Who of us was not heartened by last year's world-transforming events in what was then the Soviet Union? A popular revolt in that country foiled a coup intended to restore the state dictatorship. Subsequently, many who had long suffered under the corrupt political system represented by the coup leaders were emboldened. Television newscasts showed an exuberant crowd of some 10,000 people looking on as construction cranes toppled a fourteen-ton statue of the founder of the feared secret police force—and this in plain sight of the headquarters of the organization. Repression was giving way before the people's eyes. A woman was interviewed who, with a radiant smile, captured the feeling of the moment. "We're not afraid anymore!" she exclaimed simply.

Like most people, I was deeply moved by these individuals' courage and love of freedom. I felt some of their joy and thankfulness vicariously. But even more than that, and on a much deeper level, I honestly felt as though I were seeing reflected back to me some hint of my own experience in coming free from repressive conditions.

Although I have never lived in the shadow of a totalitarian government, I have experienced the tyranny of fear, of feeling held to and dominated by forces outside myself and beyond my control. There have been times, for example, when some physical ailment seemed utterly overwhelming. But I have found through the study of Christian Science that there is a way out of such conditions, a way to freedom. By turning to God with an open thought and an honest willingness to hear His voice, I have experienced many times the sweet assurance of His presence and love, and healing has been won. It hasn't always come quickly—in fact it has at times required a good deal of persistence—but it has come. And along with it there has been an almost indescribable feeling of freedom. I found myself remembering that feeling—actually experiencing it again to some degree—on that evening last August when I saw the statue come down and the woman exclaim to the camera, "We're not afraid anymore!"

To a great extent, this really is what Christian healing is all about—learning that we don't need to be afraid. Christ Jesus sometimes gave the assurance "Fear not" or "Be not afraid." He once told his disciples, "Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid." He understood the human heart's deep need to throw off the shackles of fear.

The gospel teaches us that we can stand up to and resist fear and illness—and that we actually should do this. In fact, the Master's healing ministry can be seen as something of a spiritual call to arms. This is certainly one way that Mrs. Eddy, an earnest follower of Christ Jesus, viewed the Master's ministry. After referring in her book Science and Health to the terrible bondage that had been imposed by slavery in the United States, she goes on to discuss the need for freedom from even more entrenched forms of bondage. She writes: "Christian Science raises the standard of liberty and cries: 'Follow me! Escape from the bondage of sickness, sin, and death!' Jesus marked out the way. Citizens of the world, accept the 'glorious liberty of the children of God,' and be free! This is your divine right."

Our divine right! How wonderfully reassuring it can be, if we're faced with some distressing physical condition, to remember that we have a God-given right to freedom. This is so because of the nature of God Himself, who is infinite divine Love, the wholly benign Principle of all that He has caused to be. Both constantly tender and unerringly just, God could do no less than produce and maintain the well-being of His creation, man. As children of the one divine Parent, then, you and I not only have a right to freedom, we really are free. This is how God has made us; this is our heritage as His sons and daughters. God sees us as He created us and as we have always truly been—spiritual and Godlike. Our divine right to wellness and peace can't really be violated or taken from us, nor can it even be voluntarily surrendered; it is inalienable, in the truest sense of that word. It is inseparable from our actual, spiritual selfhood.

Through prayer we are able to perceive these spiritual facts. Our efforts in this direction may seem to us somewhat meager at first. Yet even an inkling of God's all-encompassing goodness enables us to begin to see how it is that disease has no divine authority and so no rightful hold on our lives.

It is natural for prayer to call forth in us a defiance toward the symptoms of disease. As we come to know more about God and more about who we really are as His spiritually perfect, innocent child, we begin to feel quite indignant at the notion that some form of evil could dominate us. We find a strength welling up in us that perhaps we hadn't known was there, but which divine Love has actually been providing all along. With a growing measure of conviction and spiritual authority, we are able to cast fear and images of sickness out of thought; we are able to put them down as unreal, powerless, because not ordained by God. This brings healing, a restoration in our experience of our divine rights.

Contrary to what we may have been firmly believing, disease is not a self-determining physical condition. It's not, at bottom, a physical condition at all. Jesus clearly pointed to this fact when, through spiritual means alone, he healed leprosy, congenital blindness, chronic hemorrhaging, and numerous other maladies considered to be incurable.

Disease is one of the phases of the mortal, or carnal, mind, imaged on the body. Jesus helped us understand how this so-called mind tends to operate when he described the devil, another name for the carnal mind, as "a liar, and the father of it." As is true of some repressive governments, mortal mind's tactics include lies and manipulation to gain and retain control. This supposed mind would cast doubt on the power of God to heal us as well as on our own innate capacity to respond to that power. It argues to us, in the guise of our own thinking and in concert with the testimony of the material senses, "I'm weak; there's nothing I can do about this; I'm afraid." Or it may attempt to cloud our thinking with a vague sense of confusion or frustration. If not resisted with the spiritual truth of our being, mortal mind's aggressive suggestions would keep us focused on the problem, literally mesmerized.

But no lie of mortal mind can withstand spiritual truth. The effect of truth on human consciousness, to the extent it is understood and accepted to be true, is that it dispels error. It's not possible to believe both the truth and a lie about something at the same time. As we recognize more and more the truth that God is absolutely All and that we actually live in His all-presence, we stop believing that something besides Him is real or has power; we stop believing a lie. This breaks the mesmeric hold of fear, sin, and disease.

Christian healing is not the result of human will or personal fortitude in the face of great odds. It is the outcome of humbly yielding to and accepting what is already divinely true. Christ, Truth, the power behind Jesus' words and works, is what dethrones fear and disease. Christ, the divine influence in human consciousness, presents the spiritual idea of God and man. It's Christ that moves us to take a prayerful stand for what is spiritually true and to persist in holding to this truth until healing is apparent.

The fact is that you and I are not helpless before disease. Certainly a loving God would not make His offspring subject to chance, material laws of health, pain, malfunction, diminished ability. Isn't it time to rise up, in God's strength, and assert our allegiance to Him, to His supreme power and authority? Christ is saying to us today, "You are the Father's loved child. You don't have to be afraid anymore." In the words of Science and Health, you can "accept the 'glorious liberty of the children of God,' and be free! This is your divine right."