by Margaret Rogers
Dear Margaret,
Thank you for your last letter. A lot has happened since we last talked. I finished up all my course work and graduated from college. Transitions are often difficult for me, but I am excited about this new chapter in my life. I am enjoying finding time for prayer in my life and the contemplation of the spiritual. Still my hang-ups/questions revolve around physical healing and death.
You mentioned the importance of healing through spiritual means as a sign that we are drawing closer to truth. But at the same time we shouldn’t feel like failures when we don’t heal. I understand these two statements separately, but I don’t understand how to embody them both. I’m not sure how to practice physical healing-and then be ready for the eventual deaths of my parents.
I would definitely appreciate hearing about your experience with your mother because it seems you actually faced this dilemma. Were you able to see that physical healing would not take place, but still pray to draw closer to truth? I am afraid that when my father is dying I will try to pray for healing and in some way hold him back. When it is his time I want him to be ready, instead of clutching onto this world, thinking that he must demonstrate over the material. Isn’t it better to understand that death is not a separation from God, but assume no control over our physical circumstances? I don’t want to be subjugated to matter, but aren’t our efforts at controlling it just that?
To be honest, I don’t know if I believe we can control the physical. I hear about healings and sometimes I believe them. But I also noticed that when I believe that prayer can affect the body, I live in fear of losing the struggle against error. But what if I believe that no material situation, including death, can separate me from God-without the stipulation that I need to demonstrate over physical pain? Isn’t that true freedom-to see life as spiritual and not worry so much about the body? I think the exploration of Christian Science can be truly joyous when it’s not framed in terms of a war against the human experience. I think the human experience is quite beautiful and special and I wouldn’t want to miss it.
I want to do good in my life. I want to heal the world and be a part of social change. But I’m not sure if I want to torment myself over physical healing. I’m not sure if I want to teach my children to do that. But I do think the freedom struggle is important and I believe that man is fundamentally spiritual. I can’t tell whether shying away from physical healing is neglecting a key part of working towards freedom in Spirit or whether physical healing is just a misguided attempt to control the matter we should be seeing past. Why is it important to you to heal? Why is it a key part of Christian Science and how do you treat the concept of healing when everyone physically dies?
I really appreciate having the opportunity to ask you questions and explain to you my triumphs and difficulties in Christian Science. Although this letter may seem like a repeat of my lasts ones I do feel like I’m making some serious progress. I have started to pray again and am remembering how much I like seeking answers in Spirit and listening to intuition/God. I am tired of being afraid of death and when I frame the world in matter versus Spirit it seems to perpetuate my fear. The idea that physical death is not something I can control and that it has no effect on my connection to God is comforting. But maybe that belief is not the truth. Anyway, any thoughts or ideas you may have would be truly appreciated. I look forward to your response, whenever you get a chance.
Much Love,
Dear…,
Let me start with your question “Why is it important to me to heal?” When I was in college I began to get deeper into Christian Science. I was disappointed in the efforts I’d made to improve people’s lives through political and social work. What I saw in Jesus’ life was not only comforting ideas, but unmatched power to heal suffering and injustice. To me he’s a model of someone who broke through to higher consciousness and proved its practicality to heal humanly impossible situations. I feel that spiritual understanding is the only way to really overcome suffering, since the material sense of life includes inevitable fear, pain, and sorrow.
I don’t think Jesus saw his work as trying to heal physical life or prevent death, though. He was simply seeing-that is, consciously living-at a divine level, and that seeing broke through mental states of fear and ignorance that are the cause of suffering. God is Love and didn’t design suffering and death into the universe.
Jesus’ consciousness of spiritual reality was like turning on a light in a dark room-it allowed others to see and feel the harmony of the universe God made. When Jesus said, “Let your light so shine…,” I translate that as, “Let your understanding of spiritual reality be so alive that others will feel the peace and power of it, and be lifted above their darkened sense.” But I can’t really even try to let my light shine. The effort is to understand God as infinite Truth and Love and everything as the expression of that perfection as constantly as you can. The goal isn’t to prevent bad things from happening, but to stay awake to spiritual reality. And that mental state has resulted in some wonderful healings. It’s also given me the greatest joy I’ve ever known.
I like Mrs. Eddy’s statement, “With our Master, life was not merely a sense of existence, but an accompanying sense of power that subdued matter and brought to light immortality…” (Retrospection and Introspection, p. 58). When I think of healing that way, I don’t feel I really have a choice between trying to heal or not. The choice is to strive to know the truth. Ultimately, I don’t think anyone can avoid doing that because truth is our nature.
There’s an interesting testimony in the book “A Century of Christian Science Healing” (see p. 254). A man called a practitioner when his wife was dying. He said, “If Christian Science heals my wife, I’ll be the best Christian Scientist you have in your organization.” The practitioner said, “Don’t say that. If Christian Science is not the truth, you don’t want it, even if it heals her. If it is the truth, you want it, even if she is not healed.” The woman, who was in a semi-coma, explained later that she heard the practitioner say that, and “the fear of dying left me in my realization that what I really wanted was to know God better-to know Him as He actually is-to know the truth.” She was healed that night.
My sense is that the practitioner didn’t try to heal her, but just stuck to the reality that there is no death in the one eternal spiritual Life that man expresses. When people are apparently dying, I still want to disagree mentally with that appearance, even when it happens.
My mom lived with us for a few months before she passed on, and it was obvious that she was declining. Still, we found the most joy and strength in holding to the spiritual facts of being. We didn’t talk about her death, but we did talk a lot about what we loved in each other and expressed gratitude for all the good our family had experienced. She told me once that the only reason she was hanging on was because she loved us all so much. That really pulled at my heartstrings, but we talked about how we could never really lose each other because we knew the spiritual qualities of each other. I felt we were both growing to bigger views. I miss her, but I didn’t grieve. I didn’t feel like a failure either, although I have felt that on other occasions and have had to pray hard about it. Rather than feeling pressure to prevent death, I feel a great hunger to know better that death is an illusion and that there is no law or truth but eternal Life.
I’ve been present with quite a few people at their passing, but my mom’s was the most unusual to me. That morning she’d been very restless, and I was trying to help her get comfortable until I saw that wasn’t the issue. I said, “Mom, we can only find comfort in the truth.” She said “OK”-calmly, but with a sort of resolve. I could see her take control and she got quiet. She went to another mental place where she wasn’t apparently conscious of my sister and me anymore, but she hadn’t passed on. She was looking intently ahead of her and reaching out her hands like she was touching or exploring something. After several minutes of this, she passed on. I feel it happened that way partly for me to see that it wasn’t an end. Death is an illusion. I never want to stop affirming that, and I know that seeing that clearly can and has healed the dying on many occasions. Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection was the greatest demonstration of truth, and he said we would do what he did.
Maybe striving to understand truth so clearly that it destroys illusions and heals is important to me in somewhat the same way that making a goal in sports is important to a serious player. We play because we love to, but we also want to show a mastery of the skills, and not say it doesn’t matter if we never make a goal, or that we’re afraid it will ruin the joy of playing if we try to do that.
I admire you for persisting in your questions-”The time for thinkers has come“! I trust in my heart that God will answer you in a way you can understand. Mrs. Eddy makes the point that we don’t have to solve every life problem in a day. It’s good that you’ve gone forward in an honest way with your work this summer, and I’m glad to continue the conversation anytime.
With love,
Margaret
Share This
I’ve been following this conversation and find it fascinating. I’ve been wrestling with similar issues myself. I’ve been dealing with a stubborn physical problem that has really tested my faith in God. Three months with a CS practitioner yielded nothing but frustration. Three doctors have likewise failed so far. I don’t have much faith in anything right now.
It is suspected that I am dealing with some sort of stress reaction. Reading this entry today got me thinking about something that has bothered me all my life, and really came to the forefront in the last couple of years, about the same time this physical problem started. It is an overwhelming sense of unfairness when someone we love passes from our experience, either by death or just moving away.
When we first meet someone, we know nothing about them. As we get to know each other better our relationship builds and builds, our bonds grow tighter and tighter and our joys become more intimate. Then POOF, separation occurs and everything is suddenly broken. This feeling of unfairness first struck me when I was a child. I was watching a cartoon version of The Wizard of OZ. Dorothy wanted nothing more than to get home. Everything she did with the scarecrow, tin man and cowardly lion was geared toward that goal. It wasn’t until she was able to go home that she realized how much her new friends meant to her, and now she realized she would never see them again. I couldn’t articulate it at the time, but I was overwhelmed by a feeling of unfairness, and I started crying like mad. My dad thought I’d gone crazy.
Fast forward 40 years. Someone I worked with very closely, but with whom I had no social contact suddenly moved away. I rarely gave her much thought outside of work, but when she left I realized her friendship meant a great deal to me. That same feeling of unfairness came over me like an ocean wave and I cried. We regained contact about a month later, and she said that after we said goodbye she cried too.
I felt in some way God was looking out for this relationship, because there were a number of interesting coincidences, signs if you will, that compelled me to open up the lines of communication. I even had a free travel opportunity that enabled my wife and I to visit her a few months later. But that only reinforced my feelings of loss when I had to come home again.
This feeling of unfairness hit me again about a year later when our beloved cat passed away. She was our only “child” and we had a lot of interesting ways to communicate with her and share love as part of our family.
In Christian Science we are taught that material things are fleeting and that substance is in life truth and love. These experienced have called into question for me the permanence of life, truth and love. I certainly feel the same love for my friend and my cat, but the manifestation of that love seems to have vanished. Right now, these spiritual things feel just as impermanent as the material things and it is very discomforting.
Oh yes, who doesn’t know these feelings! I believe even Jesus struggled with them. When John the Baptist–the one who understood him best at that time in his life–was killed, Jesus went off into the wilderness. It was the horror of impermanence that drove Buddha to seek enlightenment, and Gandhi to start his life-struggle for justice. There are so many other examples, including Mary Baker Eddy, who lost so many dear to her and said, “I can only solace the sore ills of mankind by a lively battle with the world, the flesh and the devil, in which Love is the liberator and gives man the victory over himself.” (First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p.268–the whole article is very helpful).
I can’t be reminded too often that I’m in this earth school to learn Truth, the reality of Spirit. The more I see the ones I love as representatives of everpresent divine Love, the less afraid I’ll be. Happiness and permanence are spiritual, so the way to feel more of them today is to keep striving to see the spiritual truth of everything.
Spiritual-mindedness is the home Dorothy and everyone of us is really longing for. I ask myself, why am I so reluctant sometimes to go there? The resistance can’t be my true thinking, since the child of Spirit naturally loves Spirit. As I accept that, I can rebuke material suggestions and say, “Love, lead me to the rock that is higher than I.”
Thanks, Margaret. My gut feeling is that what you say is true. In the last decade or so I’ve given a lot of thought about the nature of pure Love, and the full implications of that, which can be startling. But now that I’m struggling with a variety of problems, it seems rather paradoxical to struggle to realize the truth of this. If it is truth, I should think it would be unavoidable. Still, I press on.
do you think that if someone commits suicide they have a worse time after they die than someone who dies of natural causes?
I’d like to hear what anyone has to say on suicide too
Someone who commits suicide is obviously struggling deeply with a sense of wrong of some kind–or, in the case of suicide bombers, perhaps a deluded sense of what gets them to heaven.
Rather than wondering how they’re doing, though, I think we can stay with the fact that God never stops speaking to human consciousness. The light of Truth never stops shining to awaken us from the dream of suffering to the happiness of life as God’s image and likeness. There’s no mental state that can’t be awakened. Every identity God expresses is receptive to Truth.
There are helpful insights on this subject in Mary Baker Eddy’s discussion in Miscellaneous Writings, p. 52.
I’ve been talking with people about the right to die option. Some people think it’s like putting a dog or cat down. I’m confused about it. It seems to me that if you think death is a friend, that’s not good. But then it wouldn’t be good for animals, either and somehow that makes sense to me. I hate to see the animals suffer…
I believe your intuition is right that death isn’t a solution to suffering. Only Truth is, and we have to keep striving to see all life as God made it–spiritual and incapable of suffering. That said, we aren’t judges of what anyone else feels is the highest right in their situation. If you or I have to face that particular challenge in our lives, God will give us the wisdom to do it. I feel the best way we can help the world is to keep growing spiritually ourselves, and know that will help leaven the whole of human consciousness.