Prejudging Spiritual Healing

She did not know it was Telesphoros. But she described his manifestation perfectly. It was 20 years after her childhood testimony that I discovered its meaning.

No prayer involved - Christian or otherwise.

As a child of four, in the throes of a fever, my sister saw hooded Telesphoros, ninefold round the bed, exhaling in unison.

The fever lifted.

Mondo bizarro. Selah.

There's nothing particularly *Christian* about the *Science*.

See Edelstein, E. & L. 'Asclepius: Collection and Interpretation of the Testimonies' (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998). In print!

Christ the copycat? Or just eternal syncretic play?

What was Christ, anyway?

That old brazen serpent, writhing on a pole...

I would suggest that anyone who wants to understand the Christian Science perspective begin by visiting the Christian Science Publishing Society's website at www.spirituality.com.

Christian Science has never said that it is wrong to use medical treatment, nor that sickness is a punishment from God. The Christian Science textbook (which is a companion to the Holy Bible), titled Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, by Mary Baker Eddy, has several passages allowing choice of treatment. Christian Science is inspiring and encouraging, not restricting, condemning nor punishing. I grew up in Christian Science and it gave me a wonderful sense of freedom and joy. I never for a minute felt deprived, abused or neglected by my mother's choice of Christian Science over medical treatment for me. In fact, I felt quite the opposite. I knew that our family's consecration to Christian Science practice 24/7 was the reason for my excellent health. Healing of physical and other difficulties always came about in the way that Christian Science taught me that it would. I did have some difficult physical challenges some times, but they were excellently met in Christian Science.

Now I'm a mother, and I'm raising my child with the excellent health care system of Christian Science that I grew up with. A Christian Science practitioner once told me to let God tell me whether or not to take my daughter to a doctor, and that advice has served me well. In the past there were a few instances when I took my daughter to a doctor because I was fearful and didn't know what to do. But as I've grown in my understanding of Christian Science and my confidence in trusting God, I've felt less of a need for turning to a human doctor and more solid faith in God's loving care, which is always present and reliable. There are Christian Science nurses that I've turned to at times for advice about practical, nonmedical care, and each time their expert help has made a world of difference.

Christian Science has taught me to be very alert to my my daughter's needs, and I often feel God urging me to pray for her, sometimes in the middle of the night. Each time I'm obedient to this urging, things turn out very well, and it becomes apparent later on why I was urged to pray so diligently. As a result, my daughter is growing in her own confident trust in God and has been learning a lot about how to pray for her own health and safety. She has had a healthy school year as a result and has not caught the contagious illnesses that other children in school have caught this year. Her experience growing up with the freedom of Christian Science is echoing my own childhood experience in Christian Science.

It is perfectly understandable how many people would consider spiritual healing an impossibility, a relic from the past or simply the result of "the power of suggestion." I might agree if it were not for my own personal experiences, as well as the experiences of others I have come to know since becoming familiar with Christian Science almost 20 years ago. Prior to hearing about Christian Science I had spent many years and many thousands of dollars in an attempt to be healed. My condition had been variously diagnosed as bipolar disorder, glandular problems,and systemic yeast overgrowth among many others. I had exhausted all conventional medical treatment with no lasting result and, in my continued search for healing, had resorted to many nontradional therapies, even going so far as to spend a month in Mexico receiving treatment not authorized in the U.S. I had also been to hypnotists, accupressurists and new age healers with no lasting results. In desperation I had tried "laying on of hands" faith healing and had gone so far as to have an "exorcism" in hopes of gaining relief. Nothing worked. Christian Science literally saved my life. Within 6 months of beginning to study Christian Science all former symptoms had dissappeared and I was able to resume a normal life for the first time in many years. I was healed of addiction to ativan which had initially been prescribed many years earlier by a well meaning physician. I was also healed of addictions to alcohol and cigarettes which I had been turning to constantly to gain temporary relief. I was not a religious person when I came across Christian Science and I had no more "faith" in it than I did any other form of treatment that I had tried. The plain fact is that it worked when all other avenues had failed. Anyone with my particular experience would be convinced of the validity of Christian Science. I would suggest to anyone that they honestly investigate before coming to conclusions.

Founder Mary Baker Eddy has a number of things in common with the Transcendentalists (Emerson and Thoreau) and Theosophy (Madame Blavatsky) of that same time period.

They were all substantially influenced by the Hindu Vedas and Vedanta. You can see this better by reviewing Christian Science beliefs in the link below.

My grandmother was a devout Christian Scientist and we were very close in my childhood years. On the other hand, my father felt nothing but contempt, because his own mother had allowed his youngest sister to die of acute peritonitis, rather than seek medical assistance.

When she fell and broke her own hip, my grandmother layed up in bed for a couple of weeks before finally acquiesing, and accepted hospitalization and standard medical treatment.

There is nothing in CS that prohibits conventional medical treatment, but old school believers probably resisted medical care with more diligence than those with a modern mindset in these matters. My grandmother participated in many prayer groups over the years, and Christian Science was deeply important to her.

The Church of Christian Science is anything but mainstream Christianity, and historically they seem to have adopted a protective stance with a rather opaque presentation of their beliefs to outsiders.

I think such claims of spiritual healing have to be considered as anecdotal - all we know with reasonable certainty is what we personally experience, and even that can be dead wrong as to interpretation.

Still, it's good to see Christian Science as more forthcoming these days......

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Science

Hello Bios,

I do not think that suggestion and prayer are necessarily that different, nor reciting mantra or affirmation. There is a different stance taken in them perhaps, but I believe that they work in similar ways. Intention can be, as you say, anything one may want it to be. The intention of "healing" seems a very generalized term for aiming at some 'betterment'. Toward better health.

But it is the setting of thought, and the focus upon that thought or 'vision' that is one of the commonalities. It is US setting in OUR minds a new or different intention that may change the course of events in our lives or the lives of others. Mostly in our lives, I believe. Even the recipient of prayer must have an openness to change for change to occur.

We are not unlike computer software in that we run on preconditioning and programming. We are all changeable and little is absolute or fixed or certain.

If results are what matter then let's look at the results. A 1989 study by the American Medical Association found that the death rate for a variety of illnesses was higher for Christian Scientists than for the general public, including having double the death rate due to cancer and a 2 to 4 year decrease in life expectancy for Christian Scientists.

A 1991 study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention comparing the death rate of Christian Scientists and Seventh-Day Adventists showed that the death rate for Christian Scientists was nearly twice that on the Seventh-Day Adventists.

I am not doubting that miracles do occur and I would personally hit my knees if my child was ill. However the truth is that on average spiritual healing alone means that you are more likely to die than someone who gets modern medical help.

To those who condemn one who does not heal is patient in Christian Science, how do they feel about the medical doctor who does not heal his patient?

Hi Just,
You say that the difference between suggestion and prayer (to heal) is their respective intention...I don’t understand, how so?
Suggestion in the sense of inducing a sensation or action in a receptive person can have any intention. But let say it’s done to heal, wouldn’t it be the same thing as “praying” to heal?

I was raised in Christian Science and had many wonderful healings during my childhood including that of a broken arm in less than a week, just before I started kindergarten. This was witnessed by many, as I clearly broke my arm in an accident in front of several neighbors and their children. I also experienced a quick healing of asthma, and childhood diseases such as measles and chicken pox.
As a teen, I survived a potentially dangerous interlude with a car while riding my horse along a heavily traveled road and I feel I was divinely protected during incidents with a stalker.
Today I enjoy an active lifestyle, free of health problems and worries. I am so grateful!
My answer to the question on what are results? Results are: there is no longer a problem. No, death is not results. The patients know when they are healed and it is undeniable by all around them.
There is indeed over 100 years of documented healings in the Reading Rooms' volumes and I invite everyone to come in and read them. These are healings from people around the globe that are substantiated by witnesses, some have been documented by medical professionals.
Christian healing is a reality, it is ongoing and taking place right now, and those who practice it must be allowed to continue to have that freedom. God is the greatest safety net.

To you CSists,

Yes, and the people who converge on Lourdes, France every day also experience the same miraculous cures....They spend money to get a little water bottle which supposedly scared, holy or whatever and all their ills will be cured.

Yet, when my in-laws, who are devout Catholics, came back with their little pitiful bottle of water, both of them fell ill....and had to see a medical doctor.

Guess what, they contracted a virus through that miraculous cure....

My response has more to deal with the responders' comments than with the article itself.

It alarms me that folks responding to this article are throwing Christian Science into the mix with every sort of healing attempt that isn't medical, stirring it casually, and drawing conclusions about it. Most of the comments in this blog are pitifully ignorant of Christian Science.

Christian Science IS Chrisitian and it is scientific. To make the statement that it is not shows a gross ignorance on the part of the writer.

To claim that somebody has offered 1 million dollars to prove a healing through prayer must be a joke. Unless his conditions are absolutely ridiculous and unattainable, he would lose his money in a flash. There are thousands of documented healings of people who have been diagnosed by the medical profession prior to being healed through Christian Science treatment alone--many as incurable.

I have watched prayer work in my family for over 60 years. Kids, foster kids, grandkids, great grandkids all have been healed through prayer alone. These healings are not removing splinters or curing headaches (although it works with them, too). I have watched broken bones be set and mend normally, VD be cured, mental depression eliminated, accidents healed, childhood diseases cured in record time, medically diagnosed "major" diseases cured completely, stroke healed completely in fewer than 5 days, hearing restored, and many more I can't remember right now.

When dealing with our foster children, we always took them to their medical appointments as prescribed by the family and children services case workers, but more often than not, they were healed through our prayers before they even got to the appointment.

Not understanding the subject about which he is speaking should preclude a wise man from discussing it. Mr. Davis is a respected and successful Christian Science practitioner. He has years of experience with healing people through prayer. These people come to him with all sorts of maladies and are people of all ages from all over the world. He knows whereof he speaks. His writing this article is for the purpose of expressing an opinion based on years of experience as a bona fide practitioner of Christian Science.

Perhaps readers don't agree with his opinion, but civility, politeness, and decency should prevail in the comments about what he has written. Anything less is unworthy of the contributor.

Hello Bios,

I have the sense that prayer or it's ancestors were in practice before the wheel, so I am not sure that you have the chronology correct.

However, to your question, what IS the difference really? Perhaps it is the affirmation of a different intention, so different outcome, than the current experience.

As a child my parents relied entirely on medical professionals for my care. I was ill often and found the many prescriptions to be only a slow road to temporary relief. I had surgery at the age of 12 and found that experience to be terrifying and in some regards even cruel. I remember suffering through extended recuperation periods from all of the so called childhood diseases under the care of physicians having faithfully received all of the prescribed inoculations and having followed their advice for prevention of these diseases.

As a young adult I became aware of Christian Science. Because I had not been satisfied with the results I had received from the medical profession I decided to put Christian Science to the test. I found that Christian Science is an effective healing method. The healings I have experienced through Christian Science prayer have taken place more quickly and with less pain than I experienced under medical care. I have relied entirely on Christian Science for my health care for over 25 years. Allergies and organic problems have been completely healed. My children, who are now adults, have also been cared for through Christian Science treatment. Under Christian Science treatment they have been much healthier than I ever was under medical treatment and they have suffered far less from illness and have had much quicker recuperation periods when they were ill. The most outstanding Christian Science healing I have witnessed was when one of my children at the age of 2 was healed completely of measles in a 24 hour period.

MRS,
What is the difference between the old fashioned power of suggestion and what you are describing? Are you not re-inventing the wheel?

“It’s the results that matter”

These two cases are screaming two obvious results loud and clear. Does Mr. Davis only see the “results” he wants to see and deny those that contradict his beliefs?

And the term “christian science” sounds ridiculous. If it’s science, let’s call it science.

Dear Phil, I am here because it's my month to do COP work on the internet in SoCal, and found your blog.

This is what I ask people:

Have you ever been to a CS reading room and spent a few hours reading from the bound volumes? Over 100 years of Christian healing have been recorded there. Millions of people from around the world have been healed by prayer as learned in the Christian Science Church, but that fact is practically unknown. People only hear about the losses, which are very few by comparison, and then form quick opinions. I think it's called prejudice.
The general public does not understand that when people have been healed quickly and permanently over many years that it's only natural to want to continue in that way. However, we do not believe that anyone should suffer, and if children are not healed quickly, a doctor should be called in.
Thank you for your presence of mind in this web.

I mean, seriously, half the stuff 'missionaries' start waving Bibles at as 'spiritual crises' ...they don't *look.* A good dose of B and C vitamins would do wonders for a lot of folks out there who are kind of noddy, ...they're malnourished on crap, a lot of the time, often drinking too much and not putting anything back, under all kinds of stress and just shut down.

You, columnist, don't sound like you're a fool about stuff like that, but still kind of speaking for it. This ain't a cargo cult of our bone-rattle-shaking past, dressed up in a book, this is real people, real bodies, real lives, and if we're careful, *real science.*

No shortage of hurt out there in the world, that people need to reserve it all for a book. Let's use everything we got.

I would certainly be the last one to say that spiritual healing does things. In the recurring 'Christian Science' and similar Evangelical cases, though, it's consstently about kids being subjected to ordeals and deprivation of basic, reliable, and often elementary treatments in order to make it 'prove something about faith.'

I'm not a big fan of Western medicine's mechanistic-only ways, but they are in fact the best tool out there for *many* jobs, and any purported *healer* would be foolishly irresponsible not to make full use of those tools, usually in the hands of those who are trained for them.

Spiritual healing as our ancestors knew it was no mere talismanic recitation or exercise in claiming it's a 'test of faith,' ...In a way it was a science of its own, just, all to often, no course of amoxycillin. A lot of folk cures degenerated that way, too, particularly as the knowing was suppressed rather than necessarily explored and refined: amusingly, some scoff and say "People think rhinocerous horn increases male potency ," and I just say, "Well, the original cure wasn't *going to the store,* ... some shaman says to someone looking for a pill, "Go get some rhinocerous horn," they'd darn well have to get some exercise and come up with some confidence in their virility by the time they got it. :)

Just reading from a book and ritualizing the suffering of being sick as a show of your own 'faith,' calling it a 'miracle' cause it rarely works when someone recovers from something bad...

That's not a healer's trade, it's a marketer's.

Some of this stuff don't take miracles. Sometimes it's about sending someone to the doctor and making darn sure they don't short their TB meds and breeding superstrains cause someone says 'faith based' initiatives are better than proper health care.

Some traditional stuff just isn't *made* for what we have now. Some of it's a last resort cause there was once nothing better, other of it is even just so those who survive can feel they did everything they can.

Spiritual healing *never* comes about from someone holding themselves or another *hostage* cause they'd rather have a 'miracle' than the obvious. As someone who's had to pull some stuff where, Gods help em, I was the best they could do, cause they didn't have *access* to the kind of health care these people can hire lawyers to *scorn...*

Nah, I don't get it. Just don't get it. But I've seen it. Kids get subjected to all manner of tortures by people who think 'the divil's in em' for being a little wierd or uppity or sickly,...Hel, in Texas they even passed a law that you can't *sue* some charlatan 'faith healer' who hurts your kid in an 'exorcism' for money or whatever else they get out of it.....

I say, give the kids the darn insulin. They can be whip themselves penitent later as adults if that's how they feel about it.

"I think that depends, doesn't it? It depends on whether the parents are getting results."

If they were getting results, there wouldn't be time to raise major lawsuits while watching a sick kid die painfully from lack of a shot of insulin.

You, Mr. Davis, and those like you are the devil and his demons in disguise!

Thankfully I believe in neither your God nor the Devil.

Christian Science is neither Christian nor Science. I had the unfortunate experience to witness the death of my manager quite a few years ago. The man was in agonizing pain and his wife wanted to get him relief via medication. Your freakish faith healer forbid it and sat by his bed watching him writhe in agony praying over him....but your God did not listen, neither did the cancer.

His wife finally sought a court order to stop your cult from interfering...unfortunately is was to late. He died two weeks after!

People like you are Charlatans who should answer to society. How dare you sit here and proclaim that prayer heals.

If that were true, science and medicine would have never had to progress, no need for health insurance, no need for doctors, nurses, hospitals, ets. Just give your money to the "church", and we will pray you healthy...

What a sad joke....

Just what are "results?" Is death a result? And how long does one wait for results? And how do we know what "result" God wants? Does God want the child to die? If so, do we incur God's wrath by attempting to intervene? Does God want the child to live? If so, do we incur God's wrath by failing to take advantage of the medical treatments available?

If it's my child, I opt to take the treatment -- and the chance of getting on God's wrong side. I'll take that hit for my kid any day. After my child is old enough to make such decisions, he or she can decide what's best.