suffer the little children

Photo by Jasmin Staab on Unsplash

In university I had had a good friend who’s extended family included a branch of devout Christian Scientists. They had a big family cottage on a lake in Ontario where the whole family would congregate each summer. I once or twice I visited her there — the family was a warm and welcoming crowd.

If you’ve come across many Christian Scientists, then you’ll know they are, by and large, an affable easy-going bunch. Not to be confused with Evangelicals or fundamentalists, they won’t try to convert you or scare you to death with talk of hell fire and brimstone or the approaching apocalypse. They pray quite a lot but in a meditative, thoughtful way. They don’t drink alcohol, eat lots of vegetables, read books and love a good joke. What I am trying to say is that what I discovered during those summer visits is that Christian Scientists are among the best kind of Christians, some of the most warm and broad-minded religious folk I’ve ever met. The sort of people who volunteer at food banks, shovel their neighbours snow and hand out blankets to the homeless. But here’s the catch: They don’t believe in modern medicine. Not only do they not believe in it, they blame doctors for making people sick.

And if there are no doctors around, they’ll blame someone else.

My friend with the Christian Scientist cousins, her family was not religious. This was a lucky thing too because she had a life-threatening allergy to bee stings, the kind that causes your throat to swell shut in six minutes flat. She’d nearly died at least twice in her life and carried an EpiPen everywhere and so did her father. Bee sting allergies are hereditary. Because of that, when the Christian Scientist cousins were visiting the family cottage in summer, my friend spent a lot of time watching her second cousins, there were five or six of them as I recall, sweet little tow-headed kids, skinny and tanned. They swam in the lake, had diving contests off the dock and played barefoot on the grass. My friend kept an eye on them because she was worried one of them might have the allergy too — they wouldn't know it obviously since they’d never, not even once as far as she knew, been to a doctor. This worried her to no end.