Fingerprints of God_ The Search for the Science of Spirituality - Barbara Bradley Hagerty [21]
He chuckled wryly. “Ah, dear, yes. There’s always a price. The price is yourself.”
“Is it painful?”
“There’s nothing more painful.You become incredibly vulnerable, you become incredibly naked. Nobody in their right mind would want to do it.”
“Except you can’t help it.”
“There you go,” Llewellyn said. “You don’t have a choice.”
What I did not realize when I said good-bye to Llewellyn was that the stories of my mystics would give me a peek into the rest of my research. Their stories would contain elements that would prove central to an array of different spiritual experiences: the sense of union with all things and the universe; the loss of fear of death; the new definition of reality and of “God”; and profound personal transformation. I heard some or all of these descriptions from people who experienced emotional breakdown or mental dysfunction, who experimented with psychedelic drugs or meditation, who had near-death experiences. I didn’t know it then, but I was on my way to redefining for myself the nature of God and reality.
But I am getting ahead of myself.
Fortified by the insight that spiritual experience is not only everywhere but open to research, I was ready to tackle the questions that were driving my own quest. I began by reexamining the faith of my childhood in the light of science.
CHAPTER 3
The Biology of Belief
MARY ANN BRADLEY SAT PERCHED on the living room sofa in her Nantucket home. Her eighty-five years had been kind to her. She always had been short, but these days barely topped five feet, with a perfect mane of silver hair and not a single wrinkle on her forehead. It was August 18, 2006, about ten in the morning. She had prepared for this moment, as evidenced by several pages of handwritten notes spread out on the coffee table before her. She was, and is, one of the dearest people in my life. And at this moment, Mom was serving as my guide to a religion that is, perhaps, a hundred years ahead of modern science—a religion that relies wholly on the power of thought to alter the body.
“I have never known anything but Christian Science,” she began. “It’s been the guidance system of my life and has never let me down.”
Mom comes from a family of Christian Scientists, and raised my brother and me in the faith. Her mother was a “practitioner,” the metaphysical equivalent of an emergency-room doctor. People called her with their problems. Granny prayed for them, and more often than not, a healing ensued.What most people know about Christian Scientists is that they do not take medicine—even vitamins—and that they rarely go to doctors.What most people do not know is that there is a method to this asceticism.
Christian Science holds as a central premise that healing is a function of spiritual understanding; that matter and its conditions, including sin and disease, are “false beliefs”; and that prayer changes a person’s thought, which results in healing. An example drilled into me by my Sunday-school teachers: When a person looks at a dirty bathroom mirror, his reflection may be marred by smudge marks and toothpaste splatters; but the problem is with the mirror (the distorted image of reality) and not the person. In Christian Science, the way you clean the mirror—and restore the reflection—is to clean up your thinking.
“Everything is thought in Christian Science,” Mom explained. “Everything is going on in your thinking. If you remove the ‘false beliefs’ which we can call error, evil, sickness, and replace those thoughts with the spiritual truth—the truth that man is made in the image and likeness of God—then the body responds. Since there is nothing broken in God, then there can be nothing broken in the image and likeness of God, man.”
Okay, let me translate for those unfamiliar with theVictorian language of Christian Science, which was founded by Mary Baker Eddy in the mid-nineteenth century. Christian Science prayer shares little with the popular conception of prayer. Rather than beseech an authoritative and exceedingly busy Judge to stop what He’s doing, listen to the plea,