I have always appreciated and respected Mary Baker Eddy, but over the years I heard some things about her that disturbed me. For instance, her extraordinary attention to detail and high standard in the governance of her home made her seem to me overly picky. I used to think how glad I was that I never had to work in her household.
Then I read We Knew Mary Baker Eddy. The final reminiscence is by Martha Wilcox, who was one of Mrs. Eddy’s personal maids and also a Christian Science practitioner and teacher. It was her account of working for Mrs. Eddy that turned my tentative appreciation for the leader of Christian Science into a deeply felt gratitude and true affection.
One of the accounts Wilcox shared was about how Mrs. Eddy’s pincushion was maintained. Wilcox explained that the pins in Mrs. Eddy’s pincushion were ordered according to their size and had to be maintained in this state of orderliness. This meant that whenever she needed a particular pin of any given length, she didn’t have to search for it. “No one would have thought of changing a pin in her pincushion,” wrote Wilcox (We Knew Mary Baker Eddy, p. 201, 1979 ed.; p. 473, 2011 ed.).
Frankly, this used to be one of the stories that bothered me the most. I mean, why care about such a tiny and seemingly insignificant detail? But I have since come to realize that Mary Baker Eddy understood the importance of adhering to all of the specific laws and principles she called Christian Science, and she worked to express them even in the smallest details of her life. The results of her Christianly scientific approach to living made her one of the most effective spiritual healers since Christ Jesus.
As Wilcox explained: “[Mrs. Eddy] showed forth to an unusual degree the exactness and divine order of God—her Mind—and she required perfection of thought and action from those of her household. . . . Mrs. Eddy believed that if one’s thought was not orderly and exact in the things that make up present consciousness, that same thought would not be exact enough to give a treatment or use an exact science” (p. 473).
In thinking about the importance of being scientifically exact, I was reminded of how many of my high school chemistry experiments flopped. That was because I didn’t think it was important to express order and exactness in measuring the chemicals or combining them in the correct way.
So, going back to the pins in Mrs. Eddy’s pincushion, I came to realize they were symbolic of infinitesimal spiritual ideas. The stars and planets have their right place in the universe, and Mrs. Eddy expected her pins to be in their right place in her pincushion. The beautiful thing is, that same principle of order applies to me and all creation. We exist in the perfectly ordered universe of divine Mind, where we are in the right place at the right time—the right school, the right home, and the right job. This law precludes the notion that anything could be lost or forgotten.
“[Mrs. Eddy] showed me that unless I was faithful and orderly with the objects of sense that made up my present mode of consciousness, there could never be revealed to me the truer riches or the progressive higher revelations of substance and things,” wrote Wilcox (p. 472).
Now, instead of being disturbed by Mrs. Eddy’s extraordinary ability to express order, I am in awe. The way in which her pins were kept orderly in the pincushion is now one of my favorite anecdotes about her. She wrote: “Christian Science demands order and truth” (Miscellaneous Writings 1883–1896, p. 215). This demand inspires me to see that everything in God’s universe can and is expressing the order of God’s perfection.
