On the surface, Caryl Farkas appears to be an anachronism in her largely secular, academic hometown of Madison, Wisconsin. A Christian Science practitioner and teacher, she has dedicated her life to spiritual healing, and enthusiastically attends and serves in church with her husband and their two children. On the other hand, “Most thinking people in town feel they’ve outgrown religion,” Caryl says. “They think of it as a kind of fairy tale; something that’s out of touch and has lost its relevance.”
For a time, Caryl had her own doubts about the practicality of the faith in which she was raised. After leaving Christian Science as a young woman, she later began an earnest search for truth, reading books on philosophy and spirituality. She met the man who would become her husband at a metaphysical bookstore.
Years later, after being instantaneously healed of an incapacitating illness, she recognized the truth of Christian Science. Not long after, both she and her husband became Christian Science practitioners.
Caryl Farkas
COURTESY PHOTO
Caryl, in the Preface of her textbook, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, Mary Baker Eddy makes this arresting statement: “The time for thinkers has come” (p. vii). Yet, as you’ve said, many people today who are thinkers consider themselves atheists or reject religion. How do you see these terms as being compatible?
There’s a little book by the Bible translator J. B. Phillips called Your God Is Too Small about how people get stuck in secondhand, immature imaginings about the nature of God. Phillips describes popular portrayals of God as the “Grand Old Man,” and “Managing Director”—left-over images from childhood that never grew up. C. S. Lewis, a friend of Phillips, once said that most of the time we don’t actually pray to God; we pray to our idea of God—something much smaller and ultimately unreal.
So it would seem that thinking and religion, as they are popularly conceived, don’t often go together. But Mrs. Eddy, in those first lines you quote from Science and Health, suggests something else: that real thought and religion naturally go hand in hand. It’s a revolutionary thought that not only saves spiritual sense from becoming the baby thrown out with the bath water of humanly conceived religion, but helps us move consciously and intelligently into the future without old superstitions and unproved beliefs.
Your own life experience certainly illustrates this. Would you tell us a little about it?
As a child I was on fire with Christian Science. When I was 11, I substitute-taught classes in our Sunday School. I went to Wednesday testimony meetings regularly with my mom and often had testimonies to share, including a healing of severe tonsillitis on the way to the hospital, which left the doctor impressed.
In fact, I knew I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for Christian Science. After 16 years and multiple miscarriages, my mother was losing hope of having a child. Someone said, “You should try Christian Science.” My mother called a Christian Science practitioner, and within a year gave birth—to me—and joined the local branch church. So I knew from early on that I owed my life to the practice of Christian Science.
Yet, when you were about 15, you and a friend became disillusioned with religion and “invented” your own.
My friend was dissatisfied with the ritual and creed of his church, and I had begun to feel there was a disconnect between what I was taught in Sunday School and the lives of the members, which made church seem hypocritical. In retrospect, I had a pretty immature sense of church. My friend and I were coming at the idea of a new religion from the standpoint of “What rules would ensure that church would demonstrate its value?” As if a set of rules that everyone obeyed would give you church. Of course, it doesn’t work that way.
I understand that you then had a “prodigal son” experience.
By the time I left for college, Christian Science had begun to seem distant—a far-off country I’d left in childhood and couldn’t get back to. I was beginning to adopt a more materialistic view of life to fit in with friends and school.
Fifteen years later I found myself bedridden from a malarial fever and a host of other physical problems.
I was looking at the bedroom wall and thinking about how science demonstrates that what seems solid is not what we think.
One night I woke up and the fever was spiking. I had been reading The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels and a book on quantum physics, and I lay there wondering, “How do we know anything? What is real? What is substance?” I was looking at the bedroom wall and thinking about how science demonstrates that what seems solid is not what we think. Atoms are composed mostly of space, and quantum physics gets into the question of what is in that space; that it has to do with consciousness. I wondered, What is the thought that makes things what they are? What thought is behind the essence of life, that isn’t subject to change and is consistently true?
I kept mentally circling back to the idea that what we think and believe has a huge impact on our experience. In the case of primitive Christianity (which I’d been reading about in the Pagels book), the change Jesus’ ministry caused in people’s thought had a tremendous impact. Recognition of the naturalness of healing and the active power and presence of divine Love led to more healing and widespread growth of the Christian movement.
In a way, my mental process was sort of like peeling an onion. I was taking off the layers of things that I had known in a secondhand way—philosophy, human doctrines and opinions—to get down to what I really could honestly say I knew from experience, what I knew in my heart. What remained was divine Love. I knew that it had always been there. The experience was, I suppose, a coming back home to those moments I’d had as a child when I’d had an almost palpable sense of light and love, and healing had followed.
And what happened as a result?
I woke up the next morning and I was completely well. The fever was gone; the pains were gone—the whole debilitated, sick, mortal sense of life was gone. I felt light, free, like a child. I hadn’t felt like that in years. When I tried to figure out what I had been thinking the night before, it all came back to me in the words of “the scientific statement of being” (see Science and Health, p. 468). That’s when I realized I’d been working out that statement in my own thought.
I leaped out of bed and ran into the living room and found my copy of Science and Health, which had been collecting dust for 15 years, opened it up, and started reading. And lo and behold, every single sentence rang true. I thought, “How could I not have understood these words?”
Not long after, I went through Christian Science class instruction and came home so filled up full with spiritual sense that it very naturally overflowed into the healing practice. People would call for help, and there was healing.
At the end of the class my teacher shook our hands, and he said to me, “You’ll go home and heal.” And I thought, “Well, that’s what he’s telling everyone, but I’m actually not going home right now. I’m going to visit my parents and spend some time on the beach with family.” I got in my parents’ car—I think we were on the road for about ten minutes—and my mother said, “Your aunt just called. She wants to talk to you about Uncle Johnny. He’s not doing well, and she’s been having problems.”
I got home and called my aunt. The truths I shared with her were the result of that overflow of spiritual sense that came from class. Over the next week there was healing in my aunt’s family. Then I got home to New Mexico, and suddenly people there were asking me for help. So my teacher’s words turned out to be true. The lessons from class started to become real and practical, my own thinking began to get clearer and more consistent, and I began to understand how the healing work is really done.
How did the church fit into your life at that point?
When I came back to Science, I hurried to the first Christian Science service I could find. I sat in the back and wept during Mrs. Eddy’s hymn “O gentle presence …” (Christian Science Hymnal, No. 207). I’d come home, and the service was exactly as it had been when I was a kid. But I was encountering it on a completely different level.
You had finally made Christian Science your own.
Yes! It got real. You can tell someone Christian Science works, and you can try to give it to somebody—heaven knows my mother tried to give it to me! But I had to come to it myself. My mother said that at a certain point she used to pray, “God, she’s yours.” There’s both truth and humor in that, I think. Doesn’t it always come down to honest thinking? You can’t think things through for somebody else.
To me, this is why Christian Science class instruction isn’t open to anybody who’s simply curious about it. To me, this is why Mrs. Eddy said Christian Science teachers should carefully select students with “promising proclivities toward Christian Science” (Church Manual, p. 83).
I take that to mean someone who has a genuine love for Christian Science and enough experience to have put that love into action in their daily walk, and to have seen that it is, indeed, the way. It’s not just having an intellectual attraction to something. Science and Health is not an information download; it needs to be put into practice. You take those truths and test them in the laboratory of your own experience.
And that genuine practice of the Science was what you felt was missing in your church experience as a teen.
Absolutely. That’s what I didn’t get—that everything starts from your own understanding of and relation to divine good. I think the next unsatisfying 15 years was my making my way home to the spiritual sense that underlies real Church—that underlies life.
We need to have an ongoing relationship with the revelation of Christian Science.
In the beginning of the chapter “Christian Science Practice” in Science and Health, what do you find? Three pages about Luke’s account in the Bible of a woman referred to as a “sinner,” washing Jesus’ feet with her tears (Luke 7:36–50). It doesn’t start out with a list of rules—first you do this, then that. Mary Baker Eddy recounts this story of a woman who is so ready for divine good that she literally throws herself at the feet of its representative, Christ Jesus (see Science and Health, pp. 362–365). And that’s where the practice starts—with earnestly putting ourselves in the way of what we understand to be the highest good there is, and then being faithful to it.
Mary Baker Eddy wrote in Science and Health, “The dream that matter and error are something must yield to reason and revelation” (p. 347). It sounds as though that sums up your experience.
Yes, that’s true, and the analogy to a dream is a good one. If you wake from a nightmare of being chased by a tiger, you don’t go checking under the bed to see where the tiger went. Rationality and all evidence assure you that you’re safe. In my own experience, once I began to see that pain, sorrow, sickness, and sin were not substantial or authoritative, the dream of life completely in and of matter started to lose its power.
Reason and revelation operate more freely when we allow the Word of God to fill a larger place in our day-to-day life. As students of Christian Science, we need to have an ongoing relationship with the revelation of Christian Science, which is different from just having a relationship with the bricks and mortar structure or human organization of church.
The revelation, the heart of Christian Science, is the realization that there is nothing more powerful, or causative, or authoritative than divine Spirit. And then to actually live from that basis is having a relationship with the revelation. The healing that led Mary Baker Eddy to the discovery of Christian Science was a response to the revelation that the Christ is always with us and all that was true for Christ Jesus is true in all times and places. We need to live in relation to this truth—it can’t be an intellectual exercise. We shouldn’t be—what is that phrase I heard recently?—a “tea bag” Christian Scientist. In other words, thinking spiritually only when we get in hot water!
How does this revelation relate to the church organization?
Mrs. Eddy’s definition of Church as “the structure of Truth and Love” is the natural outcome of Jesus’ healing theology. In a dictionary used at the time she was writing her textbook, the first definition of structure is “act of building”—a verb. So the human institution has to be spiritually active—it has to prove its utility by, as she puts it, “elevating the race, rousing the dormant understanding from material beliefs to the apprehension of spiritual ideas and the demonstration of divine Science …” or it’s not Church at all (Science and Health, p. 583).
We’re not done with church building in the way Christ Jesus built his church. Think of his words to Peter: “Upon this rock I will build my church” (Matthew 16:18). He meant that his church is founded on the revelation of what the Christ is. Three hundred years of primitive Christianity packed with healing was based on that rock. Are we not in need of that today more than ever?
Mrs. Eddy taught people to recognize the present power of divine Truth and Love, and those people went home to their communities and healed. Church has got to begin in practice and continue by practice.
Yet what we see today is the “unchurching” of society to some degree.
Over the last decade we’ve seen the rise of agnosticism and atheism in the West. I remember, five years ago now, I was at our community pool and the teenager who was checking passes was reading Christopher Hitchens’s God is not Great, and I thought, “Wow, it’s everywhere!”
Recently there’s been a great deal of press devoted to what mainline churches are doing to reach people and reverse that trend—setting up in coffee shops and art galleries, for example. And atheists are writing a lot about what they can do to be perceived as more compassionate and caring. At this point both believers and nonbelievers are scrambling for answers. Churches with shrinking congregations are trying to find new ways to connect and be relevant, secular humanists are creating communities so that they can affirm their values in fellowship.
In the wake of the school shooting this past December in Newtown, Connecticut, there were a number of news articles about the desire many humanists feel to be part of the community which offers comfort.
Behind it all, I think, is a yearning for something solid, a dependable place to turn in times of need; to know there is a supreme and always present divine Principle that lovingly and intelligently governs our lives.
Most people still aren’t acquainted with God, especially as divine Principle and Love. The God they have been taught to believe in—a Supreme Being who allows people to be sick and die, to be hungry and cold, or vents His wrath on the sinful—isn’t too loving or great.
You’re absolutely right. That anthropomorphic theology plays out in so many awful and dysfunctional ways. It’s no wonder thinking people would condemn it. Last year, when we first chatted about doing this interview, the news was about the attempted assassination of a girl in Pakistan because she promoted education for girls. Since then, we’ve seen multiple rampage shootings here in the United States and violence globally, which is provoking an outcry for justice. The media broadcast all sorts of opinions about how to achieve that.
I think it’s clear to any thinking person that the world is in dire need of an understanding that will bring us together and help us bring out what is best in us. And that’s what Christian Science offers the world: Jesus’ theology of God as Love, the only real power, and man as inseparable from divine Life, Truth, and Love. Rather than demanding belief in an anthropomorphic God, who looks down on us and abandons or judges us, leaving us with no basis for hope, Christian Science reveals and acquaints us with the one all-loving God, who is All-in-all. This understanding of God brings healing and shows us the power of Spirit to overcome the effects of hate and despair, as Jesus himself proved.
How important is an understanding of that theology to spiritual healing and human progress?
Theology is where we all start from. It’s what we think God is and what bases our thoughts and actions. Even if you’re an atheist, you have something you believe is cause and authority. It’s vitally important to recognize that all we think and do has a mental starting point, and then to be conscious of what that is. To choose the highest sense of what is real and good. Mary Baker Eddy wrote in the chapter titled “Creation” in Science and Health: “The foundation of mortal discord is a false sense of man’s origin. To begin rightly is to end rightly” (p. 262). If we begin with the understanding that we are the children, the expressions, of wholly good Principle, Love, we’ll find that spiritual healing and human progress come very naturally and normally to us. This is what we’re really made for.
The Apostle Paul said, “You are the temple of the living God” (II Corinthians 6:16, New King James Version). If you look up the word temple, it says, “a space set aside for auguries.” For the Greeks, an augury was a sign from a god. The temple was the place to hear divine direction. In that context, you can see what Paul was saying to the Corinthians: You are the temple. Never mind the building on the hill. You’re the place where God’s own nature is seen and heard.
