Bird flu, any flu—stop the fear

An editorial cartoon published a few weeks ago showed yet another hurricane—this one named “Avian Flu”—heading toward the White House in Washington, DC. The fearful image of impending devastation is just one of the ways people’s fears of bird flu are being stirred up.

Another is the continuing coverage of the 1918 global flu pandemic and the conviction that this is what lies ahead for us. Reports on that pandemic present a monolithic picture of helplessness and death; they do not report on something that more than one researcher noted at the time: If you defeat the fear, you defeat the disease.

For instance, to help doctors respond to the 1918 pandemic, 50 sailors volunteered to be exposed to all forms of the sickness. They were injected with the disease, exposed to patients suffering from it, even given jars of germs to breathe. But none of them got sick!

An article in the Oakland, California, Enquirer at the time commented: “These fifty young men volunteered to act as subjects upon which to be experimented. This showed clearly that they did not fear the disease. In other words, they could not acquire what they did not fear. Since their fear of the disease was gone, the disease was absolutely nonexistent, even though every effort was made to force it on them.” The article concluded that influenza cases would cease if everyone did as these sailors had done, “namely, eliminate fear of the disease” (Christian Science Sentinel, April 12, 1919).

Many years earlier, Mary Baker Eddy had already proved that to destroy fear is to eliminate disease. In Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, a handbook for spiritual healing, Mrs. Eddy wrote of the prayer that constitutes Christian Science treatment: “Always begin your treatment by allaying the fear of patients. Silently reassure them as to their exemption from disease and danger. Watch the result of this simple rule of Christian Science, and you will find that it alleviates the symptoms of every disease.”

Fear instigates disease by suggesting to us that we are mortal beings living within a material environment, where disease can develop and suddenly strike. It implies that disease can act as an independent entity, gain momentum, and even become unstoppable.

Fear knows nothing of God because its frame of reference is finiteness and mortality. Fear cannot conceive of the infinite Love that is God.

To whatever degree you and I accept fearful thoughts about disease (or anything else), we enter the arena where fear seems to dictate outcomes. But we truly don’t need to go there or stay there, if we’ve strayed in that direction—and here’s why: You and I are ideas of Spirit, inseparable from our heavenly Father-Mother.

Fear and disease are no part of our—or anyone’s—identity, heritage, future. We aren’t helpless victims, waiting for the disease to strike. We never have been, never will be. We are children of omnipotent Love, which is well able to defeat fear. Love always has, always will.

There is no mortal component to our being, which is spiritual, and therefore nothing for fear to fasten itself upon. And since fear is the root of disease, if we stop fear, we stop disease.

A Christian Scientist, who survived the 1918 pandemic, described how she conquered fear when she faced the flu. “I awakened one night, shortly after retiring, with every symptom and to mortal sense with so much fever that it seemed for a little time that fear would conquer.... but in a few moments I grasped the situation as a testing time and at once knew that God, divine Love, is always with us and cares for His own. Then words from the Ninety-first Psalm came to me and I fell asleep, to awaken some hours later with no sense of discomfort or pain” (The Christian Science Journal, October 1919).

This woman was just one of many Christian Scientists who shared their experiences of overcoming influenza through prayer during that epidemic.

For some, the disease was just a passing blow. For others, it was more serious: “My son and I both were very recently healed of . . . influenza in its worst form. He developed acute lung trouble, and it seemed that we would both go down into ‘the valley of the shadow of death,’ but Truth was victorious, and we came out on the hilltop, rejoicing and praising our heavenly Father for His love and goodness to all of His children . . .” (The Christian Science Journal, June 1919).

One important point that comes through in the published testimonies of Christian Science healing from this period is the testifiers’ alertness to pray promptly and also their conviction that God is an ever-present help.

One of the ways viruses are reported to operate is by fooling the body’s immune system so it can’t detect the sickness (John M. Barry, The Great Influenza, Viking, 2004, pp. 103–104). This deception at what appears to be happening on the biological level may appear in several forms at the mental level.

For example, passivity: “I’ll just go to bed early, and then I’ll feel better in the morning.” Or consent: “Everyone’s getting it; I guess it’s my turn.” Or helplessness: “I can’t control what my body does.” Even expectation of sickness: “Those people were coughing and sneezing all the time I was with them; I guess I’ll be sick, too.”

In these and other cases, there is a subtle acceptance of the belief that each of us is a combination of matter and Spirit, of evil and good. That mortality rules. But it doesn’t, it never has, and never will, rule over us—because God does.

To prove this in the face of disease isn’t always simple. But it is totally possible. Science and Health provides specific steps: “Take possession of your body, and govern its feeling and action. Rise in the strength of Spirit to resist all that is unlike good. God has made man capable of this, and nothing can vitiate the ability and power divinely bestowed on man.”

By resisting “all that is unlike good,” we affirm that the nature of the universe truly is spiritual and is in the hands of God, that evil has no place in our lives or our bodies, and that God has already given us the power to be what we truly are—His disease-free, totally well, spiritual creation.

The more we know and recognize ourselves as exempt from any so-called material laws, the less likely we are to be taken in by disease, whatever form it may adopt.

This may require prayerful persistence in the face of symptoms, or if others around us are ill. But we have this wonderful advantage: The full power and ability to resist are already ours through our relationship to the infinite powerhouse, Love.

Disease often claims to have the momentum—“Here I come, ready or not.” But when we “rise in the strength of Spirit,” we are not little beings, struggling alone against a malevolent force. It’s not our personal, finite strength that is rising, but the infinite power that runs the universe, and that is a universe made in the image and likeness of good alone.

So if disease comes knocking on your door, or on anyone else’s—whether it’s bird flu or something else—you don’t have to be scared. You can be firm. You can take your case to the “strength of Spirit.” And that infinitely loving power will stop the disease in its tracks.

Read more on this topic in the special feature "Bird flu: a spiritual response"

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