Who are we, really?  You and I, and all humanity?  The health, harmony, and joy we experience in life depends on our answer to this question.

Mary Baker Eddy, who founded the Christian Science church, had a profound insight into the nature of God as infinite Love.  She perceived that God is the only substance, intelligence and Life of the universe, without the opposition typically ascribed to darkness or evil.  Moreover, Eddy realized that this was the basis of Jesus’ healing works.

This is revolutionary.  Eddy didn’t say that conflict, struggle, and disease exist as unavoidable realities, then in addition there’s also God’s love.  Rather, she saw infinite Love, and genuine creation as the perfect spiritual expression of this Love, instead of the imperfect, material existence we typically assume unavoidably defines us.  To Eddy, infinite Love, being infinite, simply excludes the possibility of anything else.

Such an unusual theology might have ended as a footnote to history, except that Eddy and her students boldly used it to reinvigorate Christianity and its lost element of healing.  Since then, some 65,000 accounts of healing have been verified and published — healings of everything from cancer to AIDS to blindness, from drug addiction to broken bones.

Here’s one example.  Decades ago, a friend of mine was diagnosed with cancer in her abdomen.  Exploratory surgery revealed many tumors. Though her doctors didn’t think she could live much longer, they recommended a second operation to determine the best treatment.

Meanwhile, my friend was praying with a Christian Science practitioner.  She was understanding herself not as wholly or partly material — dependent on her genes or her childhood, or on surgery or chemotherapy — but as purely spiritual, part of the perfect spiritual creation mentioned above.

At her husband’s urging, my friend scheduled the second surgery. Afterwards, the surgeon reported, in his words, that she was “clean as a baby.”

To the degree that we understand our identity as purely spiritual — knowing that each of us shines, now and eternally, as a unique expression of infinite Love — we experience healing.  The result is wellness, opportunity, spiritual progress, and the highest degree of joy.