Yesterday, I received a glossy, professionally produced booklet in the mail from one of three hospitals in my community. No expense was spared in the production of this brochure.
As I glanced through the stories and figures included, I was stricken by how deeply embedded into my community fabric the activities of this hospital had become.
On top of the $245,000,000 in assets they own, and the large facilities and sponsored clinics being built near and far, they claim to serve 175,000 patients annually and have 1500 workers on their payroll. Many of these employees are highly paid professionals, hundreds being doctors and nurses.
My community is not very large! Richland has around 50,000 residents. The region boasts 175,000 residents or so, but there are two other hospitals nearly as large as this one in the area.
I am grateful for the care, love and interest the hospitals have in alleviating suffering and helping people find better health. My family certainly was blessed to use their services in the delivery of our children.
What alarmed me was the huge quantity and preponderance of community thought and attention being focused on seeking medical relief, as opposed to finding help through spiritual means.
Christian Science is all about finding strength, health and well being in Spirit. Faith in matter works against faith in Spirit. The student of Christian Science has to actively guard his or her thought from the influence of matter-based thinking to succeed in spiritual healing.
Mary Baker Eddy understood the downward pull of matter-based thinking and its detrimental effect on spiritual healing when she wrote,
The universal belief in physics weighs against the high and mighty truths of Christian metaphysics. This erroneous general belief, which sustains medicine and produces all medical results, works against Christian Science; and the percentage of power on the side of this Science must mightily outweigh the power of popular belief in order to heal a single case of disease.
With 1500 doctors, nurses, aides, and administrators daily working in my little city to promote and advocate medical procedures, prescriptions and methods for my neighbors, a student of Spirit-based healing may feel a bit out numbered!
But numbers mean nothing in Science. The number One is all that counts, and that means one God, one Mind, one power.
One with God is the majority. But to experience the spiritual benefits of being at-one with God, one must fervently and vigilantly defend his mental space from antagonistic intrusion and not be unwittingly or unconsciously pulled in the opposite faith-sapping direction. It can be a very subtle temptation to lose faith in Spirit because of feeling other people’s faith in medicine all around.
“Come out and be separate,” Paul counseled.
Christian Science is the best healthcare system on planet earth today!
Thanks Evan – your constant, gentle reminders helps me to make the constant, small adjustments every day in the direction of good/God
that is quite a claim.
having sincerely sought healing on my own and with many practitioners over the years, having paid thousands of dollars for their help, and still not healed … it is not a claim I feel I could make.
Thank you for your post, Evan.
All I could think as I read this blog was, “It’s taken you this long to figure this out?”.
The pervasive rule of allopathic medicine has been a well-known fact to many all over the US for the last decade.
But I’m glad that you finally are awake to this fact. I hope now that you and others are aware, some concerted efforts to counter this influence will be made by members of the Chrisitan Science community.
I have been called to renounce the claim of medicine being the only way to have employment this past week especially. I am an IT-based employee, currently working as a contractor, and one day this week was contacted by multiple recruiters to fill one position in the pharmaceutical industry (and also was contacted about other positions in that same industry). The temptation was that since I would be working in IT, perhaps I should consider, especially being a short-term thing. Gratefully, God is always in control, and has led thought to Christian Science practice throughout the week, and has thus reduced the claims in even seeking employment this week, in an active way.
I too appreciate the work that doctors and nurses have done throughout the ages, and even in current times. However, I and many others have found complete healing through spiritual means alone, and I hold to that always as being the real medicine saving mankind.
I so appreciate the gentle reminder that we are all working on this together!
Thank you for your comments which are most welcome. When we lived in CA, a nearby Presbyterian (Hoag) hospital bombarded us with mail. I called several times to get off their mail list. I wrote many times. They kept coming. Now they have many smaller branches in all the surrounding communities. Here on an outer island, thirty miles from a very small town, in Hawaii, 3000 thousand miles away, we have started to receive glossy mailings from UCLA Medical Center in LA. They must sell their mail lists. These are addressed to my son. None of us have ever had any connection with either. They are very aggressive. Here the doctors are leaving in droves because they can’t make enough money. Over 70 left in the past year, according to the local paper.
Having witnessed a relative in the hospital in recent years, I have found that the medical community definitely doesn’t have all the answers, but don’t mind charging you for the time it takes to come up with some sort of a solution. After five days of tests, poking and prodding everything, there was no conclusion for why the condition had happened, but they turned around and promised it would happen again, and sure enough, it did almost a year later! I definitely don’t call that healing. Not only was the relative not cured, but the cost of the hospital stay and all the tests was outragious (relative didn’t have medical insurance)!
I have been told that some Christian Scientists have used medical facilities and then gone back to C.S. Teachings. Is the practice permissible?
Yes, some Christian Scientists have used the help of medical professionals for different reasons and under different circumstances. Some have used it temporarily, and then ceased. Some have tried it, found no help, and went back to strictly CS practice.
The practice of CS is always permissible!
CS is most effective though, when thought is not divided between faith in material medicine and faith in Spirit. If the truth be told, faith is typically not divided, it is one way or the other. The more weight thought throws into the scale of Spirit, and the more faith one has in Spirit, the less faith one has in matter. And that lack of faith in matter sooner strips disease of its claim to power and allows spiritual healing to happen faster.