If you read the interview with Bobbi Gibb in today’s edition of The Christian Science Monitor, you’ll learn of her bold entry in the 1966 Boston Marathon after race officials had told her in a formal letter that “women are not physiologically capable of running a marathon”
When I learned of her story, I reveled in the progress women have made in sports since Gibb’s breakthrough gained recognition for women’s running and shattered many mistaken and limiting perceptions regarding women’s abilities. As Gibb pointed out in the interview, she later reflected that proving this misconception wrong would “throw into question all the other false beliefs about women that have been used literally for centuries to keep women from really manifesting their potential.”
What if she had accepted those limiting perceptions? Instead, she recognized them as beliefs without authority and forged ahead.
Christian Science shows that facing down entrenched obstacles is actually impelled and empowered by more than just human determination. It requires a willingness to lean on and trust in a higher law – one that reveals progress as not optional but inevitable. The understanding in Christian Science is that the divine Mind, God, governs all true action and development through this higher, spiritual law, and that we can understand and prove this law of Mind, which guides each one of us and unfolds all right activity. What might appear as individual courage is often more fundamentally the evidence of this always-available divine impetus that cannot be obstructed.
Christian Science defines man as the expression of God – the wholly spiritual “male and female” of His creating (see Genesis 1:27) – endowed with qualities such as intelligence, endurance, and strength that are not dependent on matter, gender, or history. Seen in this light, extraordinary accomplishments are not exceptions to a rule of limitation but are evidence that such a rule never truly exists in the first place. As each one of us listens for and responds to divine direction, we can prove man’s spiritual nature and help dissolve mental barriers that would claim the opposite and hold humanity back from progress.
In light of divine Truth and the infinite capability and progress that come from knowing that Spirit, God, is man’s sole source for life, rules of limitation, such as those stated by the marathon officials in 1966, are revealed as not rules at all. Rather, they’re untruths based on material beliefs that yield as we know that God’s infinite law is impartial in its goodness, bringing progress and freedom to all. We can know that man, as the full expression of God, is not limited by material so-called law but understands and responds to the infinite allness of divine Principle.
Mary Baker Eddy, founder of Christian Science and the Monitor, faced resistance in a very different field nearly a century earlier. Her discovery of Christian Science and her authorship of “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures” challenged deeply rooted assumptions about health and spiritual power. She taught and demonstrated that man is not the physical structure seen with the physical senses but is truly reflective of God’s divine nature as Spirit. Despite the strong opposition to the healing works proving this fact that she had discovered, and to the Science that she taught, she remained steadfast and faithful in expressing what she understood to be divinely revealed.
Her healing work defied accepted limitations. In one instance recorded in her book “Retrospection and Introspection” (see p. 40), she was traveling to give a talk and learned that her hostess’ neighbor was dying. The physicians on the case had given up, but when Mrs. Eddy went to see her and gave her treatment through prayer, the woman revived. Later, the woman gave birth to another child, despite prior medical pronouncements that this would be impossible because of an injury from surgery. She had been fully healed.
Such healings confront matter-based assumptions with evidence that health is upheld by divine authority. They show how powerfully thought is stirred as it yields to clearer, spiritual views of reality – of the immensity of divine Life and Love. The divine law in our experience uplifts us to these glimpses, which have power to help and heal, today and for all time to come.
As stated in Science and Health, “This is the doctrine of Christian Science: that divine Love cannot be deprived of its manifestation, or object” (p. 304). No materialistic thinking can suppress the demand of divine Truth to express itself. And new ground is broken and humanity advances as Truth is understood and obeyed. Limiting beliefs cannot hold a firm grasp on our thought when we turn to and follow divine Mind’s direction.
True progress comes as we lean on the infinite and refuse to either succumb to limitation or try to push through with willpower. Throughout the ages, spiritual thinkers trusting in divine law have changed beliefs that seemed fixed in human thinking – and paved the way for others to glimpse more of God, the infinite, eternal All.
