“I am so grateful that I was never afraid”
/Two things that have stayed with me from reading this book are:
How certain were many of the healers. I love the humble, rock-solid confidence with which Christian Science treatment was given.
I have loved reading where the healings took place. Bunch, Iowa; Trenton, Nebraska; Sussex, England; Denver; Los Angeles; Pilot View, Kentucky; Tokyo; Chicago; Norfolk, Nebraska; South Africa; Texas; ’the Near East’; in chemistry labs; on aircraft engineering drafting tables. “Love lived in a court or cot is God exemplified, governing governments, industries, human rights, liberty, life.” (My 287)
I found the following so reassuring, because no matter how humanly technical or complicated, the spiritual answer is neither technical nor complicated. In his first assignment as an aircraft engineer, Dwight Mills was to design a jet gear mechanism. (p. 227) There were difficult control issues, and he learned that other engineers had been working on this problem for almost a year without a solution. After studying the problem, he concluded that there was no mathematical analytical solution. There were an infinite number of possibilities for locating three main centers around which the gears would operate. As he began to feel helpless and overwhelmed, he said, “I went back to my usual way of working out difficult problems – through prayer, the prayer of spiritual understanding…I knew that God provides everything we need – if we are alert enough spiritually to discern it.”
So, one day at his drafting board, he leaned back in his chair and prayed. He started by thanking God for His goodness, realizing the ever-presence of the divine Mind’s all-power and infinite capacity. He reasoned that man actually reflects the capacity and intelligence of the divine Mind. After praying and feeling this closeness to God for 30 or 40 minutes, he went back to his drawing. Within minutes, without any calculations, it came to him where all three pivot points for the gears should be located. And it turned out to be the perfect solution for this complex design. It was put into production, and the basic design was still flying at the writing of this experience. He said, “To me this was a clear proof that when we listen for God’s guidance humbly and prayerfully, we can be led to the right answer, even though from a human standpoint the problem appears to be without a solution.”
Another notable experience echoed one of my own. Velma Lewis Ingraham lived in an impoverished ’near eastern’ country where she regularly encountered a desperately dirty, deprived young boy “with lovely brown eyes and a quick warm smile.’ (p. 217) She said, “There seemed to be no way of helping him with any degree of permanence.” Then one day she realized that Jesus must have seen so many people like this, and as it says in Science and Health, “(he) beheld in Science the perfect man...and this correct view of man healed the sick.” (SH 476-7) As she was giving him some coins, she realized how inadequate this was, and “Out of the depths of her heart (she) prayed: ‘Lord, open Thou mine eyes that I too may see! Let there be light!’ And suddenly there was nothing but the light of spiritual reality. She was no longer conscious of the boy or the place; ...she was only aware of God’s presence and of His spiritual, perfect universe. For several days the boy did not even come into her thought. Then one day she met him on the street, and he was completely clean, changed. She asked him, “Who told you to do these things?” And he said, ”No man...and pointed upward and said “I tell me.” That was the beginning of a complete transformation in his life.
The following experience of mine is parallel, seeing the hand of God move, and the Mind that is God speaking, being heard, and transforming.
For a number of years, I oversaw the Monday noon soup kitchen at 2nd Baptist church in my community. One raw winter day as we were cleaning up, there was a banging on the door and a man came in. At this soup kitchen we never saw people that were in such desperate condition. He had a garbage bag wrapped around his shoulders, cardboard strapped to his feet, and, as he shuffled to a table to sit down, seemed barely conscious. I brought him a bowl of potato salad, which is all we had left, and he began to shovel it into his mouth. I sat down near him and introduced myself and asked him what his name was. He mumbled something, and I asked again. He replied loudly, “Dennis!!” I said, and meant it deeply, “Dennis, I am SO glad you came here today!”
After he left and I went home, he was with me in thought. Actually, for weeks I prayed about this picture of degradation, refuting it as a lie about God’s man, as a lie about him. I remember knowing, acknowledging, insisting on man’s eternal innocency as an idea of pure Mind. I acknowledged that he was loved forever. “In Science man is the offspring of Spirit. The beautiful, good and pure constitute his ancestry. His origin is not in brute instinct...Spirit is his primitive and ultimate Source of being. God is his Father, and Life is the law of his being.” (SH 63:5) Then, one time when I turned to God again about this, what came to me was, “This is the first time anyone has ever known this about him. This is his virgin birth!” I was moved to tears. I was so grateful. And then, he completely left my thought.
Maybe a month later at a soup kitchen meal, he came in. He was clean and dressed normally, clear-eyed, and he looked right at me and spoke. It was clumsy, as though he was not used to speaking. But it was direct. He came to that noon meal off and on for a couple of months. Then I saw him riding a bike around town. And then, he didn’t come back.
Recently I had a wonderful healing for which I am deeply grateful.
One evening, the corner of my pant leg caught on a kitchen drawer and I pitched forcefully backward, landing on the stone floor, my head fully connecting with the corner of a kitchen cabinet door as I fell. I lay there. My husband called a practitioner, and she spoke to me about my untouched spiritual being right then. After a while I sat up, and the pain subsided. I went to bed shortly thereafter and slept deeply. But early in the morning I was roused to get up and go to the bathroom. The next thing I remember was my husband trying to get into the bathroom, but I was unconscious on the floor blocking the door. He roused me, but there were intense symptoms of illness. Once again, I listened to the practitioner as I lay on the floor. Eventually I was able to lie on a bed.
The practitioner shared with me many ideas, including:
“God is the creator of man, and, the divine Principle of man remaining perfect, the divine idea or reflection, man, remains perfect.” YOU are the expression of God’s being.
There’s NO REASON for this situation, because it ISN’T.
You have on the helmet of salvation, and God is supreme.
God is the source and condition of all existence and the source and condition of your existence.
I am so grateful that I was never afraid. I became clearer and could think about the adjustments to the day that needed to be made. Then my daughter called, and when I told her I’d had a fall, she didn’t ask details but was tenderly compassionate. Then remembering what she’d learned in Sunday School, clearly affirmed “There is no spot where God is not!” That made me smile. And by the time we’d finished talking, I was sitting up, ready to shower and get dressed. It was a quiet day, but I never lay down again that day. Except for a little tenderness to the back of my head, there were no more symptoms. And I continue to be vigorous and free.