Itinerantdaughter's Blog

I think my new favorite hobby is reading “Testimonies of Healing” from the Christian Science Sentinel. 

Diagnosed Dental Problem Healed

As I sat in the dentist’s chair for my yearly checkup, I once again heard how important it was that I make an appointment to have a root canal procedure.  I had heard this urging before at the previous appointment and the supposedly dire consequences of doing nothing.  But I had been doing something: I had been praying.  I had been affirming that my true substance was spiritual and that God was the source of my entire identity and being.

I knew that a decayed tooth was not a spiritual reality but an illusion, a false image of mortal mind.  A material operation would not dispel this illusion, and it was important to me not to simply go along with the seeming reality of matter’s illusive nature.  Now was the time to defeat this lie and to know that God was working out His purpose in me.  I left the dentist’s office, knowing I could lean on God, but I also felt I was at odds with the dentist who was urging a medical procedure.

Moving ahead a year,just before Christmas, I suddenly began to experience pain in the area of my mouth where the dentist had warned me about.  Over the next few hours the pain increased, and the side of my face became swollen.  I prayed the Lord’s Prayer right away and declared: “… as in heaven, so on earth, –– God is omnipotent, supreme” (Mary Baker Eddy, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 17).

Encouraged, yet still in pain, I called a Christian Science practitioner for prayerful treatment.  Today, I don’t remember our conversation, but the love and confidence the practitioner expressed calmed my fear and strengthened my expectation of healing.  Immediately I felt the pain subside, and within a couple of hours the swelling decreased.  By the next day there was no sensation or evidence of the difficulty.

All was well until a couple of weeks later when the pain and swelling returned.  My first impulse was to call the practitioner back, requesting further treatment.  While preparing to make the phone call, I recalled the memory of the dentist standing over me and describing the troubled material picture.  At that point, however, I turned from pondering the memory of this diagnosis and listened instead to hear what divine Mind was communicating to me.

What suddenly and strongly came to thought was that the belief that I had a decayed tooth was a lie.  The disease had always been a mortal belief; my real substance as Spirit’s idea had never lapsed from the harmonious perfection of Mind’s creating.  Whatever diagnosis I’d received, based on the testimony of the material senses, was not the truth about my real substance or identity.

In that moment my realization of the truth was so profound that all fear quickly left and the pain with it.  Within an hour the swelling also disappeared.  It has been more than eight years since that experience, and all continues to be well.

An important lesson I learned from this experience is to be more prompt in rejecting false claims and to affirm all discordant conditions to be a lie.  As our Leader, Mary Baker Eddy, tells us, “When the first symptoms of disease appear, dispute the testimony of the material senses with divine Science” (Science and Health, p. 390).

At the time of the dentist’s examination and warning, I had been confident that any problem could be in healed in Christian Science, but I had not been immediately vehement in my rejection of the medical claim that was presented to me.  However, through this experience I have learned that it is never too late to stop and listen to the truth that is always present to meet our need immediately.

Just zipped through some of last year’s winning essays in the Notting Hill Editions Essay Prize (really loved “Eulogy for Nigger”) and although I was mostly besotted with Josh Cohen’s “The Incurious Rabbit,” there was one thing I found a bit peculiar.  When he talks about his analysands are struggling with often paralyzing indecision, he uses, for the every-patient, the pronoun “she.”

I can’t help making a link between this generalized cultural condition and the crisis I find recurring more and more often in my psychoanalytic consulting room, of the impossible decision.  Prospective patients come to me in the grip of an urgent yet irresolvable dilemma.  Should I stay in my unhappy marriage for my children’s sake?  Should I leave the stable job I hate for the risk of an uncertain and potentially disastrous new venture?  She appeals to me to help her extricate herself from a swamp of indecision and ambivalence.  But turning over the competing arguments in the session does little to clarify her wish or relieve her anxiety.  In fact, after a few session or many more, she might complain that she’s no clearer about what she wants and that the uncertainty has only become harder to bear.

So, either the Good Doctor Cohen is a) only seeing female patients (weird), b) trying to push back against the historical standard of always assuming every person/character/divine being whose gender is otherwise unspecified must be male or c) saying, in a roundabout way, that women struggle more with pathological indecision than men do.  Votes?