I am a regular writer for the Danbury News Times Forum on Faith Series. Here is today’s column on preventing Swine Flu:

God’s Complete Control Can Cancel Disease

People often think of Christian Scientists as “those people that don’t go to doctors.” This is misleading. We are simply people that go to God first when we have a need, instead of seeking Him as a last resort, as is so often the case. When we turn to God in scientific prayer, our needs are directly met, and then we have no reason for any other remedy.

I bring this up because of all the attention given to the swine flu lately. This affliction has been healed in my practice of Christian Science by logically and prayerfully applying an understanding of God as infinite, all-powerful, ever-present and good. But for our purposes here, I am much more interested in seeing it prevented than having to cure it.

The foundation of any pandemic is fear. Fear is also the major cause of disease.

The Bible tells us that, “Perfect Love casts out fear.” It also declares that, “God is Love.” God, or Love, is infinite and you can’t get outside of infinite Love. We live and move and breathe and literally have our being in a divine atmosphere of Love that surrounds and envelops us. There can be no contagion of anything but good in God’s presence, which is where we are.

However, in our efforts to be wise, informed and prepared, we inadvertently stoke fear in the mind of the public by advertising disease, creating fertile ground for exactly the problem we say we want to avert. We need to be removing fear, not inciting it. We need to shut out unhealthy thoughts and fears instead nurturing and feeding them, watching them grow, and sharing them.

Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, recommends in her groundbreaking book on Christian healing, “Stand porter at the door of thought, admitting only such conclusions as you wish realized in bodily results, and you will control yourself harmoniously.”

Disease itself has no intelligence; it can do nothing on its own. Disease is not what’s contagious; it’s our thinking that’s contagious. Disease requires our complicity for it to spread. Disease is a mental state imaged on the body; if it can’t enter thought, it can’t enter the body.

God is not only infinite, ever-present good, but all-powerful good as well. And if God is all-powerful, what kind of power does disease have? Can disease cancel God’s complete control? No, but God’s complete control can cancel disease.

In Mary Baker Eddy’s book titled Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, she asserts, “Let us banish sickness as an outlaw and abide by the rule of perpetual harmony – God’s law. It is man’s moral right to annul an unjust sentence, a sentence never inflicted by divine authority.”

In thinking about something like the threat of the swine flu, I find Psalm 91 in the Bible very reassuring. It tells us that when we dwell with God (who is always with us!) He is our refuge and fortress and no harm can befall us there. We are told we can trust in that. He will shield us from any form of error. It says we have no reason to be afraid because we will be delivered from any pestilence. The Psalm promises that no evil will happen to us, nor any plague will come into our home.

My favorite part of this Psalm is when David declares, “He shall cover you with his feathers, and under his wings shalt thou trust.” I love that image of being tucked under God’s wing, all nestled in: cozy and safe and comfortable and cared for in all those soft downy feathers. There is no fear or threat there. There, we have immunity not only to disease, but to anything unlike good. There, not only are we healed, we’re unassailable.

Mrs. Eddy tells us, “A calm, Christian state of mind is a better preventative of contagion than a drug, or any other possible sanative method; and the ‘perfect Love’ that ‘casteth out fear’ is a sure defense.”

Come join me under God’s wing, safe in those wonderfully fluffy feathers, assured that there is no reason to fear, where infinite, all-powerful good, God, is present.

By Polly Castor, a Christian Science Practitioner and a member of First Church of Christ, Scientist, Ridgefield. She can be reached at PollyCastor@gmail.com