I make strong demands on love,
call for active witnesses to prove it,
and noble sacrifices and
grand achievements as its results.
Unless these appear, I cast aside the word
as a sham and counterfeit,
having no ring of the true metal.
Love cannot be a mere abstraction,
or goodness without activity and power.
—Mary Baker Eddy, Miscellaneous Writings 1883-1896, p. 250

EVERY COOK knows it—there are some ingredients you just can't do without. If you're making a sweet potato casserole, for instance, it's well nigh impossible to do it without some form of sweet potato yam. You could spare, or find substitutes for, most of the other ingredients—salt, butter, cream, the marshmallows on top. But leave out the sweet potatoes themselves? Not unless you want to end up with a dish that looks and tastes like a failure!

Farmers say the same thing about water—it's the one indispensable element in raising corn, strawberries, rice, or just about anything else. Without irrigation, crops shrivel up and die. And it's that way with an orchestra—a conductor may have a full complement of instruments and performers, but without a music score to play ... there's silence.

Well, practitioners of spiritual healing will tell you something similar—that there's an indispensable ingredient in their mission, too. It's love. Pure, unselfish love. Love so fundamentally motivates prayer that a person can't be a healer without it. Not just a personal, me-to-you kind of love. But a universal, out-to-everyone-and-everything love that burns so brightly and unquenchably in your heart that it could only come from God.

It was this kind of spiritual love that fired the glorious healing career of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, the role model for all Christian healers. The Bible says again and again (15 times!) that he felt overwhelmingly moved with "compassion"—something dictionaries describe as tender mercy, sympathy, "fellowship in feeling"—as he healed people. He surveyed the hundreds of people with illnesses or disabilities who gathered around him begging for relief from their suffering, and "his heart broke" (Matt. 9:34, Eugene Peterson, The Message).

But Jesus' compassion didn't stop there—with sympathy and heartbreak. The fullness of his caring brimmed over in healing—in instant restoration of diseased bodies, broken spirits, battered lives. And the children, women, and men before him walked free, in true spiritual health that only God can give.

Mary Baker Eddy's radical discovery was that Jesus' compassion-based spiritual healing wasn't a one-time historical event. It wasn't accidental. There was, and is, and always will be, a divine Science behind the kind of healing love Jesus felt. And the world-changing truth is that anyone can enter into the meekness and majestry of such love. Anyone can experience its healing touch. And—here's what may seem most surprising to human thought—anyone can heal others with the impetus of this holy love!

Why? Because, as the first Christians understood so well from the Master, God is Love itself. Healing love comes from God, and its sum and substance IS God. And, as one early Christian writer explained, all we need to do to bring that healing Love into the most intimate details of our lives is to love each other. "If we love one another," he wrote, "God dwelleth in us, and his love perfected in us" (I John 4:7, 12).

When you and I let divinity into our hearts this way, no wonder we feel and act differently! No wonder our lives transform for the better inwardly and outwardly. No wonder our minds and bodies feel regenerated by the Christ-consciousness that we've made our own. It boils down to simple Cause and result—or, as Mary Baker Eddy described it, to "the divine science of divine Love" (Message to The Mother Church for 1900, p. 5).

It's tremendously heartening to learn that eminent scholars like Dr. Stephen Post, professor of bioethics at Case Western Reserve University's School of Medicine and president of its Institute for Research on Unlimited Love, are now studying what they call "the new science of love and health." Research in some 70 studies conducted in the US over the past century, Dr. Post says, demonstrates with hard, empirical data that the virtues of love, giving, forgiveness, and gratitude have measurable benefits on people's health, happiness, success—and even their longevity. (See the interview with Post on page 10 of this issue.) "The remarkable bottom line of the science of love is that giving protects overall health twice as much as aspirin protects against heart disease," Post and his coauthor Jill Neimark write in their new book Why Good Things Happen to Good People, (p. 7).

BENEFICIAL EFFECTS OF LOVE-IMPELLED PRAYER

Scientific studies also prove, Post and Neimark point out, that praying for others makes the people who do the praying live healthier and longer lives. "Even the simple act of praying for others," they write, "reduces the harmful impact of health difficulties in old age for those doing the praying" (ibid., p. 10).

But this begs a key question. What about the people being prayed for? Does this love-motivated prayer benefit them? Post and Neimark's research doesn't explore this question.

In this key arena, however, Christian Science offers both theological underpinning and solid documentation. "Love for God and man is the true incentive in both healing and teaching," Mrs. Eddy announced to the world in her book Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, first published over a century and a quarter ago (p. 454). And without this spiritual love for God and humanity, Science and Health explains, the would-be healer is apt to be ineffective: "Not having this spiritual affection, the physician lacks faith in the divine Mind and has not that recognition of infinite Love which alone confers the healing power" (p. 366).

As to documentation, in addition to the 100 pages of healings through prayer published as the final chapter of Science and Health ("Fruitage"), thousands of verified accounts of spiritual healing have been published for well over a century in the Christian Science magazines, radio programs, and websites. They offer layer upon layer of evidence that Love-motivated prayer heals all sorts of ailments quickly and decisively.

As a Christian Science practitioner for the past 25 years, I've discovered for myself over and over that "spiritual affection" is an indispensable ingredient in healing others. One afternoon years ago, for example, a woman called me, with desperation in her voice, asking me to pray for her. She was having a "heart spell" that was making her feel weak and helpless. She was alone and really scared.

As I listened to her description of symptoms, it was hard not to get swept up in the tide of panic she was feeling. I prayed as systematically and persistently as I could, and gradually the wave of fear — and the feeling of personal responsibility — receded in my thoughts. She, too, became calmer, and the symptoms abated somewhat. But I wanted so much for her to feel whole and well, as she had every right to as God's cherished daughter. And I began to feel frustrated that she wasn't. I even began to wonder if I had the spiritual understanding to bring healing to this situation.

That's when I opened up Science and Health and, with all my heart, asked God to show me what I needed to see. Randomly it seemed, I turned to page 9. And my eyes landed on this passage. "The test of all prayer lies in the answer to these questions," it began. And the very first question that followed stood out to me as if it were written in neon lights: "Do we love our neighbor better because of this asking?" Then, farther down the page, was a related question: "Dost thou 'love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind'?"

Love! Simple, pure love for God and my neighbor. Somehow I'd managed to overlook this in all my strenuous efforts to pray. Yet Jesus had made it all so clear: "On these two commandments [to love God and our neighbor] hang all the law and the prophets" (Matt. 22:40).

At that moment, I finally let God's unending love—and my love for divine Love—fill my heart. And then, spontaneously, my heart just naturally overflowed in true, exuberant love for my friend. It was a peaceful, trusting love that made me know she was spiritual, whole and free—just like her Maker.

And she was. When I heard from her again, she felt wonderful!

It's never too late, or too soon, to infuse your prayer with the crucial ingredient of spiritual love. And to witness the exalting effects of this revitalized prayer — in the minutest details of your personal life, in your healing practice, and in a world that calls out so urgently for relief from suffering of every sort. CSS