A heart in protest

There aren’t many things on this planet that have been alive for some 2,000 years, but last spring I stood in front of one of them. In the Waipoua Kauri Forest of New Zealand, measuring just over 45 feet in girth, Tane Mahuta stands as the largest known kauri tree in the world.

Countless trees have come and gone in that forest in the last two millennia. Wind, frost, fires, insects, invasive plants, and lumbering have all taken their toll. But this tree refused to concede. In my work as a Christian Science nurse I’m called upon to help people who are facing their own challenges, some of which seem pretty daunting. And I’m mindful of the fact that the people I help need me to be strong and steadfast—“full of faith” as Mary Baker Eddy put it in Science and Health. So the significance of this kauri tree’s sheer endurance was not lost on me.

It brought to mind a passage I’d been thinking a lot about from a collection of Mary Baker Eddy’s letters and messages to churches. It reads:

“My Beloved Brethren:—I have a secret to tell you and a question to ask. Do you know how much I love you and the nature of this love? No: then my sacred secret is incommunicable, and we live apart. But, yes: and this inmost something becomes articulate, and my book is not all you know of me. But your knowledge with its magnitude of meaning uncovers my life, even as your heart has discovered it. The spiritual bespeaks our temporal history. Difficulty, abnegation, constant battle against the world, the flesh, and evil, tell my long-kept secret—evidence a heart wholly in protest and unutterable in love” (The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, pp. 133–134).

That “heart wholly in protest” was certainly apparent in Mary Baker Eddy’s healing work, as it had been in the work of Christ Jesus. When faced with evidence of suffering, she was always ready to stage a mental protest against anything that did not reconcile with her understanding of God’s loving, merciful government of His universe. She showed great patience and tenderness toward the sufferer, while dealing decisively with the thoughts that she understood to be the source of the suffering.

The love that heals

Christian Science nursing expresses God’s tender care in very tangible, practical ways. But because it’s based on an understanding of divine Love and not mere human sympathy, it expresses a power and tenacity that brings healing. Merely human caring comes and goes. Some people may be better at expressing it than others. Some patients may be more receptive to it than others. Looking to a merely human sense of love can be a bit like sitting beside the pool of Bethesda waiting for someone to help us into the water. We’re looking for a very specific setting, just the right atmosphere, and we wistfully long for some human angel to come and get the healing water moving (see John 5:2–9).

Divine Love, on the other hand, is enduring. You can’t turn it on and off. It doesn’t run dry in difficult circumstances. It isn’t found in one place and not in another.

Jesus didn’t usually have access to a private, quiet, well-appointed room in which to treat his patients, but that never seemed to matter to him. He was much more concerned with the condition of thought—the patient’s thought, onlookers’ thoughts, and especially his own thought. He spent many hours tending the flame of his devotion to God, keeping it bright and clear. And when the sick came for healing, he was ready!

Whether Christian Science nursing takes place in a beautifully maintained facility or a hut with no running water, the heart of its practice is divine Love. The primary need in any Christian Science nursing activity is to understand and express that Love.

Joy Reges is a visiting Christian Science nurse in Reston, Virginia. She told me recently that when she’s on her way to visit a patient, she often acknowledges that she doesn’t “bring the calm—it’s already there.” In the same way, Christian Science nurses don’t really bring the love that a patient feels when they’re being nursed. They make it a little easier for the patient to accept that they’re loved by expressing that love tangibly. But the spiritual fact remains that divine Love doesn’t come and go with the Christian Science nurse. Love is actually constant, unfailing, eternal—and it heals!

More than a good Samaritan

People sometimes refer to “the good Samaritan” as a model for Christian Science nursing. There is much in that parable to recommend the Samaritan (see Luke 10:29–37), but the parallels to Christian Science nursing go only so far. First of all, the question that prompted Jesus’ telling this parable wasn’t, “How do I go about caring for my neighbor?” It was, “Who is my neighbor?” And Jesus’ answer shocked his listeners. First-century Jews had a very different perspective on Samaritans than we have today. To us, the word Samaritan is synonymous with caring. But when Jesus told the story, he knew very well that his audience hated the Samaritans. The Samaritan woman that Jesus met by the well was stunned that he would even speak to her, because “The Jews have no dealings with the Samaritans.”

And even though the parable’s Samaritan is a fine example of a human being—he is compassionate, generous, caring—the healing that we see in Christ Jesus’ own work is missing from this story. His sense of compassion went beyond loving someone while they suffered; he defeated the sense that suffering has a place under God’s government.

Heather Worley, a Christian Science nurse from Brookline, Massachusetts, says: “It’s not that in the interim, while we wait for this person to have a healing, we’ll give some physical care. It’s what am I actively doing right now, both with how I’m caring for this person and also how I’m caring for my thought about this person. Am I being active enough, am I trusting in God enough, am I expectant enough to see the healing? Not just knowing that healing can be true but see that it’s manifest.”

We can bind someone’s wounds, we can take them to the inn, we can provide financially for their care. Yet where is that “heart . . . in protest”? Mrs. Eddy wrote that Jesus’ “. . . humble prayers were deep and conscientious protests of Truth,—of man’s likeness to God and of man’s unity with Truth and Love” (Science and Health). The good Samaritan illustrates that the world is our neighborhood and everyone is our neighbor. But the care we owe these neighbors is much better illustrated by Jesus’ healing works.

Choosing to change thought

Many of Jesus’ patients had to go out of their way to get to him—by pushing through crowds, by friends tearing out roof tiles, or by walking a day’s journey into the countryside to hear him preach. I think it’s safe to say that nobody turned to Jesus out of habit. Nobody turned to him because that’s what they were used to doing, or because it’s what they were supposed to do. They had to actively turn away from old ways of thinking and acting to a radically new view of God and His healing love. One of Jesus’ main themes was: Repent, which means: Change the way you’re thinking. Mrs. Eddy tells us, “He demanded a change of consciousness and evidence, and effected this change through the higher laws of God” (Unity of Good, p 11). No matter how long we’ve relied on Christian Science for healing, we can still use that kind of repenting. Turning to Christian Science for healing is an active, informed, inspired choice—not a matter of “I’m a Christian Scientist and this is what we do.”

A Christian Science practitioner once told me that a patient who’d come to him for Christian Science treatment also applied for admission to a Christian Science nursing facility. But they turned her down because they felt that her reason for coming there was not based on expecting to be healed, but rather to pass on in a peaceful atmosphere. If you didn’t know the end of that story, you might be tempted to criticize the facility for turning her away—maybe her nursing needs were such that her only alternative would have been to go to a hospital. But by asking her to reassess her motives (and I trust this was done in a very tactful, prayerful, loving way), they challenged her to make a choice. And she did—she became more engaged in studying and praying for herself. Soon she reapplied to the facility and this time was admitted and had a beautiful healing. But to me, even more important than the physical healing, was the repentance, the willingness to be made whole—to be awakened from the dream of life in matter to a more vibrant understanding of God as Life. And to embrace the demands that Life makes on us to face life’s challenges with a protest.

That facility didn’t know what the patient would choose to do. She might have chosen to go to a hospital; sometimes people do. Christian Scientists are not here to keep people out of hospitals. We’re here to provide excellent Christian Science treatment and Christian Science nursing care to those who choose to genuinely rely on it.

Choice of care

I’ve been impressed with the fact that Mary Baker Eddy consistently respected people’s freedom and capacity to make right decisions about their care. It’s quite remarkable, really, that a woman whose heart yearned so deeply to practice and teach a purely spiritual method of healing consistently avoided imposing her views on others. I find some interesting and very instructive themes along these lines in her writings:

1. Mary Baker Eddy was very clear that a choice needs to be made between Christian Science and material forms of treatment. In medical practice, if two doctors diagnosed a condition completely differently, and recommended completely different treatments, you wouldn’t take both courses of action. It might not be an easy choice, but you’d have to choose the one you had the most confidence in. Mixing two different forms of treatment can be counterproductive, especially when the treatments are as diametrically opposite to one another as are Christian Science and material medicine. Mrs. Eddy put it quite clearly in Science and Health: “Inferior and unspiritual methods of healing may try to make Mind and drugs coalesce, but the two will not mingle scientifically. Why should we wish to make them do so, since no good can come of it?.”

2. Mrs. Eddy was not timid about stating her own preference. She made it abundantly clear that in her estimation, Christian Science was the most reliable, desirable healing method on the planet. She said, “Teach the meekness and might of life ‘hid with Christ in God,’ and there will be no desire for other healing methods” (Science and Health).

3. Given her own preference, she was remarkably respectful of other people’s choices. She pointed out the wisdom in waiting for Christ to prepare thought to accept healing. She wrote in Science and Health, “. . . all are privileged to work out their own salvation according to their light, and that our motto should be the Master’s counsel, ‘Judge not, that ye be not judged.’ ”

Are we as respectful as she was? As patient? Are we ever tempted to second-guess, or judge another’s choices? Do we realize the subtle pressure that this might inflict on another? Turning to Christian Science for healing is a priceless privilege. It’s a blessing. But it’s not a membership requirement. It’s a choice, and we need to love one another enough to respect each individual’s right of conscience when it comes to choice of care.

Christian Science nurses, acting in a professional capacity, have an ethical obligation to confine their Christian Science nursing practice to cases where Christian Science is the only form of treatment. But once that choice has been made, and a Christian Science nurse called on for assistance, it’s our job to conscientiously provide the highest expression of nursing care possible. And if someone chooses not to rely on Christian Science for healing, or doesn’t even know it’s available to turn to, that doesn’t mean we cannot pray. We can always pray about what we see, pray to keep our own thought in tune with what God sees and knows of His creation. This quiet, mental protest isn’t a personal judgment on someone’s choices, though. It’s an acknowledgement that the circle of eternal, divine Mind is so large that no one can ever truly be outside His care.

A loving heart protests

Recently I spoke with a young friend who’s in high school. He told me that his Sunday School teacher always gave his class a little assignment. She mentioned to them one spiritual idea, and they were to look for this idea’s expression all week, and then on Sunday share the ways they’d seen it evidenced in their lives. One week the idea assigned was rebirth. And my young friend thought, “Hmmm, that’s going to be hard one.”

One of his schoolmates had been out sick for a few days. That Saturday their marching band participated in a local parade. His classmate still wasn’t feeling 100 percent, but he showed up anyway, lugging his big bass drum. It was a hot day. The drum was heavy, and after some marching this boy asked the band director if he could stop and rest. He told him no, so the boy kept going until he collapsed. An emergency medical team called to the scene attempted to revive him, but could not detect a pulse. My young friend was standing near enough to see and hear what was going on and found it very disturbing. He knew—he felt deeply in a heartfelt, wordless prayer—that the death of his classmate was not God’s will. Moments later, much to the amazement of the emergency medical team, they picked up a heart beat.

Did my young friend’s prayers heal the boy? I don’t know. Others might have been praying—probably many were. But I do know one thing. That young man had a “heart . . . in protest”—he was not willing to accept the picture of a dying mortal.

My young friend’s experience made me wonder: What does it take for each of us—when we see a neighbor struggling with a chronic illness, or when a friend pours out his problems to us—to mentally rise in rebellion against the injustice of it all? Isn’t that the whole point of Christian Science—that we take this understanding of God, nurtured in the quiet closet of prayer, into the world and face down these pictures of distress with confidence and authority? We won’t all become Christian Science nurses in the public sense of that term, but to challenge suffering and to nurture the right understanding of God’s creation is part of what it means to be a Christian Scientist.

We may not know the kauri tree’s secret for survival. But the secret Mary Baker Eddy referred to in the letter quoted earlier is discoverable through prayer and practice. As we grow to understand the timeless, persistent nature of divine Love—as we comprehend its depths, let it flow through our hearts and lives—a “magnitude of meaning” is uncovered. We may find within ourselves a kauri-like tenacity that perhaps we didn’t know we had. And, ultimately, we may discover that we, too, possess hearts “wholly in protest and unutterable in love.”

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