Exposing the false nature of disease
Diane P. Dailey | from The Christian Science Journal
We live in an age of information overload. Television and radio, newspapers and magazines, advertisements and commercials, Internet blogs, and chat rooms inundate us with continuous coverage and sometimes frightening messages on a variety of topics—including health. Security and well-being seem ever at risk, or so it would appear.
While the word tyranny usually characterizes cruel and ruthless governments, censorship, and suppression of basic rights, it isn’t a stretch to associate tyranny with disease as well.
Disease itself seems to hold many people hostage.
Contagion, hereditary and gender-specific diseases, aging, contamination, and conditions linked to stress grip many people with fear. Conversations about illness are part of water-cooler chatter at work and discussions among family members and friends. Disease itself seems to hold many people hostage.
In a culture that seems overly preoccupied with the body and the prevention of disease through a regimen of regular and sometimes vigorous exercise, healthful foods, and the use of vitamins and medication, you‘d think the prevalence of disease and chronic conditions would diminish. Instead they appear to be on the increase. Illnesses that the medical profession terms treatable but incurable are particularly on the uptick.
Despite the consensus that disease is a normal part of life, Christian Science takes exactly the opposite view.
Despite the consensus that disease is a normal part of life, however, Christian Science—the Science of spiritual, mental healing—takes exactly the opposite view. In fact, this Science presents practical, healing solutions to disease of every kind. Based on the Bible and the teachings of Mary Baker Eddy, it provides answers to such significant questions as: Is there a genuine and reliable method of preventing disease? Can prayer alone heal disease? How can fear of disease be eliminated?
In the 19th century, Mary Baker Eddy discovered that God-enforced spiritual laws of health and well-being govern everything about us—not partially, but completely. Christian Science is unique in its explanation of the cure and prevention of disease. The laws of this Science are wholly apart from specific food choices, diet and exercise, and examining, diagnosing, or doctoring the body materially. Mrs. Eddy’s main work, Science and Health, speaks volumes about the significance of understanding that our true individuality is spiritual, rather than material.
The ever-present Christ is the spiritual authority behind health and healing.
Science and Health further points out that the ever-present Christ—“…the spirit of God, of Truth, Life, and Love, which heals mentally” (p. 137)—is the spiritual authority behind health and healing. It is this Christ that constantly reveals to us our perfection under God’s government, which eliminates the fear of disease and the subjection to medical opinions that connect disease to physiology, biology, chemistry, genetics, and heredity.
In the past few months, medical scientists have found what they consider a spate of remarkable discoveries about the correlation of specific human gene patterns with some virulent diseases. This research is apparently limited, however, in its ability to determine the extent to which people are at risk for these various illnesses, and contributes little, if anything, to the prevention or cure of diseases associated with heredity.
From a biomedical standpoint, humans can be predisposed to various diseases and conditions transmitted from generation to generation, which may appear at some point in their lives. But this perspective is based on a limited, material concept that an individual’s make-up is primarily physical. However, from the standpoint of the spiritual reality of being and our status as children of God, this assumption can be vigorously rejected and proved false. Likewise, the cycle of anxiety about inheriting diseases within families can be broken. What is required, though, is a shift in reasoning from a material view of creation to the spiritual understanding that we and the universe are created solely by God.
Mary Baker Eddy made this profound statement in Science and Health, which gives us a clear explanation of our divine inheritance: “The transmission of disease or of certain idiosyncrasies of mortal mind would be impossible if this great fact of being were learned,—namely, that nothing inharmonious can enter being, for Life is God.” She continued, “Heredity is a prolific subject for mortal belief to pin theories upon; but if we learn that nothing is real but the right, we shall have no dangerous inheritances, and fleshly ills will disappear” (p. 228).
Jesus taught that only a spiritual heritage belongs to each of us.
Certainly Jesus taught that only a spiritual heritage belongs to each of us. He understood that our true identity is at one with God and therefore expresses the perfection of our divine Parent (see Matt. 5:48). These ideas must have seemed revolutionary to Jesus’ disciples. But time and again the disciples witnessed the immediate recovery of hundreds of people from all kinds of conditions—healings that were based on spiritual law. For example, the New Testament relates how Jesus healed the vision of a man who had been sightless since birth (see John 9:1–7). Comments from Jesus’ disciples indicated that the man’s blindness was inherited, or the result of his own or his parents’ sin. Yet Jesus refuted such a suggestion and explained that this event was instead an opportunity to see the works of God—to realize the man’s true source of being. We might assume that the disciples then saw this healing as a significant opportunity to see through the tendency to accept disease as being inherited or incurable.
Viewing ourselves as the offspring of one Father-Mother God provides the understanding that we are spiritually endowed, rather than programmed with undesirable peculiarities and vulnerability to disease. Because each of us has a divine, not a human, fleshly origin, our actual makeup includes perpetual wholeness, health, and perfect functioning. By mentally insisting on and claiming a spiritual rather than a physiological heritage, we can free ourselves from the claims that life is inherently matter-based and that disease is transmitted through eggs, DNA, cells, or genes.
Our own substance—everything about us, inside and out—is not the result of mindless matter, but rather perfect good, since we are wholly derived from God, divine Spirit. Because God is the Creator of all, and God is entirely good, we are incapable of transmitting or receiving evil in any form, including disease.
The chapter “Recapitulation” in Science and Health, for example, poses the question “What is man?” and then answers: “Man is not matter; he is not made up of brain, blood, bones, and other material elements. The Scriptures inform us that man is made in the image and likeness of God. Matter is not that likeness” (p. 475). Later the passage continues, “Learn this, O mortal, and earnestly seek the spiritual status of man, which is outside of all material selfhood” (p. 476).
We are the very likeness of God in nature and makeup.
Think about it! We are Godlike. The very likeness of God, in nature and makeup. God who is divine Mind, Spirit, Life, and Love. So, what is this other, material entity that seems to be the identity of each of us? It’s a false representation of the perfect man, or idea of God. How do we free ourselves from this falsity? I’ve given this question a lot of thought.
When I first moved to California, I used to jog around Lake Hollywood, a vast reservoir in the hills overlooking Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley. It holds over two billion gallons of water, and the perimeter around the lake is more than three miles. After a purification process, the water pours out from the faucets of Los Angelenos. Unlike reservoirs in smaller towns and communities, however, Lake Hollywood isn’t dependent on rainfall to maintain required water levels. That’s because the water comes directly through an aqueduct from Northern California.
I started thinking one day about an analogy that could be made between Lake Hollywood and what Mrs. Eddy called our mental reservoir. She wrote: “Ignorant that the human mind governs the body, its phenomenon, the invalid may unwittingly add more fear to the mental reservoir already overflowing with that emotion” (Science and Health, p. 180).
Whatever ideas are needed to counteract disease come to us from God.
If our thoughts overflow with concepts of disease and suffering, we can recognize our innate ability to keep our “mental reservoir” filled instead with spiritually based truths about our well-being. The source of this spirituality is God, who is divine Truth. Whatever ideas are needed to counteract fear or disease come to us from this source. Drawing from it, we are then able to eliminate any inharmonious beliefs about God or ourselves, and, in particular, refute false laws about health and wholeness.
How do we do this? Not without a struggle perhaps. But, thankfully, it’s a mental, not a physical, struggle. Not surprisingly, the agenda of materiality is always to trick us into believing in a reality besides God and the spiritual nature of His creation.
Some of the specific ways to confront this misrepresentation and, consequently, the tyranny of disease might include the following:
- Mentally refute images of disease in the media. In order to no longer be held captive to disease, we can monitor what we take into thought, since what we entertain in our thinking can impact us negatively. We can prayerfully insist on the fact that disease is unreal. As Mrs. Eddy put it, “Why declare that the body is diseased, and picture this disease to the mind, rolling it under the tongue as a sweet morsel…? We should understand that the cause of disease obtains in the mortal human mind, and its cure comes from the immortal divine Mind” (Science and Health, p. 174).
- Conquer fear through divine Love. We usually think of the opposite of fear as courage. But the Bible statement, “Perfect love casts out fear,” gives one pause to challenge fear from another angle. From a metaphysical standpoint we can think of divine Love as always present, embracing and comforting us. So there can’t be a place for fear in our thinking. And when fear is removed from thought by divine Love, this removes its ability to take hold in the form of some disease. In a way, we might think of divine Love itself as the opposite of fear. Certainly courage is included in Love, but more than the courage to face off fear is the ability to experience exemption from it through the laws of Love.
- Realize the supremacy of God, divine Spirit. Acknowledging the spiritual fact that Spirit has created and is maintaining all of creation enables us to relinquish the belief that there is more than one power or authority for our well-being, and therefore any source for illness in our experience. This statement in Science and Health supports our effort and ultimate success: “The power of God brings deliverance to the captive. No power can withstand divine Love. What is this supposed power…?” The passage later asks, “What is it that binds man with iron shackles to sin, sickness, and death? Whatever enslaves man is opposed to the divine government. Truth makes man free” (pp. 224–225).
In my own life, I’ve experienced the effectiveness of spiritual healing through Christian Science many times. I’ve had healings of influenza, injuries, a sprained ankle, extreme internal pain, growths, hepatitis, reaction to a spider bite. And as a child, healings included polio, the effects of an automobile accident, chicken pox, whooping cough, eczema, food poisoning.
There is a spiritual foundation based on divine law for health.
Given my own application of Christian Science, as well as witnessing its effect through helping others in my healing ministry, I’m convinced that the way to counteract disease is to understand that there is a spiritual foundation based on divine law for health and wholeness. This foundation allows us to be unimpressed by media images and commentaries, or tyrannized by medical opinions to believe in a cause or source for disease. Instead, we are enabled to accept a provable fact that as spiritual beings, in reality we never have been and never can be subject to disease.
If this seems inconceivable, we can find encouragement in a Bible promise that applies to whatever rises up to oppress or tyrannize us: “In righteousness shalt thou be established: thou shalt be far from oppression; for thou shalt not fear: and from terror; for it shall not come near thee” (Isa. 54:14).
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