The Ultimate Wild Goose Chase

By Anthony J. Whitehouse, CS

There is one stunt that error pulls which is wonderfully devious and distracting. It presents one with a challenge and then insists that there must be a cause to the problem, so that one then goes cause hunting.

And therein lies the rub ( to quote Shakespeare). Error does not actually have cause but error pretends that is does so that it can engross you in the hunt.

The reason error does not have a cause is that it just a misstatement of truth. If you are presented with the argument that 2+2=5 there is no actual cause behind the error . It is simply a misstatement of the truth that 2+2=4. There is no point in trying to figure out the reason for the misstatement. And yet error compounds the mesmerism of illness by maintaining that it must have a cause ... and one ends up on the wild goose chase. Especially when one cannot actually find a cause.

When confronted with deafness or blindness, the human solution lies in figuring out the cause so it can be corrected. The divine response is to maintain the truth of being in which there is no loss or deterioration of faculties.

When the disciples confronted Jesus, as reported in John:

as Jesus passed by, he saw a man which was blind from his birth. And his disciples asked him, saying, Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind?
Jesus answered, Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him. I must work the works of him that sent me, while it is day: the night cometh, when no man can work.
(John 9:1–4)

When you correct the punctuation in the last verse you can understand the point being made
Jesus answered, Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents. But that the works of God should be made manifest in him, I must work the works of him that sent me.

Jesus absolutely refuses to get into attributing cause but rather says “Attribute all power to God” and that Truth is then manifest.

So healing follows the refusal to figure out cause, but by knowing the Truth which the error is trying to hide or negate.

One of the great obfuscations is that error must have a cause. Proverbs 26 refutes this

2 As the bird by wandering, as the swallow by flying, so the curse causeless shall not come.

Mary Baker Eddy adds in Christian Healing:

Contending for the reality of what should disappear is like furnishing fuel for the flames. Is it a duty for any one to believe that “the curse causeless cannot come”? Then it is a higher duty to know that God never cursed man, His own image and likeness. God never made a wicked man; and man made by God had not a faculty or power underived from his Maker wherewith to make himself wicked.

Anthony J. Whitehouse, CS, is a Christian Science practitioner in Coppet, Switzerland. Connect with Anthony»