Lifted up and out of incorrect teaching

I grew up in a Christian Science household, but not necessarily one that understood Science well. I had healings as a child and went to Sunday School. When I was unwell my parents called a practitioner and my needs were always met. When I was sixteen, I had trouble with eyesight and for the first time worked with a practitioner entirely on my own. Sunday School taught me about absolute versus relative, but that confused me and my parents didn’t clarify much. After seeing a lecture the next year, I reasoned that I would surely learn what I needed to know in class, and so I enrolled. 

In class I learned many things: anecdotal stories about the teacher’s past, World War II healings, and that one should use “steps” in a treatment. Also, that various physical problems had their root cause in predicable forms of wrong thinking; for example, if a patient has a problem regarding teeth, work about inharmony in family. These things didn’t set quite right with me and I wrestled with them for years, even asking my fellow Association members what they thought. 

In the mid-1990s, I read an article that Skip had written years before about reading “the book,” and I read Science and Health from cover to cover for the first time. That helped me understand what it was that I found unsettling about my teaching – what Mary Baker Eddy says in Science and Health simply didn’t support the things that were bothering me. While it took 20 years more and another couple of readings of Science and Health, I finally was comfortable where my original teaching had not been accurate. Then circumstances that no human could have foreseen took place: My original teacher, who had passed in 1991, was posthumously removed from the Journal, my Association was disbanded, and the Board of Education requested that we be retaught.

While I had already been on a path of sticking with “what the book says,” being a member of Skip’s last class was the biggest possible boost to understanding Christian Science correctly. He put the slightest amount of Skip’s personality in the teaching and the strongest possible emphasis on what Mary Baker Eddy says, most especially in Science and Health.

Not long ago a patient told me, “I’m not really sure I know how to give a treatment,” and I brought her right to page 410, “Mental Treatment Illustrated.” That’s because it’s not how I think a treatment should go, or even how Skip would do a treatment, but what our Leader says. This is how Science and Health has healed me – like a child of Israel, it lifted me up and out of incorrect teaching to a better understanding of what Science is.