Skip to footer

Consistent healing – and a deeper purpose

A Christian Science perspective: Spiritual ideas on healing and progress.

  • By Nathan A. Talbot

A friend recently asked what was the most impressive healing through prayer I’d ever experienced. After pausing for a moment, I explained that what has made the greatest impression on me about Christian Science healing isn’t a particular healing I’ve had, but the fact that solving such a wide range of problems through prayer has been so consistent over a lifetime.

I did give my friend two examples of physical healing that came as a result of treating the conditions with Christian Science and its unique approach to prayer. One took a long time before my body was functioning properly again. The other came instantly; there had been a severe illness, and then suddenly I felt completely healthy. I spent days in awe of how a condition could change so dramatically and instantly. And the healing that took so long was especially impressive because my life was so transformed. Nevertheless, it’s the lifelong consistency that stands out to me.

Such examples of finding solutions through prayer are, for many, concrete evidence that Christian healing, after nearly 2,000 years, is again active and alive through the discovery of Christian Science. The evidence is, of course, way beyond healings that a few individuals may have had. Christian healing for well over a century has spread to hundreds of thousands of people around the globe. Sometimes this involves families of five or even six generations. It has been and is being practiced with the kind of consistency that may be surprising to many people. An empirical study that illustrates this point can be found on the Press Room section of the official website of The First Church of Christ, Scientist, at christianscience.com. This consistency of healing helps explain the adoption of hundreds of laws around the United States (even some around the rest of the world) that accommodate spiritual healing in a variety of ways.

And so, does this extraordinary record of healing simply mean that the contribution Christian Science has made to society is a group of drug-free healthy people? While there are many systems of healing in the world, the Discoverer of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy, founded a system where healing was seen as a consistent byproduct – the outcome of understanding that perfection, instead of imperfection, is the reality of God and His universe.

Christian healing – that is, healing by experiencing the Christ, the divine manifestation of God – is actually a window into God’s reality of flawless existence. In truth, God’s creation is perfect and complete right here where existence sometimes seems so chaotic and discordant. Scientific Christian healing, rooted in divine law, reveals a glimmer of our true being – spiritual and perfect – made in God’s image and likeness (see Genesis 1). These glimpses of reality hold the deepest significance for society.

While this understanding of reality has led to better health, it has also led to more stable lives rooted in moral and lasting spiritual ideals. This can be deeply meaningful to a world that finds itself in a major state of flux – and even upheaval, at times. If there’s any one thing society needs, it’s moral and spiritual roots during times of instability. Mrs. Eddy claimed this advantage to healing by prayerful means: “A person healed by Christian Science is not only healed of his disease but he is advanced morally and spiritually” (“Retrospection and Introspection,” p. 34).

A significant range of thoughtful and intelligent people see something powerful at work here: that a spiritual method of health care – in addition to healing without harmful side effects – can help stabilize society. They claim there’s logic, as well as practical evidence, that consistently relying on a method of spiritual health care may truly be the best, if not the only, way to genuine and lasting stability.

How can a more stable moral environment be established? More Christian healing. That’s because, in a word, this kind of healing has a consistency that leads to transformed lives. That is, lives rooted in a stronger integrity, innocence, unselfed love, and spiritual goodness.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to Consistent healing – and a deeper purpose
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/A-Christian-Science-Perspective/2015/1006/Consistent-healing-and-a-deeper-purpose
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe