What’s the most valuable gift Broadview has to give? It’s the opportunity to recognize who and what we are as God’s children, and Christian Science practitioner Summer Wright reminds us of that in this guest post.
Broadview is not a material location where we go to “get” well. Broadview is a state of Mind we enter as to realize health. In Biblical times, this place is known as the “most holy place,” (1 Kings 6:8), — a place in human consciousness where God comes and dwells with man. This place was represented in the Old Testament as a physical location in the innermost sanctuary of the Temple. The New Testament uplifts the idea and shows it to us as a mental state revealed by Christ (see Hebrews 10:19-25). As a mental state, it is a place of deep prayer and union with God, and, in terms of Broadview, it is where Broadview’s staff and supporters work together with guests to discover our natural state of health and well-being.
Health, like man, is always spiritual, and this truth becomes clearer to us as we recognize who and what we are as God’s children. Thus, the only thing we ever need to “get” is the right idea of health. Health exists in the third degree of consciousness referred to by Mary Baker Eddy as a spiritual state of understanding. (Science and Health 116:1-3)
Third Degree: Understanding.
SPIRITUAL. Wisdom, purity, spiritual understanding, spiritual power, love, health, holiness.
The Bible says, “Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom: and with all thy getting get understanding.” (Proverbs 4:7) This human sense of getting understanding, then, is simply gaining a higher degree of thinking and living, which reveals our perfect, healthy, holy selfhood as God’s self-expression. Discovering our health, therefore, requires understanding what health really is.
Healthiness is holiness. It is our natural spiritual state of being. Discovering our healthy, holy, natural state of being is a mental activity where we see that the person presented to us as a sick us is not us at all. It never has been who or what we are. We reflect the divine Us that is God. “And God said, let us make man in our image, after our likeness….So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” (Genesis 1:26 to likeness, 27)
We are the image of the divine Us, commonly known as God. Therefore we can never be that which God is not. Nor have we ever been separated from Him. Image can never stop reflecting its natural, spiritual, healthy, holy, unified state of being. Christian Science treatment unites the illumined human understanding with its divine source, God, and enables us to see ourselves as God-like images of spiritual being.
Supporters of Broadview are active witnesses to the divine presence and activity in human consciousness. We come together in Mind to see His self-expression in one another. This state of consciousness is where Broadview exists, where health exists; it is where God is, — and “Where God is we can meet, and where God is we can never part.” (Miscellany 131:20-21)