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It is a joy and a privilege to have this opportunity
to consider with you the subject of healing for we are concerned not only with
our own well-being but we know it is also vital for the very survival of the
world.
At the time Marjorie and I received the invitation to
come to South Africa we were preparing for a seminar which was entitled, 'How
we can help our world.' We had been asking ourselves whether our private study
of Christian Science, of the Bible and of spiritual ideas, is simply for our
own benefit or whether we should be aware of some other dimension or purpose.
Is this purpose to benefit both ourselves and the world?
I would like to begin by exploring some points that
have arisen in our own experience as Christian Scientists in the area of
spiritual healing. You may then have questions or comments about Christian
Science itself. Next it may be useful to consider the way we work in Christian
Science. Finally I would like to offer an indication of the flow of the
chapters of the Christian Science textbook. This textbook together with the
Bible are our guides.
Just before we came away from England a friend
telephoned from America and in the course of conversation said that they had
watched a nation-wide television chat show in which a number of eminent doctors
had been interviewed. All these doctors said that in the course of their
medical practice they had seen every kind of incurable disease healed through
prayer, in cases where medicine had not been able to effect a cure. These
doctors went on to say that in their view the future of the healing art lay in
prayer. It is remarkable for men in that profession to come out and say this.
Of course, everyone has heard of many a case given up by the medical faculty
that suddenly starts to get better for no apparent reason. It could well be
that it is prayer that has helped to turn the tide by introducing into
consciousness a new factor of hope or expectation, or the patient has found a
conviction that he can recover, no matter what the medical books say.
True prayer is not pleading but is an affirmation of
the onliness of God's law, the eternal laws of being. The Bible is full of the
assurance that God is an ever-present help in trouble. The law ofhealing that
Christ Jesus worked from is available for us too because it is "the Lord that
healeth thee" (Ex 15:26). The Christ-Science textbook observes that "the
central fact of the Bible is superiority of spiritual over physical power"
(131:10).
There is a useful visual image that may help to show
the attitude of what we will consider together. It comes in weaving with
perpendicular warp threads and the horizontal weft threads,which weave in and
out between the warp. Think of the warp threads as the divine laws of being,
which intersect with the horizontal weft human experience. Divinity and
humanity coincide, they are interwoven. This is the symbol of the Christian
cross: the intersecting of the perpendicular and the horizontal dimensions.
All. of us, whether Christians or not, find that our experience lies at this
point of trying to bring human life into agreement with the divine
requirements. Our human experience is harmonious in the measure that we are in
accord with these divine laws. Even though we may believe we have a long way to
go, the laws are there for us all to be blessed by. It is we who have to
recognize and avail ourselves of them.
Most people know instinctively that there is no
solution to the human problem on the horizontal dimension, however diligently
they may try. Unless the perpendicular dimension of the eternal laws of being
is brought in, we have nothing reliable to relate to and we are trying to work
out the problem from within the problem, and there is no permanent solution
that way.
In the Gospel of Mark there is the story of a man who
was paralytic, and his friends wanted to bring him to Jesus for healing.
Because they could not get near the Master for the press of people they climbed
up on the roof, removed the tiling and let him down on ropes into the midst
before Jesus, and then the man is healed. But the symbol there is the man being
let down in this perpendicular dimension.
We are here in the horizontal human experience because
of the grace of God; we are held by those strong warp threads and not because
of some human happening. We are interwoven with the divine source of authority
and power.
Let us examine then some of these fundamental laws of
being,which are the warp threads on which the strands of our life-experience
are interwoven; how these laws are expressed in the Bible and are recorded
there as great historical healing incidents, and how those laws are still
available today in what we call spiritual healing in our own time.
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