A member of the Christian Science community in Canberra shared his thoughts on how Christian Science helps him:
Recently I have found myself being very busy trying to achieve the many goals I have set myself. These tasks seemed important and usually came with deadlines. In doing this I have realised that I have let go of my usual focus on spiritual development. As a Christian Scientist there is a commitment to the daily prayer (Church Manual p41):
Thy kingdom come
Let the reign of divine Truth, Life and Love be established in me, and rule out of me all sin
And may Thy Word enrich the affections of all mankind
And govern them
I found that I had almost just been saying the words to the daily prayer, for example, without really having a full commitment to it. I had been studying the Daily Bible Lesson but not with the same degree of commitment or focus as a result of this busy work. I had foregone the focus and commitment to developing spiritually and instead had been focusing on getting this busy work done. The busy work itself had taken over my attention.
Even the busy work – those little goals – weren’t being achieved with the same degree of freedom, the same degree of perfection, I had previously been able to achieve. When I had taken a more spiritual or a more focused attention to the spiritual side of my life there didn’t appear to be such a focus on busy work or human activity, and the busy work didn’t seem so difficult.
In my commitment to Christian Science there is the understanding it is more than just the Daily Prayer or doing the Daily Bible Lesson. It is a commitment to a way of living and that way of living has an impact on what happens. In her textbook Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, Mary Baker Eddy writes (p423):
The Christian Scientist, understanding scientifically that all is Mind, commences with mental causation, the truth of being, to destroy the error. This corrective is an alterative, reaching to every part of the human system. According to Scripture, it searches “the joints and marrow,” and it restores the harmony of man.
The inharmony on display because of the busy work had been brought about by my neglect of the spiritual recognition that all is brought about by mental causation. I had to remember to trust God to give me the order of work – He knew what was important and what needed to be done in what order. It was necessary to find that quiet mental place to pray; to silence the material senses and intrusive noises. Once again I turned to Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, where Mary Baker Eddy writes (p15):
In order to pray aright, we must enter into the closet and shut the door. We must close the lips and silence the material senses. In the quiet sanctuary of earnest longings, we must deny sin and plead God’s allness. We must resolve to take up the cross, and go forth with honest hearts to work and watch for wisdom, Truth, and Love. We must “pray without ceasing.” Such prayer is answered, in so far as we put our desires into practice. The Master’s injunction is, that we pray in secret and let our lives attest our sincerity.
I shall be forever grateful for Christian Science. The study of Christian Science and application to my life has allowed me to make significant long lasting and beneficial changes to my way of thinking and living. Christian Science is to me, an applied, practical science that can be used everyday in one’s life. The application of Christian Science in this instance has allowed me to be free from the constraints of ‘busyness’ and to be much more productive both materially and spiritually.
A Daily Lift by Deborah Huebsch, a Christian Science practitioner and teacher.
In this brief podcast Deborah relates how one of her beloved horses was diagnosed with an incurable kidney condition. She describes how she prayed and how this passage from Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy helped her. Three months later the vet announced that there was no longer any trace of this condition.
The effect of this Science is to stir the human mind to a change of base, on which it may yield to the harmony of the divine Mind. p162
Throughout her life, Mary Baker Eddy, the Founder of Christian Science, lived in an area of the United States prone to climatic extremes. Having grown up on a farm, she was certainly aware of the impact that weather conditions could have on people’s economic and physical well-being. And in teaching Christian Science, she identified weather forces as subordinate to God.
Irving Tomlinson was a student of Eddy and worked on her staff for a number of years. He described her approach to the weather this way:
Mrs. Eddy taught us that weather conditions are not beyond God’s control, and that they can be corrected through right prayer. She made it clear that Christian Scientists are not to attempt to control or govern the weather. We should know that God governs the weather and no other influence can be brought to bear on it. She said we are to be particularly watchful to guard against any disastrous effects of storms.
Eddy’s correspondence and other writings indicate that she specified violent weather elements in particular as requiring ongoing prayerful attention. …
Clara Knox McKee was Eddy’s personal maid in 1906 and 1907. She recounted an experience that helps to illustrate further the distinction Eddy made between attempting to control the weather and holding it as a subjective state of human consciousness:
One day Mrs. Eddy called her students into her study and pointed to a very black cloud, shaped like a cornucopia, coming toward the house in direct line with her front study window. She asked each one to go to a window and face it, and to realize that there were no destructive elements in God’s creation. While the cyclone came whirling straight toward Pleasant View, before it reached within a mile or so, it parted and went around Concord and into the mountains, doing very little damage in our neighborhood. …
Mary Baker Eddy’s convictions regarding God, prayer, weather, and climate grew out of her Christianity. As a student of the Bible, she read in the Hebrew Scriptures accounts of prophetic appeals to God in times of drought. She knew well the Gospel stories of Jesus Christ stilling a storm on the Sea of Galilee. Unlike some others, however, Eddy came to believe that these incidents were neither miracles nor interruptions of the natural order. Instead, she classified them as demonstrations of divine law, which overruled what she identified as the limitations associated with laws of nature.
These statements are from an answer compiled by the researchers at the Mary Baker Eddy Library (menu option: Questions). The complete answer to the question: What did Mary Baker Eddy say about the weather? can be read here:
Scriptures inform us that man is made in the image and likeness of God. Matter is not that likeness. The likeness of Spirit cannot be so unlike Spirit. (Science and Health p475:8)
If Life is God, as the Scriptures imply, then Life is not embryonic, it is infinite. (Science and Health p550:21)
Spirit is the real and eternal; matter is the unreal and temporal. Spirit is God, and man is His image and likeness. Therefore man is not material; he is spiritual. (Science and Health p468:12)
An interview with Beth Packer, a Christian Science practitioner from NSW, Australia
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When a baby goat went missing, Beth learned a profound spiritual lesson about our oneness with God. She shares how a deepening understanding of this central Christian Science concept has helped bring healing to other areas of her life—and how it can in yours, too.
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Daily Lift by Beth Packer– If I know, you know.
A quick listen …
Sentinel Watch Podcast: The full interview with Beth.
If you enjoyed the ideas shared in this short Daily Lift podcast, then hear more of how Beth used these ideas to solve other problems in this longer interview.
This recording is of the readings on the topic: Miracles – Divine Law in Action
The Sea of Galilee at sunrise.
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The miracle introduces no disorder, but unfolds the primal order, establishing the Science of God’s unchanging law.
There is to-day danger of repeating the offence of the Jews by limiting the Holy One of Israel and asking: “Can God furnish a table in the wilderness?” What cannot God do?
The members of the Christian Science community in Canberra share their experiences and thoughts on Christian Science:
For quite some weeks I had been having trouble walking. I could move around but my walking ‘style’ was more akin to a ’duck waddle’. My hips were causing me pain and my style of locomotion and gait had altered to try and accommodate and ameliorate the pain. For someone who is quite comfortable undertaking various sports, going to the gym and doing manual labour this wasn’t a very good state of affairs.
As a Christian Scientist I had turned to our textbook, Science and Health With Key to the Scripturesby Mary Baker Eddy, and to the Bible for support. I continued my search for any passages within those books to assist my spiritual growth and understanding and application of Christian Science to healing my problem. After about a fortnight of such study and still having a ‘duck waddle’ walk I was no better.
One of the hymns (565) in the Christian Science Hymnal has the words:
Cleanse the lepers, heal the sick. Cast out demons. Raise the dead. Truth is revealed in every place, Throughout all time, throughout all space
In searching through the Bible, I was acutely aware of the healing works of Jesus Christ, and indeed hymn 565 glorifies such healings. Try as I might I still couldn’t shake my problem. As an adherent to Christian Science I have been able to overcome a number of physical problems by turning to our texts for comfort and support. I know this method of healing works – but this time it was proving difficult. I was still undertaking work; I still had to move around; I still had things to do – but it was becoming physically taxing. Some days seemed rather long.
I asked my wife to pray with me on this situation. Together we have had many quick healings of physical problems. After a very brief discussion with her I started to ‘waddle’ down the hallway. I had not travelled more than three metres when all pain and difficulty with my problem disappeared. Once again I was amazed at how supremely effective and immediate Christian healing can be. It is not magic; it is not mind control; it is not drugs; it is not hypnosis – it is Christian healing.
Having some understanding of Christian Science and Christian healing with previous problems, I know I shouldn’t really have been amazed but still my expectations of relief being so immediate were more than met. I still continue to be ever so grateful for the power of Christian healing and its application in my life.
Mary Baker Eddy in Science and Health (p.138) states:
Jesus established in the Christian era the precedent for all Christianity, theology, and healing. Christians are under as direct orders now, as they were then, to be Christlike, to possess the Christ-spirit, to follow the Christ-example, and to heal the sick as well as the sinning. It is easier for Christianity to cast out sickness than sin, for the sick are more willing to part with pain than are sinners to give up the sinful, so-called pleasure of the senses. The Christian can prove this to-day as readily as it was proved centuries ago.
I had read and reread this passage, but I had been busy with material physical work and should have been busy with God’s work. It was this realisation that came to me afterwards. I had spent time searching through the texts but had not been giving the spiritual work the due deference and application it should have been accorded.
Although coming to Christian Science later in life, I am so very grateful for having found it.
The members of the Christian Science community in Canberra share their experiences and thoughts on Christian Science:
In our back yard in Canberra we have certain sections of the garden fenced off as a chicken run. One afternoon I was down in the bottom corner of the chicken’s area checking for eggs. On this day the chickens had been particularly industrious and had dug some quite deep holes and unearthed some old timbers that I had not known were there. As I stepped back from the hutch I felt a sharp pain in my left foot. I looked down to find that I had stepped on a piece of wood that had a very long, rusty nail sticking out of it. The nail had gone right through my plastic yard shoes and was now lodged deep in my foot. It had obviously been buried for some time and now the nail was not only rusty but muddy and yucky with chicken droppings. I pulled it out and went up to the house to wash it off.
As I walked back very fearful ideas started filling my thought. Not long before I had heard someone tell of symptoms of tetanus and I found myself worrying that I had never had a tetanus injection ever.
At first I thought: Why am I thinking these thoughts? I never think like this! I am not normally a fearful person. I’ve been a student of Christian Science all my life and it has taught me that what I think is very important. The quality of my thoughts determines my experience, so thinking fearfully was strange to me. Then it dawned on me – these were not really my thoughts! These thoughts came only as suggestions. I love that word suggestion; it means that I have the option of accepting or rejecting something. This was something that I would certainly reject. In that moment I felt no ownership of these thoughts. I knew that I didn’t have to analyse them, or wonder: Why did I think this? or delve into what fears might be lurking in my thinking for me to produce these thoughts. Because I felt no ownership of them I could simply discard them.
That was the end of the matter. I washed my foot but there was no pain and it immediately stopped bleeding. Later that day after my shower when I dried my foot, I couldn’t even find the place. There were never any repercussions from the incident.
The lesson I learned that day has stayed with me. Nowadays I am more alert to the implications of this word suggestion. God never suggests; only human reasoning suggests. God doesn’t give you options; He is just good and His word is final.
I am becoming more practised now at recognising suggestions and not owning all thoughts that come to me. I know I don’t need to analyse a suggestion; I don’t need to delve into it; I don’t need to feel guilty for thinking it. I just reject it with a very firm: That’s not my thought! When I say this, I know that it isn’t my thought because it isn’t of God. I know that God doesn’t give me fearful thoughts therefore fearful thoughts are not my thoughts. Learning this has so simplified my prayers. I use this line all the time now: That’s not my thought! And then I let it go. Only good, healthy, harmonious, progressive thoughts are mine because these stem directly from God’s goodness.
Stand porter at the door of thought. Admitting only such conclusions as you wish realized in bodily results, you will control yourself harmoniously. When the condition is present which you say induces disease, whether it be air, exercise, heredity, contagion, or accident, then perform your office as porter and shut out these unhealthy thoughts and fears. Exclude from mortal mind the offending errors; then the body cannot suffer from them.
(Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy p392:24-32)
Isn’t it Love that makes us happy? Isn’t it Love that heals our hurts and fears? Isn’t Love the thing that at every stage of our lives we need in order to flourish and thrive, not just survive?
Isn’t it Love that makes life worth living? Isn’t it Love and only Love that can bring ‘… on earth peace, goodwill to men’?
Golden Rule
Love is what unites us all. No matter what our religion or philosophy, Christian, non-Christian, atheist, sectarian, Love is at the heart of us all. In fact, most great spiritual thinking has the Golden Rule as a core value.
Judaism says, ‘What is hateful to you do not do to your neighbour.’
Buddhism – ‘Hurt not others with that which hurts yourself.’
Sikhism – ‘Treat others as you would be treated yourself.’
Islam – ‘Not one of you truly believes until you wish for others what you wish for yourself.’
In the Christian Bible, Christ Jesus says, ‘… all things whatsoever you would that men should do to you, do even so to them.’
Love for one another is at the core of all of them.
However, this Love that is such a core principle, has to be more than mere human affection. So, what then is it?
What Does the Bible Say?
The Bible does tell us very clearly when it says in 1 John, ‘God is Love’.
For many, that term ‘God’ is variously thought of as the non-physical, all good, supreme Being; the governing benevolent power in our lives and of the universe. Too often though, we can also overlay our sense of God with all sorts of human traits and limitations. But, to think of the supreme, wholly good, governing power of all things, as Love, lifts our thoughts of God beyond the human into something far greater; it lifts it into the realm of the divine. It takes away a sense of the distance and unknowability of God, the humanness and variability, and brings it to the here and nowness, the closeness of Love, of what we already know within the core of ourselves.
A Powerful Force
It makes Love a powerful force in our lives.
Love is the true essence of all religion. This is certainly true of Christian Science. I grew up in Christian Science, but you can’t inherit an understanding of what a religion has to offer. There has to come a point when you decide for yourself that its ideas and Principles are right and good.
Personal Experience
For me it was this sense of God as Love, that helped me see its worth. Like most of us, I went through a period where I felt lost and alone, and very unloved, but it was the inner voice that kept telling me how much God loved me and knew me, that blew away the darkness and brought me into the light – the light of feeling loved. It literally transformed me.
In fact, the founder of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy, has made Love an essential quality for being a Christian Scientist. She said, “Christian Scientists, their children and grandchildren to the latest generations, inevitably love one another with that love wherewith Christ loveth us; a love unselfish, unambitious, impartial, universal, — that loves only because it is Love.” (Pulpit and Press p21:1)
Original Christianity
It’s a high ideal to live up to, but no less a standard than Jesus set for original Christianity. Original Christianity loves without discrimination; unites and never divides; values a person by the quality of character not material riches. This original standard is at the heart of Christian Science.
Find Out More
If you would like to know more about this religion of Love, please meet us at our Sunday Services (10.00 am) and our Wednesday Testimony Meetings (6.15 pm). We are located on the corner of Macquarie and Bligh Streets in Barton. Sunday School for students up to the age of 20 is also at 10.00 am – new students are always welcome.
This article was contributed by Beth Packer who is a full-time Christian Science healer.
Christian Science Canberra 