Recently the members of The Christian Science Board of Directors—Tom Black, Walter Jones, Nate Talbot, Mary Trammell, and Vic Westberg—spoke with Sentinel Radio. They shared their individual insights into the healing truth that Mary Baker Eddy discovered. Here is a transcription of what they said, first broadcast June 3 on Sentinel Radio.
Mary Trammell: What is healing? Well, really, it’s the restoring of health to the body, heart, the mind. Or maybe, on a broader basis, the body of one’s finances, one’s economy, one’s community, one’s whole world. And healing is just absolutely central to the theology of Christian Science. We have to have it. Mary Baker Eddy, who discovered and founded Christian Science, wrote this in her book Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures: “The theology of Christian Science includes healing the sick” (p. 145). And to me, healing is important because it’s the tangible evidence that God loves us, that God is with us, and that He cares about us.
Tom Black: Mrs. Eddy referred to the healing of the sick as a “bugle call”—an announcement of something of great importance. Something that reaches human thought, which might otherwise not be aware of it. It’s important because the metaphysical healing of physical disease, and the metaphysical healing of issues that challenge mankind, verify the theology of Christian Science. And it needs that verification, of course. Jesus healed and verified his theology that way. He said, “I am come to bear witness unto the truth” (see John 18:37). And healing is the verification that actually is lifting those burdens.
Vic Westberg: Healing is what [originally] attracted people to Christian Science. It’s still what attracts people, because everybody’s looking for healing. And once they find what Christian Science does, in the way of healing, they never leave it. I was not born into Christian Science. I found it later in life. But what I found was a healing of my false concept of what man is. Mrs. Eddy in her writings brings that out so clearly—that man is not material, that he is spiritual. To me, that was so important because it set the stage for the rest of my life of healing problems—all based upon the fact that I finally knew who I was. You need that in order to heal.
Walter Jones: Healing confirms that Christian Science is scientific, provable in daily life—not just confined to the era when Jesus walked about the hillsides, speaking to multitudes, and healing. But healing confirms that the Christ is present today—that the message of the Comforter does bring healing into individual lives and to nations.
Nate Talbot: People deserve to be free of suffering. There are lots of reasons why healing is important. It’s important because it confirms Jesus’ promise of another Comforter. Mary Baker Eddy felt that this revelation that had come to her—and that she had put on record in her book Science and Health—this divine Science, was the Comforter that Christ Jesus promised. Sometimes people look at the roots of that concept of the Comforter Jesus promised, and they think of it as an advocate. And it seems to me that in Mrs. Eddy’s book there is an advocacy of man’s full relationship to God, to recognize that man truly is made in the very image and likeness of God. What could be more comforting than this kind of Comforter?
WJ: You know, some of the hindrances to healing include a belief of being separated from God, a belief that matter is powerful. And Mrs. Eddy told us that the first thing to handle often is fear. She said, “When fear disappears, the foundation of disease is gone” (Science and Health, p. 368). Sometimes today it’s popular to think of being a victim, and yet what does that lead to but a sense that there is something more powerful than God, and that we are left alone? We need to see through that, and admit that the power is God. And that we can yield to that power. I love the way Mrs. Eddy said, “The exterminator of error is the great truth that God, good, is the only Mind . . .” (ibid., p. 469). And we are the expression of that Mind, the reflection of good.
VW: One of the things that Mrs. Eddy worked with—all of her life, I think it was—was the handling of animal magnetism, the negative thought that tries to enter consciousness. That would be something that would attempt to discredit the basic teachings of Christian Science—that man is spiritual, not material. She had people working 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to see that animal magnetism had no power, although it had a lot of suggestions. Today I ask myself: Are we, as Christian Scientists, doing that, every moment of the day? Are we, as she said, “Stand[ing] porter at the door of thought” (ibid., p. 392)? Are we handling every negative suggestion that comes to consciousness during our day? I think the more we work at it, the more we’re alert to it, the more we recognize it. It becomes automatic. It’s like breathing. You don’t think about breathing. But we should be so well versed in handling the negative thought that tries to enter consciousness—which is animal magnetism—every moment of the day, that it becomes natural. It’s just second nature to us to do that. That’s why it’s so important for us to deal with that, moment by moment, in our daily lives.
NT: There are plenty of hindrances to healing. In fact, I suppose, in a way, you could say the world is full of different things that get in the way of healing. So I’ll pinpoint one. I would say that matter is a hindrance to healing. Now probably a lot of people would say, “Whoa, wait a minute. Matter? A shoe, a tree, a building—that hinders healing? What does that mean?” Well, I think for one thing, that they are symbols of matter. They’re not really matter itself. Matter itself, to me, is a limited way of seeing reality. So rather than the things we see, this limited way of seeing things needs to be released. It gets in the way. We need a more expansive way of seeing reality. And that more expanded way is Spirit. It seems to me that matter limits, and Spirit liberates. Spirit, or God, frees us. It gives us a much more unlimited way of seeing reality. People tend to turn to the very thing that limits healing—matter, a material sense of existence—whereas what we need to do is have that spiritualization of thought that enables us to see Spirit, or God, as the reality. That’s what brings healing. Matter limits, Spirit liberates.
TB: You know, I think the greatest hindrance to healing is the basic assumption that matter is cause and effect. And Christian Science teaches emphatically that God, Spirit, is cause and effect. So there is an impassable chasm between these two assumptions about the reality of life, and “the determination to hold Spirit in the grasp of matter” (ibid., p. 28)—that’s a phrase Mrs. Eddy used—which is one of the principal hindrances to healing.
MT: In my experience as a Christian Scientist and as a healer, there are three things that sometimes hinder healing, or would try to hinder healing. There may be many things in other people’s experience, but it’s often cropped up in these three ways with me. One, fear—thinking that somehow I can be separated from God. And the answer to that is always realizing that that’s impossible, because God is everywhere. He’s everywhere in the universe—everywhere you or I or anyone else will ever be.
A second hindrance to healing might just be not knowing, or not remembering, how omnipotent God is. A kind of ignorance, I guess you could say. But when you think about it, there’s nothing that can overpower omnipotence. I mean, God is the primal and only cause of the universe. God doesn’t have manlike limitations. He’s all-power itself. Nothing can overwhelm God.
And then, one other way that sometimes we all get hindered—held back from healing, temporarily—might be what the Bible calls sin. They say that translates into “missing the mark.” Well, for me, that usually amounts to purposely holding on to something that keeps me from hearing what God has to say. Saying, This is what I want. Even Jesus had to deal with this. Ultimately, he always handed it over to God, however. And he said, “Not my will, but thine, be done” (Luke 22:42). And that’s the answer, I think—to let God’s good will be done in you, in me, in everyone.
VW: When I was a newcomer to Christian Science, I had no idea who Mrs. Eddy was. So I found her in her writings. And having found that, I knew where I could go when I had a problem. But it was the daily study of her works, along with the Bible, that enabled me to heal a lot of things.
I can give you an example of one. During the time I was in the military, I sustained an injury to my right shoulder, and the military doctor said I would never have the full use of my right arm again the rest of my life. When I got out of the military and found Christian Science, I still had the same problem. I worked in a warehouse in which I had to physically toss boxes when we got a shipment that came in. I remember going through one of these sieges where the pain was so excruciating that I hadn’t slept for a couple of nights. I remember it was three o’clock in the morning, because I looked at the clock. I was sitting in the living room, and I took Science and Health and flipped it open. And it came open to page 14, line 12. And you know how you see films that highlight a section of a page so you can read it? That’s what happened. I could just see clearly line 12. And there Mrs. Eddy wrote: “Become conscious for a single moment that Life and intelligence are purely spiritual,—neither in nor of matter,—and the body will then utter no complaints. If suffering from a belief in sickness, you will find yourself suddenly well.” Well, what hit me was “a belief” in sickness. She didn’t say, “sickness”; she said, “a belief” in it. So it wasn’t something that was permanent, which I’d been told by the medical doctor. And I remember falling off to sleep.
I was in the warehouse the next morning, and we’d just had a big shipment come in. I found that I was in the warehouse throwing boxes to the top shelf, with both arms, with no pain whatsoever. As I went to lunch, it dawned on me that I had full freedom. That taught me that Christian Science healing is simply removing the belief of a problem from thought. It’s so simple, because the problem is never real but is formulated in thought, from which it has to be removed. And my difficulty has never, ever, recurred. That was decades ago. I like to think of it as an instantaneous healing that took a long time to come. But once truth dawned on consciousness, the difficulty was gone.
TB: Mrs. Eddy was a remarkable woman in any objective consideration of her life and character. One of the things about her that is inspiring to me as one of her followers, is that she was a discoverer, and she broke the bonds of traditional thinking. She was a radical thinker, but she verified her discovery with her works. And it’s so inspiring to me that she was comfortable in her role as a breakthrough thinker. I think she was comfortable with it because she knew that it came to her from God, so it was not her own thought. She knew it was God revealing Himself and His reality to her.
I remember once when our first daughter was just an infant. She had a very, very bad fever, and I was up with her all night. As the night went on, I was very afraid. I walked and held her and prayed and prayed, and it seemed as though she wasn’t any better at all. Then just before dawn I suddenly thought of a passage in Miscellaneous Writings, by Mrs. Eddy. It says, “No evidence before the material senses can close my eyes to the scientific proof that God, good, is supreme” (p. 277). And, you know, when I thought of that passage, it just absolutely arrested and captured my whole thought. I took that little baby, and I just put her back in her crib, and fell into a chair myself. All I could think about was what it meant for God to be both good and supreme. It just absorbed my thought. It was so wonderful to realize that nothing could keep me from appreciating what that meant. I went back to our daughter’s crib, and she was sleeping absolutely peacefully. There wasn’t a single vestige of that fever. She was absolutely normal in every way. It was a moment of discovery for me—a moment of appreciating, a little bit, I guess, what it must have been for Mrs. Eddy to discover a new reality. And to be a thinker who was comfortable with considering ideas that were so radically different from the general stream of mortal thought. I found that that kind of breakthrough discovery actually brings healing.
NT: Probably all of us have had times when we felt very grateful for what others have done for us. Well, let me tell you, just for a moment, about something Mary Baker Eddy did for me. I had been suffering from some kind of illness—it was not diagnosed, so I don’t know just what it would have been called medically—but it went on for some time. One night it seemed particularly severe. As I was praying, as I had been for quite a while, I suddenly felt this immense gratitude for the fact that Mrs. Eddy had discovered the powerlessness of evil. Now that might seem a little strange, but really, that’s what came to me. Her discovery, this revelation of God’s allness, also carried with it the realization that evil is powerless, because God is All.
Well, Mrs. Eddy called on us to stick by our guns, and to prove that truth. At that moment I felt so grateful that she had recognized, discovered, and then proved the fact that evil could be seen as unreal in the face of God’s allness, that I was instantly healed. Every symptom just disappeared, and it was awesome. Literally, I sat there for a moment, trying to take in what had happened. It was so inspiring.
When I looked back on that experience, I realized that gratitude for what someone has done can be important in anyone’s life. And for me, gratitude for Mrs. Eddy’s discovery that evil is powerless—ultimately nothing in the presence of God’s allness—had a very healing effect on my life.
WJ: One of the writings of Mrs. Eddy that has always spoken very deeply to me is her poem “Shepherd, show me how to go.” I can’t tell you how many times I’ve turned to it when in need of healing. I love the spirit of “I will listen for Thy voice.” So often, that’s what’s needed. It’s moving away from the carnal mind that’s spinning on some repeated message about disease or discord or something to be angry about or something to feel self-justified about. And yet what we need to do is yield to the divine.
I will listen for Thy voice,
Lest my footsteps stray;
I will follow and rejoice
All the rugged way.
(Christian Science Hymnal, No. 304)
I remember one time when I was flat on my back for a number of days, not able to move easily, with a difficult back problem. I got to a point one day where I just prayed, almost in a petitionary way: “Father, show me. I will listen to You.” And I just started going through that hymn. “ ‘Shepherd, show me how to go.’ I just can’t do this alone. It is God that is revealing to me what I need to see.” When I got in the second stanza to the point where it says, “And Thou know’st Thine own,” I was just so deeply touched that God knew me as I was, in His image, without whatever this seemed to be that had me immobilized. He knew me as I am. And that was enough. That knowing is what was opening the way for healing. I just lingered on that point for a little bit through tears. And that was the healing. The body responded, and I was able, before the day was over, to get up and go about my life.
You know, I think that’s what is so wonderful about Mrs. Eddy’s writings—they touch you so deeply with scientific truth, with reality, with the reality of God and man, that it really helps us free our thought from the limitations of mortality and see ourselves in His image.
MT: Mary Baker Eddy’s love has taught me so much. You know, she could have kept this revelation of Christian Science to herself—it would have been certainly a lot easier for her that way. There wouldn’t have been then all those years of struggling to capture in words what she was seeing, those years of teaching, of heartache sometimes, but of triumph. But the fact is Mrs. Eddy did love enough to labor for 45 years to give us Christian Science. And her pure spiritual love has taught me so much about prayer—and of course about healing.
I remember a few years ago I’d been praying all afternoon for somebody who was really suffering and in a lot of pain. She was scared, and honestly, after a few hours, I was starting to get scared, too. But on toward midnight I just finally asked God, “What more can I do here?” I opened up Science and Health to page 9. It seemed like just by chance, but this was such an answer for me: “The test of all prayer lies in the answer to these questions.” And what was the first question? “Do we love our neighbor better because of this asking?” Love my neighbor? I was too busy working at my prayers to even think of just pure, simple, spiritual love—love for God, His love for this dear friend that I was praying for.
And so, I think at that point I finally let myself just love. I began to love God enough to trust His love for my friend. And in some small way, to begin to love her the way God loved her. Well, in just a matter of moments, I knew my friend was healed. And she was.
And Mrs. Eddy had taught me once more that love is at the heart of healing.
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A few days ago I had the privilege to join the meetings of the members of the Board of The Mother Church in Hamburg and Stuttgart. I’m so grateful to hear and now read about their deep devotion to the ONE MIND and their love for Mrs. Eddy’s teachings. What encouraging examples of humbleness to yield to divine Mind, Truth, and doing this receive healing.