The Spark for Healing

The year was 1903, and the place Concord, New Hampshire.  A woman lived there who was paralysed on one side and destitute to the point that her home life had become unbearable. Out of sheer desperation she decided one day to leave her home, never to return. But her leaving happened on the day when another event in Concord had attracted a large crowd. She was caught up in the flow of the people, probably coming from the railway station.  She didn't know why they came, but she followed the crowd as fast as she able to.  When she reached a homestead at the edge of town, a place called Pleasant View, she discovered that the crowd had gathered there, centered around a house with a balcony from which a woman was speaking.  But having come late, thus standing at the far edge of the crowd, she was unable to hear the woman addressing her guests. She remained standing though for some time, possibly all the way to the end of the address, until she turned away in tears for this once more added disappointment of not having heard what had attracted so many people. She felt that it must have been an important message that had been conveyed. 

On the way back into town, possibly still in tears on and off, as she crossed the street at some place to a vacant lot, she saw a team of horses approaching. She stopped to let the carriage pass. To her great  surprise she recognized the woman in the carriage to be the same woman who had spoken on the balcony at Pleasant View. She also saw, as the carriage passed, that the woman in the carriage leaned forward and looked at her as the carriage passed by. What happened in the flow of this single moment of a voiceless communication completely changed her life. The woman said about this incident that she was instantly healed in the one single moment. Also, when she returned to her home that day she found the condition there likewise healed.

She learned in time that the woman on the balcony and in the carriage had been America's renowned religious leader, Mary Baker Eddy, the discoverer and founder of Christian Science, the science of the "revelation of the divine Principle of scientific mental healing," which might also be called the religion of love. The woman who had been partially paralyzed related later about this moment of her healing when the carriage passed by, saying, "never before nor since have I seen the love and compassion in any human face that I saw in Mrs. Eddy's when she leaned forward and looked at me."*1