"…liberation from the mental decline has come…"

Some years ago, our children had moved on to graduate schools and work, and my husband began to decline mentally. He obsessed about his “running program,” making a huge wall-filling chart that tracked his various running goals. He gave hours and hours to this, barely paying attention to anything else. He also began to look at experiences as through the eyes of a child, asking questions that were silly.

With the kids gone, I found this behavior very difficult. I talked to him about this. (I confess that I didn’t have a spiritual focus.) And I became deeply dark in my thought. Eventually I was hiding from the world, from life. I lay on the couch a lot.

At one point I attended a lecture in a large, packed church. I sat at the back, planning to slip out quickly at the end. But afterwards, a woman who I knew a little saw me leave and ran after me. She reached out with such love. She was a newly Journal-listed practitioner and had just moved to our area.  She discerned my need, and we became friends. She visited me and eventually prayed for me.

My darkness lifted.  I began to go out again, started swimming for the first time in my life. I became active in both community and church work.  And my husband’s decline was reversed. Tonight he was playing a 72-point word in “Words with Friends” with our daughter. With joy I have witnessed his expansive mental and practical activities – being Chairman of the Board at church, serving on three other boards and a ministerial board representing Christian Science, and sustaining wide-ranging reading interests. This liberation from the mental decline has come through his daily, faithful spiritual study, and faithful prayer. Our textbook says, “Clad in the panoply of Love, human hatred cannot reach you.” (SH p. 571:18,19)

Likewise, clad in the panoply of Mind, mental decline cannot reach you.

Hymn 140 sums this up for me:

If on our daily course, our mind / Be set to hallow all we find, / New treasures still,
of countless price, / God will provide for sacrifice.

Old friends, old scenes, will lovelier be, / As more of heaven in each we see; /
Some softening gleam of love and prayer / Shall dawn on every cross and care.

New mercies, each returning day, / Around us hover while we pray; / Old fears are
past, old sins forgiven, / New thoughts of God reveal our heaven.