Like many readers of the Journal, I recently learned that several books about Mary Baker Eddy are being reissued as digital titles on JSH-Online.com. The first four of these consist of a narrative emphasizing Eddy’s healing work, a biography for young adults, and two volumes of reminiscences—recorded memories. As the Executive Manager of The Mary Baker Eddy Library, that made me happy for at least two reasons: first, because they represent several approaches to telling Eddy’s multifaceted story; and second, because the digital format makes the books searchable to subscribers of the site! At The Mary Baker Eddy Library, we receive questions every week asking for help finding a remembered passage. Now, many readers of these books will often be able to locate such passages themselves.
In addition to this variety and utility, there’s much to cherish about biographies and some of the building blocks that constitute them: insight, memory, balance, and inspiration.
The Scottish poet Alexander Smith observed, “A good portrait is a kind of biography, and neither painter nor biographer can carry out his task satisfactorily unless he be admitted behind the scenes” (Dreamthorp: A Book of Essays Written in the Country, p. 292). One of the best-known portraits of the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science is by Jean Jacques Pfister, painted from a 1903 photo of Eddy speaking to her followers from the balcony of her home in Concord, New Hampshire. Her outspread hands and tender expression show motherliness, eloquence, spiritual conviction—some of the qualities that make Eddy the Leader of Christian Science.
Our perception of this “balcony portrait” is enriched by the reminiscences, related correspondence, and newspaper accounts used by biographers to bring out the meaning of that June day. And Mary Baker Eddy’s published writings include her brief address, which begins, “Welcome home! To your home in my heart!” (The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 170). Isn’t that where real biography leads us—to the heart, the pith as well as the particulars of a life? And it’s our heart’s response that makes biography powerful. The telling of a human life in its significance resonates, raises questions, prompts self-examination, and makes biography useful. It takes us “behind the scenes,” not only into another’s life but into the purpose and direction of our own life, just as Eddy’s words did when heard in person.
For instance, a reminiscence by a woman called Dorothy Dellano Rumage recalled how her mother and father had told her about that 1903 address by Mary Baker Eddy and what it had meant to them:
“Mrs. Eddy spoke quietly, but with great strength and spiritual conviction. Although microphones and public address systems were unknown at that time, every word was perfectly and distinctly heard. There was not the slightest apparent sign of the accumulation of years. Mrs. Eddy was erect, gracious, with great ease and activity of movement.
“As she ended the address with the words ‘Trust in Truth, and have no other trusts,’ (The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany 171:1) my parents said that they felt such a great sense of release and uplift. . .” (Dorothy Dellano Rumage reminiscence, August 12, 1961, p. 2, The Mary Baker Eddy Library, © The Mary Baker Eddy Collection).
Unlike letters and other documents that are products of the moment, reminiscences such as the recorded memories of Rumage are often created long after the incidents they record, touching on both events and their significance. Eddy wrote, “Memory, faithful to goodness, holds in her secret chambers those characters of holiest sort, bravest to endure, firmest to suffer, soonest to renounce” (Pulpit and Press, p. 5).
It’s our heart’s response that makes biography powerful.
The women and men who wrote reminiscences about the Leader of the Christian Science movement, including those published in We Knew Mary Baker Eddy, Amplified Edition, Volumes I and II, deeply cherished her. They would certainly have described her as “of holiest sort, bravest to endure, firmest to suffer, soonest to renounce.” Many were modest people who, speaking and writing with utter conviction and from hard-won experiences, nevertheless remind readers to keep their words in perspective. While recollections might not always be 100 percent accurate to actual experience, one can rest with full confidence, they might say, in the Science of the Christ shared in the Bible, and Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures and other writings of Mary Baker Eddy.
At the same time, biographies of Eddy are uniquely important. They tell of a life of remarkable scope and achievement, of great sacrifices and healing impact. They also tell of a life that has suffered misrepresentation and character assassination. This started during Eddy’s lifetime. The 1909 publication of Georgine Milmine’s The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy and the History of Christian Science was both critical and inaccurate. Sibyl Wilbur’s similarly titled The Life of Mary Baker Eddy offered a sympathetic portrait, but one that was incomplete.
But why misrepresent Eddy? Sometimes her womanhood was used against her, as well as false characterizations of her as a hysteric, neglectful mother, plagiarist, power-hungry authoritarian, and drug addict. Through hard experience she grew to frame calumny as suprapersonal. Hadn’t many of the Hebrew prophets, as well as Jesus and his early followers, been pursued with hatred by those whose orthodoxies were challenged by spiritual healing, teaching, and preaching?
The Master pointed beyond their troubled rejection to the impersonal “lie” and “liar” that drove them (see John 8:31–44). He said, “The light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not” (John 1:5), or, as the New Revised Standard Version translates, “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”
Eddy wrote to a student in 1879, “I am ready to have laid bare all my life, and all I need is for the truth of this life to be known, but this is just what they won’t let be known” (Mary Baker Eddy to Caroline A. Fifield, January 8, 1879; L14257; The Mary Baker Eddy Library, © The Mary Baker Eddy Collection).
On the other hand, Eddy has at times stood alone as a misunderstood figure, because of some of her followers’ myth-making tendencies. The verified accounts in biographies such as Mary Baker Eddy: Christian Healer, Expanded Edition, supply readers with something more substantial and thought-provoking than circulated stories. The emphasis on the practicality of Christian Science and its demonstration by its discoverer offer a more balanced assessment.
The conflicting portrayals that have been published over the years owe some of their imbalance to the unavailability of primary sources to many of those same biographers. They did not have access to the letters, sermons, diaries, notes, reminiscences, and other historical materials that are available to the public today at The Mary Baker Eddy Library. The four books being reissued benefited from the current access to the archives. In the case of We Knew Mary Baker Eddy, authors’ earlier accounts were reevaluated by editors in the light of archival resources.
Mary Baker Eddy wrote briefly about herself in Science and Health; a little more extensively in Retrospection and Introspection. And in a letter dated around the time of her June 1903 balcony address to her followers, she wrote this to her church:
“My Beloved Brethren: — I have a secret to tell you and a question to ask. Do you know how much I love you and the nature of this love? No: then my sacred secret is incommunicable, and we live apart. But, yes: and this inmost something becomes articulate, and my book is not all you know of me. But your knowledge with its magnitude of meaning uncovers my life, even as your heart has discovered it. The spiritual bespeaks our temporal history. Difficulty, abnegation, constant battle against the world, the flesh, and evil, tell my long-kept secret—evidence a heart wholly in protest and unutterable in love” (Miscellany, pp. 133–134).
Like the Bible, all of Mary Baker Eddy’s writings enable us to go behind the scenes in the most profound way of all, to get beyond matter and find God, Love. The prophets staked their all on God’s nearness, and Mary Baker Eddy studied Bible accounts to learn how to follow these pioneers. She found spiritual reality shining through the words and works of Christ Jesus and the New Testament writers.
To some, it might be surprising to think of the Bible as a door to spiritual reality. But Eddy’s experience took her behind stereotypes of the Scriptures to their spiritual meaning, their true essence, which is accessible to us, too. Matter and its limitations are not the substance they appear; sin, disease, death, are not God-sponsored or God-created. In fact, they yield to the understanding of God and God’s creation, the spiritual man that Eddy traced through the Scriptures as the true identity of all men, women, and children.
She identified this understanding as Christian Science—provable spiritual knowledge—and explained it in Science and Health. This book takes us behind whatever scene, or situation, we may be in, and shows us that we are really God’s creation and in God’s care. It purifies our strengths and heals our weaknesses; we find ourselves more complete in God’s context and in service to others.
When I first read Science and Health from beginning to end, I thought, “This is a book for people who want to do something!” I naturally wanted to know more of the author. One experience brought together biography and healing for me. I recovered immediately when I called a Christian Science practitioner to pray for me after being sick several days with the flu. Around the time I was reading a biography of Mary Baker Eddy. I learned from my reading and my healing that Christian Science was meant to be practiced, actuated in human lives. I learned that Eddy applied her discovery to the founding and leadership of the Christian Science movement, and that I could apply its teachings to all aspects of life, especially to help others.
More recently, I’ve appreciated the way that A World More Bright: The Life of Mary Baker Eddy by Isabel Ferguson and Heather Vogel Frederick, the fourth book to be released in digital format, brings Eddy closer to young adult readers, with a promise that they, too, can participate in her discovery by putting it into practice.
These four biographies help us all to do that—to participate in Mary Baker Eddy’s discovery, her founding, and her leadership; to deepen our Christianity; to interrogate the Bible more closely; to read her writings and demonstrate their promises; to turn to God in storm and sunshine; really, to let God write our own story, too.
