Although I was raised in a mainline Christian religion, I always wondered, "Where is God?" I got traditional answers, but I was never satisfied. I had attended the finest schools. After graduating from high school, I studied in Europe and later graduated from an Ivy League university, Neither my childhood religion nor my education had helped me find answers to my questions about life and the human experience, and by the time I was 20 I had become an atheist.

I had everything the world valued. I had a fine education, friends, popularity, good fortune, and I was engaged to a young man from an internationally known family. But I was unhappy—so unhappy that I decided to jump in front of a train, which was something people were doing frequently in New York in the late '70s. What was the point of life, I wondered? If I, who had experienced the best the world had to offer, was so miserable, and if there was no meaning to existence, why did people go on living?

I had been seeing a therapist, and on the Thursday when I told her I was suicidal, she suggested we make a deal that I admit myself to a hospital through the weekend to think it over. While I was in the hospital, a clerical messenger, who had casually stopped to speak to me, suggested that I turn to God. Although I really was searching for Truth, I rejected the notion of God. To me, the idea of God was inadmissible because of all the evil I saw going on in the world. But this person persisted. And when I asked, "How will I find God?" she said, "God will find you."

That evening, which was a Saturday, I decided, why not? So on Sunday morning I went to the church service downstairs in the hospital. I was expecting it to be like the somber, uninspiring services of my childhood, but when I got there, I found a totally new atmosphere. The minister was filled with joy—and so were all the people attending. He was very excited, and I hadn't seen such joy in church in my life.

At the end of the service, the minister said he would pray for each of us, and he went down the line and said something special to each person. All I could think was, "By the time he gets to me he won't have any energy left. I'll be left out." But that minister did find me, and he prayed for me. And he said, "You are healed, and before you get upstairs, you will know you're healed." But nothing happened. So I went back upstairs.

It was just as I stepped out of the elevator that something monumental changed in my thought. I took one or two steps into the hallway, and I felt as if I'd dropped enormous weights. In fact, I looked around to see if I'd had baggage with me that I'd put down! And the fog of my thinking—the dark clouds of the depression I'd been struggling through—began to clear. The words to a song from the '70s filled my thought: "I can see clearly now . . . ." I realized that there was a God. I felt bathed in light, and I felt whole and joyful. This light was completely pure. I recognized this light to be the living Christ. I was suddenly full of life and peace and joy. Everything had been made new.

The doctors later interviewed me and could find no reason to keep me any longer in the hospital. My entire countenance and disposition had changed. They discharged me on Monday morning. That was 21 years ago.

I began attending a Pentecostal church, and one of the things it taught was that subsequent to healings of the kind I'd experienced, one goes through a baptism in the Holy Spirit. The book of Acts in the New Testament gives an account of a special event on the day of Pentecost (Acts 2:1-4). The followers of Jesus gathered, and "they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance." Even though I could speak three languages fluently and had studied two others, I yearned for this spiritual experience, this Biblical "speaking in tongues," to happen to me. For months I prayed to God to let me, too, be filled with the Holy Spirit.

Then one afternoon about three months after I'd been studying the Bible, I was walking in Central Park. I was praying for God to show me what I needed to know so I could be closer to Him. Since I had been praying over these last months for all kinds of answers, and I'd been getting the answers I needed, I felt I had a right to pray for this.

As I was walking along and praying, I felt absolutely directed—God spoke to me and said, "Go ask that one." The park was filled with people, but when I turned back to where God had directed me, I saw a woman sitting on a bench reading. I knew that she was the person God was sending me to talk with. I had learned over these months of praying that when it's God directing me, I'll have no doubts whatsoever about what I'm being led to do. I knew I could rely on the Bible promise, "Thine ears shall hear a word behind thee, saying, This is the way, walk ye in it, when ye turn to the right hand, and when ye turn to the left" (Isa. 30:21). And in this case, I simply had no doubt.

So I approached the woman. "I know this sounds a little crazy," I said, "but God just told me to ask you about the Holy Spirit." This lovely woman did not even blink. She made a place for me to sit down, and told me she was reading a weekly Bible Lesson, which, as a Christian Scientist, she said she read each week.

She talked to me for at least an hour. We opened the Bible to talk specifically about the two accounts of creation that appear in Genesis. She also explained her concept of "being filled with the Holy Spirit" as "having the Mind of God." She said that there was only one Mind, and that, as God's reflection, I had that mind as my own. These were the answers I'd been searching for all these years. Everything she said to me made perfect sense.

The woman told me that I could buy Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, by Mary Baker Eddy, at a nearby Christian Science Reading Room.

I began going to that Reading Room. I just studied and studied about God there. In the beginning I read mostly the Bible parts of the weekly Lesson. I loved all the versions of the Bible and the study materials the Reading Room provided, and I studied them deeply. I felt that all the parts from Science and Health had to match up with the Bible. I didn't want to read something that was just made up.

Then one day when I was in the Reading Room, I had a headache. The only way I knew how to pray was to ask God for things, but when I mentioned to the person working in the Reading Room that I had this headache, she said simply, "No, you don't have a headache." And in that moment the headache was gone.

This was significant, what she had said to me. It was then that I saw so clearly that what Christian Science teaches is that we don't have to go find God and ask for His blessings and power, because we already have all of God's love and power and blessings with us, in our own thought, every moment. God and His power are not "out there." As Jesus said, "The kingdom of God is within you" (Luke 17:21). That's what this person was drawing on when she told me I didn't have a headache. She was seeing me as God sees me, which is as a perfect, spiritual being, free of pain. And my immediate healing came as I responded to her clear, Godlike thought of me.

I saw that day that Truth—God—was with me and everyone. Since then, for over 20 years, I have continued to pray to God, asking Him to lead me and to show me what I need to know. Sometimes I found it hard to believe some of the absolute statements in Science and Health and reconcile them with the more relative, less black-and-white, ideas, concepts, and situations that this existence presents. But every time, God led me to Christian Science, and I saw it as a true revelation.

In the very first healing I had at the hospital (and I've had many since then, as have my children), I had been searching for the truth of existence. I thought I was living—but I was existing without Truth. I now see that God is Life. I had no answers before. But when I heard the conviction of that minister  when he said, "God is good and wants you to be well," I was overwhelmed. I had been so miserable I couldn't even cry. That day I cried for the first time in a very long time. I hadn't expected such good news in church.

All the disciplines I'd studied—economics, physics, political science, literature, and all that I'd learned through my education—had failed me. None of them provided a firm foundation. All was speculation and theory. And I had never wanted to pretend that all was OK—that's why I'd refused medication when I was suffering from depression. I didn't want a drug to make me feel better. I wanted the truth. Today I can say without a doubt, "God heard my prayer" (see Ps. 84:8). I feel like a modern-day Paul on the road to Damascus. Where once I was blind, I rejoice to say, "Now, I see."