I WISH I COULD SAY my first response to Mary Baker Eddy's textbook, Science and Health, was something like, "Oh wow, this is exactly what I've been searching for all my life!" Well, that was how I felt by the time I'd finished reading the first chapter. But my very first reaction — after an initial casual flick through the book— was more like, "What does it mean, matter's not real?"
I was twenty years old at the time, living away from home for the first time, and struggling, as I had for some years, with increasingly frequent bouts of depression and anxiety. I felt like I didn't really have a handle on life — a sense of purpose and meaning — and often I feared I might be headed for a mental breakdown. I found it hard to feel at ease among other people, and I didn't know anyone I could really confide in. Still, even though I hadn't been raised in any religion, I sensed that the real answers, if there were any, must be spiritual. I'd been somewhat of a "seeker" for a few years, but had never found any spiritual teachings I truly felt I could trust, until an acquaintance sent me a copy of Science and Health. Somehow, intuitively, I got the feeling that there was something special about this book. But at a glance, a good deal of its content seemed a little hard to swallow.
Fortunately, once I started reading it from the beginning with an open mind and heart, it started to make sense. More sense, in fact, than any spiritual text I'd ever read before. When I read Mrs. Eddy's description of God in her spiritual interpretation of the Lord's Prayer, "Our Father Mother God, all-harmonious" (Science and Health, p. 16), something just clicked within me. This was the God — all-powerful, all-loving, and all good — I'd been searching for all these years, sometimes almost unknowingly. But at the same time, there was a startling insistence woven all through the book, coming up directly or indirectly on nearly every page: Matter is entirely an illusion and is no part of God's creation. What did that mean? And why was it so important that Mrs. Eddy began "the scientific statement of being" like this: "There is no life, truth, intelligence, nor substance in matter. All is infinite Mind and its infinite manifestation, for God is All-in-all" (Science and Health, p. 468)?
