A disease named for the San Joaquin Valley, where the same soil produces the state’s agricultural bounty can turn traitorous.
The disease, called the “silent epidemic”, known as “cocci”, became less silent last week when a federal judge ordered the state to transfer about 2,600 vulnerable inmates — including some with H.I.V. — out of two of the valley’s eight state prisons, about 90 miles north of here. In 2011, those prisons, Avenal and Pleasant Valley, produced 535 of the 640 reported inmate cocci cases, and throughout the system, yearly costs for hospitalization for cocci exceed $23 million.
Advocates for prisoners have criticized state agencies for not moving the inmates sooner. “If this were a factory, a public university or a hotel — anything except a prison — they would shut these two places down,” said Donald Specter, the executive director of the Prison Law Office.
Please share how you are praying:
From Anonymous:
As the almond blossoms fill the air with their fragrance in the San Joaquin Valley, I have to ask myself, “How am I tending the garden of my thinking?” Am I digging up the false images planted by the fear of disease? Am I bringing the soil of thought into line with Paul’s words in Acts “For in Him, we live and move and have our being”? Am I recognizing God’s presence in the very air that I breathe?
By sowing the seeds of Love and Truth in the soil of my thinking, the ultimate harvest has to be good, wholesome, refreshing, spiritual ideas that uplift, inspire and heal. The Psalmist sang, “Whither shall I go from thy spirit? Whither shall I flee from thy presence?” (Psm.139) Keeping our thought on God, good, keeps us safe from predictions that some minuscule particle can enter our being and destroy our peace. God, Spirit, Love is ever present, guiding, guarding and protecting each of His precious ideas.
Take a moment to pause each day and appreciate the radiant garden that is you. The dire predictions will then find no fallow ground on which to germinate and we will find our lives filled with the God-like qualities of vitality, symmetry, balance, grace, goodness, health, and purity…and the fragrance will be all divine.
From Carol Lynds:
Just what is prayer or treatment in Christian Science? It is mental activity which brings my thought closer to my Father-Mother, God. I realize more and more my selfhood as a beloved child of God, blessed and loved, daily. When my thought realizes my oneness as a mature, perfect child of God, I have all the qualities of God available to me daily to overcome any belief in disease
From Julie Broat:
My first thought is to vehemently deny that there is anything other than good, God. That God is all there is. She fills all space, is ever present. If there is nothing but God then the belief of disease, of any name, is a complete lie or illusion and I strive to take a radical stand for the perfection of God and everything she has made.
I strive to close out the mortal thought and its beliefs in sickness. Turn my back on the mortal drama. Relinquish the belief that I am personally responsible for healing and demonstrating Life, when the natural state of things is already perfection through God.
Then, accept and feel the strength, power, Love, and omnipresence of our Divine Mother and the beliefs vanish into their native nothingness.
Our church Christian Science Practice committee took this on as an assignment. Here is the first of several replies to this article.
From David Cline:
Love is flowing with pure currents of spiritual energy and heavenly freedom. It forms our atmosphere of thought, which transforms and elevates our environment.
No pollution can destroy our peace and calm joy. Nothing can enter being that erodes or destroys life. Man cannot breathe in unhealthy thoughts that suggest he is subject to something outside God’s control.
Spiritual man is the only man and he can’t be invaded by matter, because matter is simply an illusion that God is not All in all. We live in the atmosphere of Mind. It is pure and joyful–ever healthful. The clouds of sense disappear in the sunlight of Truth.