As a former public school educator, I’ve often wondered why parents consistently rated their children’s schools better than schools that other children attended. It turns out that first-hand experience matters in how we perceive things.
With that potential bias in mind, it’s interesting to look at the Social Progress Index for 2015, which ranks countries according to how they are doing in various aspects of health. As it happens, the United States ranked lower than many nations who spent far less on healthcare. However, as someone who lives in the US, I think these rankings may not be giving the whole health picture.
Could that be because I’m looking at health through a different lens than those who analyzed the results for the Social Progress Index?
For me, health is spiritually based. It starts from an understanding of my relationship to God. Mary Baker Eddy, a spiritual thinker and healer from the 19th century, clarified this concept after she slipped and fell on an icy sidewalk as she was heading to a temperance meeting. She was so incapacitated by the fall that she was taken to a nearby residence and a doctor was called to help her.
His diagnosis was that she would not live through the night. Instead of resigning herself to passing on, she asked for a Bible and through a prayerful glimpse of its deeper, spiritual message she was healed. With further study, and through the application of her ideas to healing others, she gained a clear understanding of man’s relationship to God as His spiritual idea, or divine reflection. And she articulated in her writings how significant this relationship is to health and healing.
First-hand experience in relying on the relationship between man and divine Spirit brings confidence in it – just like a parent’s perspective matters when surveying schools. That’s why it’s so important to collect first-hand experiences in studies of the validity of prayer for healing, which major universities increasingly have been doing. This effort was best explained by Duke University’s Harold G. Koenig, M.D.
“An exhaustive analysis of more than 1500 reputable medical studies indicates people who are more religious and pray more have better mental and physical health,” he reported.
With the US ranking lower than Costa Rica in happiness, I wonder if the factors researchers used for their criteria included spiritual qualities like the ones Eddy taught and practiced in her healing work, or just qualities of physical and mental wellbeing? I would hope the results of the Social Progress Index for 2015 took into account the important role spirituality can play in maintaining health. To many people it may actually be more meaningful than other rankings.
Interestingly, even though the Social Progress Index ranks Costa Rica as having the world’s happiest citizenry, the country’s leaders continue to search for excellence through a concept they call “true north” in developing the quality of life of their citizens.
This is a concept that has the potential to yield great results. But my own first-hand experience has assured me that finding “true north” in the area of happiness and health includes loving, and living, the spiritual qualities that evidence our relationship to the Divine.
Don
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Don Ingwerson | Media and Government Relations for Christian Science in Southern California
