Fingerprints of God_ The Search for the Science of Spirituality - Barbara Bradley Hagerty [22]
I asked Mom for a concrete example.
“Okay, I’ll tell you about my broken hand,” she offered. “I was engaged to be married and it was a Sunday afternoon. I was with my fiancé—your dad—and he was teasing me, and I hit his knee in response. I knew immediately something was wrong with my hand. So I asked him to take me home.
“I started working in Christian Science,” she continued.“And this is the thought I worked with: Nothing can come into my human experience that I do not allow in my consciousness as a reality. And it was up to me to see that this broken bone—or whatever it was, at that point I didn’t know—was unreal. Just as the statement ‘Two plus two is five’ is erroneous, unreal. You take it out of your consciousness as a reality. You erase it, and then you substitute the truth.”
“In this case, what was the truth?” I asked.
“The truth was, that I could not have anything broken,” she said. “I was a spiritual idea of God, so there was nothing to be broken.”
Then Mom grew quiet, overwhelmed by the memory of what came next. I had seen this cascade of emotion before, when I talked with Sophy Burnham, and Arjun Patel, and virtually all of the mystics I had interviewed.
“I was sitting on my bed, about to go to work,” she recalled. She was reading the Christian Science textbook Science and Health when the tectonic plates of her reality shifted.
“I had this great sense of light—of one thing flowing out of another, out of another, out of another, out of another, into eternity,” she said. “There was nothing but light. It’s all one. It’s all God. The all-ness of God, which is the oneness of God, and I was within that oneness. And I just sat there, and it didn’t last very long, but I’m quite convinced that that was when my hand was healed.”
At the request of my father, who had not yet converted to Christian Science, my mother visited a doctor who X-rayed her hand two days later.
“And the doctor came back and said, ‘Well, yes, the large bone in your right hand is broken,’ ” Mom recalled. “And he said, ‘What we usually do in cases like this when someone hasn’t gone to the doctor immediately is we rebreak it and reset it. But if you want that done, you’re going to have to go to another doctor. Because it’s perfectly set and it’s almost healed.’ ”
Mom paused, reliving the intensity of that moment.“And I remember walking out of his office—my feet didn’t touch the ground, I was so filled with God’s truth, the spirituality, the marvel of it. That was the end of it.”
As I began to study the biology of belief, I found myself circling back to Christian Science and taking a fresh look at healing—what believers see as the evidence of divine laws in operation. Certainly I continued to delight in swallowing an aspirin or cough medicine anytime I chose. But the more I talked to people about spirit and matter, the more I suspected that Christian Science was onto something.
Laughing Back to Health
Mind-body medicine has become so widely accepted today that it is difficult to recall when it was considered fantasy. For ordinary Americans, the conviction that your thoughts or emotions affect your body gained traction in the 1950s when Protestant preacher Norman Vincent Peale wrote his transformative book, The Power of Positive Thinking. But it was not until the 1970s that scientists finally began to acknowledge a connection between mind and body.
Anne Harrington, a professor of the history of science at Harvard University,