A Newsweek magazine cover story — "Treating Pain" — caught our attention recently. Millions of people around the world suffer from chronic or acute pain. In the US alone, Newsweek reports (May 19, 2003), the annual cost of treatment for pain (not including the value of lost-work time and diminished productivity) is about $100 billion.

But much closer to home, most of us either know someone who is dealing with pain, or we're facing it ourselves in some form.

Newsweek's writers posed two key questions. Claudia Kalb's article asks, "Why do we hurt?" and catalogs the currently accepted biological causes of pain. Kalb notes that "patients are demanding that pain be seen as a condition unto itself, not just a byproduct of injury or illness."

Dr. Sherwin Nuland explores the question, "Where Doesn't It Hurt?" He examines spiritual, cultural, and emotional causes of pain. While Nuland hopes for solutions through "sustained effort" in research, he sees no specific cures or solutions on the horizon.

Sustained effort in the search for health was a hallmark of the Sentinel's founder, Mary Baker Eddy. For many years she suffered from chronic and acute illnesses — ones often accompanied by pain. She explored conventional medical therapies and many of the alternative healing methods of the 19th century, but without lasting success.

While Mary Baker Eddy's own ill health impelled her search, she also yearned to be able to help others break free of imprisoning pain. And she found that prayer, more than any other approach, brought healing. She became convinced, further, that what both physicians and the public most needed was a healing method that was both spiritual and systematic — that there must be divine laws of health and healing.

Mrs. Eddy's impulsion to share her ideas with the public was fulfilled in her book Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. In its later editions, the book's opening line promised: "To those leaning on the sustaining infinite, to-day is big with blessings." Readers encounter in its pages the God who is both infinite and immediate, supreme and caring, able and willing to heal life's hurts.

Science and Health draws a distinction between the human mind, or what the Apostle Paul called the "carnal mind," and the divine Mind, or God. This distinction — and its significance — gives hope for the healing of pain. The book explains why our thoughts determine how we feel, and that illness generally, and pain specifically, are actually mental phenomena.

The sensations we perceive as physical are ultimately the outward effects of thoughts, fears, attitudes, oppressive memories, and emotions — including the thought that an injury (due to an accident or emotional trauma) can make life miserable.

What Science and Health calls Mind-healing involves a shift in self-image, to seeing ourselves as spiritual rather than material beings. Prayer, in its various forms, awakens the sufferer to his or her original God-given spiritual nature. The feeling of being totally loved by God has a natural way of dissolving pain.

Whether pain is associated with disease or injury, psychological harm or a broken heart, prayer offers a route not only to relief but also to cure. Identifying oneself, and one's brothers and sisters everywhere, as having only that "mind . . . which was also in Christ Jesus" (Phil. 2:5), and not a mind confined by gray matter, has proved time and again to be a powerful therapeutic.

What about global chronic pain, the pains of history? As faith in God's healing power grows among pray-ers, we are convinced that the healing of painful relations between races, nations, and religious believers will advance. The "healing of the nations" is a Biblical promise that spiritual thinkers have long cherished. Conventional wisdom views some conflicts as intractable, but such skepticism only hinders healing.

We're not naive. The challenges presented by history's conflicts are huge. But planet-wide wellness comes one changed heart at a time.

Every child and adult is God's special creation, maintained, blessed, and loved by infinite Mind — the health-giving intelligence of the universe. The healer, who attributes all power to God and acknowledges Him as the substance, source, and Mind of all that creation is and does, can respond more effectively to any cry of pain.

How we respond to those in pain — how full of love and spiritual expectation we are at this moment — offers the most hope.