Miracles?

 As I write, I am anticipating watching closely a lecture by Christian Science practitioner and teacher Heike Arneth from Germany tomorrow evening, Sunday Feb. 13 2023. The title of her talk is - Miracles re-defined: overcoming crises and finding security. The lecture is generously sponsored by First Church of Christ, Scientist, Ringwood in Victoria.

The reason that my interest has been especially aroused at this time is that it coincides with my reading of Chapter 2 of Robert Peel's Spiritual Healing in a Scientific Age, published in 1987.

Page 16 includes this: "One of the problems [with spiritual healing] is with the expressions faith healing and miracle. Neither is in the vocabulary of many who practice Christian healing wholeheartedly."

Peel then recounts "a remarkable healing of cancer experienced by Alice Newton of Leavenworth, Kansas" (p. 16), a healing that puzzled the physicians and created a stir in her community because it had apparently occurred as the result of prayer and thus was regarded as "a miracle, a setting aside of natural law as generally understood, especially when they found that Newton had lost thirty-eight and a half pounds in ... one night's experience" (p. 17).

One might ask, along with Peel "What did the disappearance of that thirty-eight and a half pounds show about the nature of matter? If God could choose to bring about such a healing, why did he permit the disease in the first place? What kind of law may be involved in such a healing? How does this relate to faith in medical means? How does it relate to Jesus' announcement of the kingdom of God within? What are the implications of such a healing for our very concept of reality?"

Peel continues: "... just such questions as these had been asked back in 1866 by a woman in Lynn, Massachusetts, who experienced a healing less dramatic in character than Newton's but vastly more far-reaching in its effect" (p. 18). Of course, here he is talking about the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy. 

He writes: "[on the third day] she read in her Bible the account of one of Jesus' healings. As she read, a flood of light poured into her thought, a sudden insight (as it seemed to her) into the heart of true being. Put in terms closer to her own, it was a revelation of the spiritual perfection of the universe as it exists in the mind of God--or, to use her later terminology, the Mind that is God" (p. 19).

Reading this reminded me of an interview with neurosurgeon Dr. Eben Alexander, published in the February 2014 edition of The Christian Science Journal. At one point, in describing his insights about "being eternal", insights gained as a result of his "miraculous" recovery from a coma - a near-death experience - Alexander says: "I would say my view of healing now is we're not just talking about healing someone who has an illness or an injury. I would say by being eternal, the only progress that we make that's in a direction of causality in that higher realm is towards love, towards oneness, compassion, forgiveness, acceptance, knowing that we are eternally and infinitely loved by all-loving, all-powerful God...

"Our infinitely powerful Creator loves us infinitely no matter what. We are here to learn lessons, so it's all about love and forgiveness--showing love to strangers, showing love to our enemies. That has infinite power and will completely undo evil in the world."

As Peel notes, in Mary Patterson's (Eddy) case, the "real miracle" can be summed up in these words: "That short experience included a glimpse of the great fact that I have since tried to make plain to others, namely, Life in and of Spirit; this Life being the sole reality of existence" (Miscellaneous Writings 1883–1896, Mary Baker Eddy, p. 24:14–18).

 How grateful I am for evidences of the applicability of Christian Science to healing in my life.

Julie Swannell