TO UNDERSTAND and TO REASON

 

25.11.12  I’ve just finished reading most of Robert Dessaix’ book A Mother’s Disgrace.  Robert attended the Christian Science Sunday school at Chatswood in Sydney, and was taught there by my son-in-law’s father. 

 

When Robert was 9 he objected to being taught in the Presbyterian Sunday School that Jesus was God.  His mother said there was a church which didn’t teach that – Christian Science.  So he took himself to that Sunday school.  He turned his back forever, he says, on mainstream Christianity after having read Billy Graham’s Peace with God.  He says, “As Turgenev has written, a religion that teaches that God sent himself in the form of his own son down to earth to offer his other sons salvation by sacrificing himself to himself – well, it’s too silly, really, to spend time even completing the sentence.”

 

He found that Christian Science didn’t expect him to ‘believe’, but to understand, to reason, and with his superior intelligence, that was what he did.  (He was studying Russian at that time, and became a lecturer in Russian at ANU (Australian National University.))

 

And, I am coming to the most interesting part as far as I am concerned.

 

He studied Russian in Moscow and while he was there as an exchange student in 1966, he smuggled Christian Science literature into Russia.  He doesn’t actually say in the book that it was Christian Science.  However, his main contact for delivering the literature was Lina Ivanovna Prokofiev, wife of the famous composer Sergei Prokofiev.  Literature was distributed to Leningrad, Vilnius and one or two other cities.  Wikepedia has a nice photo of Sergei, and tells us that Lina Ivanovna Prokofiev was a Spanish dancer – Carolina (“Lina”) Codina.

 

Robert’s way of life took him away from church, but it seems he still holds dear the truths of Christian Science in general.

 

Back to Peel’s book.  Yesterday I read the first report of a healing in the book.  And what an outstanding healing it is.  Surely no other child has been healed so completely of so many physical handicaps.  Doris Wiederkehr, the child’s mother, tells us that his problems included unformed vocal cords, a damaged heart, a serious bone condition, and cerebral palsy.  And this mother’s work of love, through her trust in God’s goodness, healed the child.

 

How we wish that the world in general would read such a testimony and seek to learn how it came about.

    

I am beginning to realise that we are being fooled into thinking that at least some of the battle in Christian Science is in trying to convince persons (in the form of the medical fraternity and physical scientists in general) that it is the truth, whereas our battle is always with impersonal error – the animal magnetism which would have us believe there is a power apart from God.

 

Joyce Voysey