Prayer for Church and Sunday school brings some immediate results
/I loved rereading A Century of Christian Science Healing in the weeks following the announcement of the assignment. Reading those accounts brought much joy and inspiration. Reading the book through – and knowing that it draws on sources that are loaded with many more examples of healing and that many, many more such healings remain unpublished – gives such a sense of the abundance of healing and the superabundance of God’s love that brings it about.
There are many accounts of healing that stood out to me, and five that I specifically flagged – those in addition to the well-known and well-loved accounts by Joseph Mann and Peter J. Henniker-Heaton. But I have narrowed it down to the following two:
J. Henry Ball (pp. 151-54) was not a Christian Scientist when diagnosed with inoperable “quick-growing cancer.” He was given little time to put things in order before his passing. After reading a copy of Miscellaneous Writings that had been shared with him, he walked to a Reading Room and purchased Science and Health and then visited a practitioner for help in understanding the book: “I had to unlearn that God was a stern, severe Deity. The new impression I began to receive was that God is Love and can do nothing but love His creation, and that God actually is loving me.…I asked the practitioner to tell me more of this God who is Love. I began to see that this God that the practitioner was talking about was the cause of all existence – the cause of my existence; and because God is Love and perfect, He could not make anything unloving or imperfect.” After a period of pondering these ideas and growing stronger over some months, he visited a Christian Science church.“…I heard them singing as I walked in – ‘His arm encircles me, and mine, and all.’ I actually felt that it was God’s arm, divine Love’s arm, that was holding me. Not only did the cancer disappear, but one by one headaches, stomach trouble, and a long list of other ailments left me.”
You see and feel in this account how the truth of God’s all-powerful love replaces the beliefs that had occupied thought. That a gradual, natural change of consciousness brought the healings, one after another. He concludes: “It was such a change in my life that it is difficult to describe in words just what the feeling was in me and in my family. I became a better husband, and better father to my children, a better neighbor, and a better citizen.” The blessing of the truth of God’s utter goodness naturally radiates and touches other lives.
Bernice Lewsader (pp. 147-49) had not been a student of Christian Science when she lost her eyesight and was told by 20 specialists that it couldn’t be regained because the “sight film had been destroyed.” She was also found to have evidence of tuberculosis. Her husband had been out of work for three months. I love how the truth of the Bible was coming to her before she embraced CS. Her sister read aloud to her these words in Matthew, “And all things, whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive.” She requested to hear the verse several times. “This was an awakening to me for I saw that I had been denying that this statement was true every time I finished praying. Now something changed in me and I began praying with confidence.
Within a few days her husband found work and an apartment for the family to move into in the house of Christian Scientists. “I have never known such kindness and consideration as these people expressed to us. As a result of this, the prejudice and resentment which I’d had for years towards Christian Science disappeared. I finally decided to try this religion. I soon had two proofs that I could be helped. One was the solving of a very serious business problem and the other was the healing of an intestinal condition that had bothered me since I was 16 years old.”
Bernice’s husband and daughter read to her from the Textbook and a CS periodical, and she started working with a practitioner. In time, her sight was restored and the claim of tuberculosis was healed. Among many things that she learned: “And most of all I learned that man, spiritual man – the man of God’s creation – is complete and perfect now. You might say that I had to reconstruct my concept of what man is, including myself. I learned most of all that sight is spiritual and cannot be lost, decayed, carried away, or dimmed.”
At the time of her diagnosis of incurable blindness, she was advised not to have more children. After these healings, “I have had two more lovely children without any ill effects.”
I love how in both of these testimonies what is being learned about the power of God’s love simply and decisively overrules the decrees that have come down with such apparent authority and that had allowed no hope of recovery. Hearts opened and the truth that heals flowed in.
I’m remembering the first healing in Christian Science that I had entirely on my own. After 8th grade, my Boy Scout troop traveled together to Philmonte – the Scout ranch in Cimarron, New Mexico. Shortly after arrival, a camp medic discovered that I had had no shots and was not pleased. He seemed particularly offended that I had not had a tetanus shot. I explained about being a Christian Scientist and was ultimately allowed to go ahead without shots on a two-week backpacking trip in the New Mexico wilderness with my fellow Scouts.
Many days into the trip, in a particularly remote area, it was a hot summer day, and I was wearing shorts. At one point we had to step over a rusty barbed wire strand. My bare leg made contact with a rusty barb, which drew blood. This brought on a strong argument of fear. I didn’t tell anyone about this, but occasionally dabbed the blood with a spare bandana. At first I allowed the fear to provoke extreme scenarios of being medevacked out of the wilderness due to the ravages of tetanus – my adolescent imagination in overdrive. But I had learned better in Sunday school, and soon I was silently singing much-loved Christian Science hymns. As I was silently singing, we were climbing a low mountain, and I remember a feeling of drawing closer and closer to God with each step up the mountain. I understood that the growing intimacy I was feeling with my Father-Mother was due to gaining mental, not physical, altitude.
By the time we reached our next campsite, the fear was gone – replaced with an assurance of God’s loving care for me and all. The next day, was spent in part rappelling off cliffs. That did not bring back the fear; it was just fun! I don’t know if, according to belief, there was ever an argument of tetanus to be met, but I do know that drawing nearer and nearer to the God who is Love itself, freed me from the fear of disease and danger.
What am I doing to be more active in healing myself and others? Good question! One thing, as chairman of our branch church ad hoc metaphysical committee, we put together a letter to members and regular attendees that included the following:
“The committee has specifically been working to counter mortal mind’s leading arguments concerning Christian Science, which are aggressively imposed upon the public. One of these leading arguments is that Christian Science doesn’t heal – or, begrudgingly, if it does heal at all, it doesn’t heal like it used to. Talk about “bald impositions”! That argument cannot stand up to the mountainous evidence that we have concerning the efficacy of Christian Science healing.
“Countering the aggressive falsehood – and seeing more healing in our lives – will inevitably open the doors for growing church activity and extend our church’s capacity to bless all whom our thoughts rest upon. So part of the assignment you are being asked to take up is to actively affirm the unstoppable power and authority of Christian Science healing and to counter the mesmeric argument that spiritual healing can be obstructed, delayed, or reversed. The other part of the assignment – and this part is certainly “big with blessings” – is for each of us to take up something in our own experience that is in need of healing, and through the application of the truths of Christian Science, heal it!”
My own work on this assignment has included regular prayers along the following lines: Error may be out to obstruct, delay, and/or reverse Christian Science healing, but that is an impossible aim, because the infinite power and supreme authority of the All-God creates, sustains, defends, and propels Christian Science healing, and the error that would seek to obstruct, delay, or reverse it is impotent. And so there’s actually no contest.
As a committee we have been working for many months to witness the natural growth and progress of our church, including Sunday school, Reading Room, and Wednesday testimony meetings. A month or so ago, a college student who grew up in our Sunday school and was attending whenever in town, turned 20 and thus “graduated.” His younger brother is a high school senior and was the last remaining regular pupil.
During my prayerful work at home, prior to heading for church, on a recent Sunday morning, I was working with and really feeling the truth of the words in our Textbook: “There is but one real attraction, that of Spirit. The pointing of the needle to the pole symbolizes this all-embracing power or the attraction of God, divine Mind” (SH, p. 102). I was seeing and knowing that everyone has a natural God-given responsiveness to the Mind that is God, and Christ leads the hungry heart, the receptive thought, to the fountain that pours forth the truth that quenches and heals.
Perhaps an hour later, I was standing alone in our Sunday school, singing the opening hymn that was being piped down from the service upstairs. Our one regular pupil was not in attendance that day. There was a temptation to feel a tad lonely in that otherwise unpeopled space. But I countered that suggestion, affirming the abundance of purpose and vitality that is built into church and all of its activities. A moment later I looked up and was delighted to see a man with two young boys walking into Sunday school, followed by a Sunday school teacher and an usher. The older of the two brothers came loaded with questions, and from what I observed as superintendent, it was a lively hour of spiritual education.
The next week, we had the regular pupil, the two young visitors from the week before, and another family with a daughter and son, who came for the first time. All five of those students attended again this past Sunday. The mother of the youngest of these newcomers, who is 5 years old, said that her son was still getting the hang of Saturdays versus Sundays and that on Saturday he had expressed concern that they hadn’t gone to Sunday school!
Considering the blessing Sunday school is prepared to bestow on the children, it’s easy to see how natural and right it is for Sunday School and all aspects of our church to grow. It’s as natural as the blossoming of a field of wildflowers on a sunny spring day after several days of gentle rain showers.