speaks to us so deeply? Why are we irresistibly drawn to identifying it as being what scientific Christianity is "all about"? One answer may be that there is so much pure goodness in healing. The Psalmist wrote, "Teach me to do thy will; for thou art my God: thy spirit is good." It is clearly a very good thing to see a child's life given back when no hope was offered on any other terms. It is a very good thing to have a friend's sight restored. And this kind of goodness lifts the heart. It gives us a clear view of God, as nothing else quite does, as it did in the time of earliest Christianity. Christ Jesus said to the messengers sent to him by John the Baptist, "Tell John what things ye have seen and heard; how that the blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, to the poor the gospel is preached." That kind of healing could come only because God is good, totally good, entirely Love, and because He does not in fact create or uphold so-called laws of sickness and death.

When we find ourselves saying emphatically, "That's what it's all about," we are usually expressing some relief at getting to the point, at cutting through the things that Christian Science is not about. We might, for example, be tired of wrangling and fractiousness at branch church meetings. We may be fed up with lack of simple love for each other and holier-than-thou posturing of various kinds. Considerations of human strategies may seem to be wearing on the spiritual inspiration and freeing that come in communing with God. Interestingly enough, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy, was in total agreement with this intuition of the need for getting to the heart of the matter and staying there. She wrote, "Preaching without the truthful and consistent practice of your statements will destroy the success of Christian Science" (Sentinel, September 1, 1917).

We can see from this statement, and many like it made by Mrs. Eddy, that healing is no peripheral option but is integral and essential to Christian Science. It is not so much what Christian Scientists choose as it is the indication that Christian Science is being practiced. When people are striving to live in relation to Christ, the true idea of God, healing happens. It is happening. In the last five years more testimonies and reports of healing have been received at the Sentinel, The Christian Science Journal, and The Herald of Christian Science than in the previous five years, and this in spite of a presently decreasing number of church members. This has happened at a time when the Church is demonstrating greater care about the world.

Mrs. Eddy writes in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, "The life of Christ Jesus was not miraculous, but it was indigenous to his spirituality,—the good soil wherein the seed of Truth springs up and bears much fruit." We can expect to see more healing and also new growth as people consciously rebel more and more against the demands of the carnal mind to drop healing and to accept materialism as the entirety of existence. Obeying the demands of the one Mind, God, to grow in spirituality, we learn more of our true being as God's wholly spiritual man, and it is freeing and healing. That's what it's all about.

Allison W. Phinney, Jr.