HUMAN EXISTENCE, SAYS BETTY JENKS, IS FUNDAMENTALLY CONTEMPLATIVE. IT IS, SHE SAYS, "ABOUT IDEAS AND THEIR POWER TO SHAPE WHO YOU ARE AND WHAT YOU EXPERIENCE." MS. JENKS IS A BOSTON-BASED CHRISTIAN SCIENCE TEACHER AND HEALER. FOR OVER 45 YEARS SHE HAS HELPED PEOPLE EXPERIENCE THE PRACTICAL POWER OF IDEAS—RIGHT IDEAS PREMISED ON ONE'S TRUE, SPIRITUAL NATURE AND GOD-SOURCED BEING—TO CORRECT DIFFICULT SITUATIONS AND TO HEAL.
Enter her Massachusetts Avenue apartment, and you enter a vibrant mental universe, pulsing with humor, serenity, and irrepressible intellectual zest. Though her graduate studies in French literature at the University of Chicago were interrupted by World War II, during which she served with the American Red Cross clubmobile in Europe, Jenk's love of philosophy, literature, and art never waned. She lives surrounded by books. Copies of the two on which her healing work rests, the Bible and Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy, mark cozy places to study and pray throughout her home. The 48-volume Anchor Bible spans two shelves a few rows down from volumes of poetry by Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Ogden Nash, and Maya Angelou. I spy Buckminster Fuller's Critical Path; Edwin A. Abbott's 1884 mathematical teaser, Flatland; and Plato's Republic. Jenks is so moved by the brilliance of the two-page introduction of a 1913 issue of Alfred Stieglitz's Camera Work magazine that she reads it to me. I'm moved, too. In Jenks's world, the 19th-century prose of Henry David Thoreau and Victor Hugo synchronizes with the 21st-century buzz of hip Wired magazine. Her sleek, super-modern Apple titanium laptop hums in a landscape of antique furniture.
What is it about artists like Frost, Stieglitz, and Picasso that interests you?
