Gwen B. - Christian Science Sentinel, July 23–30, 2007
When I was in fifth grade, my class had a picnic at a lake near our school. Beyond the groomed lawns and the picnic tables was a field of very tall, uncut grass. A friend and I went there to play, gathering handfuls of the long-stemmed grass, waving them at one another, and generally romping about in it. When our teacher happened by, she casually commented, “I’m glad neither of you has allergies.”
I didn’t know anything about allergies, having never experienced them, so I asked my friend what they were. After hearing her explanation, I experienced an allergic reaction almost immediately, and from that point on, I was plagued with severe allergies whenever I encountered grass pollen.
The following year, my family moved to a farm. Every spring and summer, when the hay fields surrounding the farm began to emit pollen, the allergies would appear with a vengeance.
In high school, I began to take allergy medications. After several years, however, I desired to be healed of the allergies permanently rather than simply continuing to manage their symptoms. For some years I had attended a Christian Science Sunday School, where I learned to rely on the truths in the Bible and Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy for prayer and healing.
Up to this point, however, I hadn’t made a serious study of Christian Science. Nor had I really applied its teachings to heal issues in my own life. But I decided to stop taking the allergy medications and start seeking a spiritual solution to the problem. Although I don’t remember the exact ideas I prayed with, I do remember attempting to redirect the focus of my thoughts away from my body and its physical condition and toward my spiritual identity as a perfect expression of God who wasn’t subject to material laws and conditions.
As a result of prayer, I experienced some relief, but when springtime rolled around each year, the symptoms re-emerged. One thing that kept me from being as diligent in prayer as I might have been was the knowledge that the allergies would cease when the “allergy season” ended. Also, I’d moved to a city where the problem was intermittent and less severe. During what I came to call my “off season,” the times of the year when grasses were not in pollen, I conveniently forgot about the problem.
Then one January I had the opportunity to work on a study-abroad trip to New Zealand with a group of biology students. It was the middle of winter in North America, but it was summer in New Zealand. One day, not long into the trip, we went to a beach to observe sea mammals. The vans dropped us off at one end of the beach, and, after walking some distance along the beach, we were to meet up with the vans at the top of a long dune at the other end. The dune was covered in shoulder-high grasses, and a very narrow path wove its way up to the parking lot about a mile away.
I’d barely started to hike up the dune when I began to have a severe allergic reaction. My first thought was, “Hey, this isn’t fair! This is supposed to be my off season!” Since it was winter back home, the allergy problem was far from my mind, and I was caught off-guard. I was resentful, fearful, extremely uncomfortable, and a long way from the vans.
As I trudged, fuming, up the path, I hugged my arms tightly about myself to avoid touching the grass that encroached from all sides. It was then that I noticed the completely opposite behavior of the student walking in front of me. She had flung her arms wide, delighting in running them through the grass, and was commenting on how beautiful and soft it was.
Walking through such wonderful grass made her feel joyful, not fearful, and of course, she was not experiencing any allergic reaction to it whatsoever. This startling contrast made it suddenly and completely clear to me that the only difference between this student and myself was that I believed grass caused allergies and she did not.
Allergies had only the power I assigned to them in my thought. With that, the symptoms simply vanished, and I hiked up the rest of the grassy dune in complete freedom—joining my student friend in running my arms through the tall grasses and rejoicing in their beauty. I was free. When I glimpsed the purely mental nature of the problem, the healing was instantaneous.
Some years later, I came across a passage in Science and Health that helped me understand the spiritual foundation of my prayers. Mrs. Eddy wrote: “Disease is always induced by a false sense mentally entertained, not destroyed. Disease is an image of thought externalized. . . . Whatever is cherished in mortal mind as the physical condition is imaged forth on the body” (Science and Health, p. 411).
This explained to me why, when I was presented with information about allergies back in fifth grade, the allergy symptoms manifested themselves on my body in the first place. I had “mentally entertained” them—accepted them as legitimate and true—instead of destroying my belief in them.
The fact that the allergies suddenly ceased on that hike in New Zealand is explained by this statement from Mrs. Eddy: “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. Sorrow is turned into joy when the body is controlled by spiritual Life, Truth, and Love” (Science and Health, p. 14).
This is exactly what happened, and it was proof to me of her further statement that “the belief in sin is punished so long as the belief lasts” (Science and Health, p. 497). I could only experience allergies as long as I gave this belief credit, or power, in my own thought—not one instant more or less. Through the remainder of the trip, and on similar trips, I was so grateful to be able to help others in the group who were dealing with allergies by sharing the spiritual insights I had gleaned from this healing.
While not all the physical ailments I’ve dealt with can be traced to such specific moments when I adopted and refuted them, the clarity of this experience helped me better understand that, no matter how subtly a belief of disease creeps in, and no matter how long it is held, it still is nothing more than a belief.
And the instant one gains the spiritual insight necessary to disbelieve it, the sickness disappears from the body. Disease exists only in thought, and once it is destroyed there, we suffer from it no longer. |CSS
Gwen Beacham lives in Salida, Colorado.
This article first appeared on www.spirituality.com.