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Mind Over Matter: Inside the Christian Science Church NEW ENGLAND MONTHLY March 1988

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Mind Over Matter: Inside the Christian Science Church NEW ENGLAND MONTHLY March 1988 Mind Over Matter: Inside the Christian Science Church NEW ENGLAND MONTHLY March 1988 Mind Over Matter Inside the Christian Science Church By Alfie Kohn A young man at the back of the room stands up, his pink shirt sleeves rolled back from his wrists, and everyone turns around to see him and hear his story. He describes how he awoke in the middle of the night several years ago to find that his nephew, with whom he was sharing a bedroom, had developed a nosebleed. At first he was tempted to fetch a towel, but immediately realized that the proper response was prayer. He approached his nephew’s bed in the dark. “I said, ‘Do you know you are the perfect and entire reflection of God?’ and in a sound sleep he nodded and said, ‘Uh huh.'” The next morning the man awoke to find that “there was absolutely no sign of nosebleed on sheets, pillowcases, whatever.” The man sits down and there is a moment of silence here in the Mother Church, the world headquarters of Christian Science. Since the 3,000-seat “extension” building is being repaired, this week’s Wednesday testimony meeting takes place in the smaller church that adjoins it, the one Mary Baker Eddy built in 1894. On this sultry summer evening, the congregation fills all available space both downstairs and in the balconies. It is a well-dressed crowd featuring a generous sprinkling of white hair, but a good number of younger folks, too, have come to tell of their healings. A young woman rises and waits for the usher to reach her with a microphone. She thanks the Reader for having read selections from the Bible and from Eddy’s book Science and Healthjust before — selections chosen in advance and offered each Wednesday and Sunday without comment or interpretation, just as Eddy decreed. Then the woman begins: “After some years of wasting my substance on riotous living…” and describes how Christian Science changed her life and how Science and Health led her to God. “Each time I’m in need, He’s there. And He throws His arms around me and kisses me….Once I turn to my Father for all my substance, I’m truly alive.” An elderly man in a suit that has outgrown him tells how his daughter once had a premonition of disaster before getting on an airplane. Sure enough, there was an announcement about a mechanical problem and the passengers were transferred to another plane. “An indication of the kind of protection we can get from Christian Science,” the man says. A man in his mid-20s announces he has just returned from Christian Science summer camp, where he served as a counselor. One day a boy slipped off a log and hurt his back. His bunkmates reflected for a while on how he is a “perfect child of God.” Three days later the boy was happily playing Capture the Flag. A little girl tells how her eyes hurt one evening, whereupon her mother told her to read the Bible lesson. When she got up the next morning, the eyestrain was gone. A man in the front row says he prayed four times a day because he “felt incomplete” being single. Eventually he realized he “had to give up the idea that I was in charge of my social life. God was in charge.” After he went to a Reading Room to look up the word husband — the man pauses dramatically — “I met her.” * Although the splendid complex of buildings that make up the 15-acre Christian Science Center is at least as familiar a Boston landmark as Symphony Hall across the street, the nature of the Church of Christ, Scientist is understood by few outside its ranks. Christian Scientists are sometimes confused with Scientologists. Most people know they publish a newspaper, they have those Reading Rooms scattered about, and they don’t go to doctors. Occasional news stories describe the lawsuits that are filed when a child of Christian Scientists dies of a curable disease. Otherwise the Church is regarded as slightly peculiar, perhaps a little exotic, when it is regarded at all. Etched on the wall of the Mother Church are these words of its founder: “…disease is mental, hence the fact in Christian Science that the human mind alone suffers, and the divine mind alone heals it.” Anything that goes wrong — from illness to violence — is not part of ultimate reality but a reflection of the limitation of the human mind. Mortality and matter are themselves illusory. If, say, a child dies, this is not God’s will but the nature of mortality, which is based on error. (Why this nature should be built into our lives by a beneficent God is the wrong question to ask, according to one spokesman for the Church.) If the problem is alienation from God’s perfect will, then the solution is to return to it. This involves coming to understand how we ourselves are perfect creatures of God’s and how spirit rather than matter is the essential nature of being. It does not involve reliance on answers from the material world. Thus an editorial in last August’s Christian Science Journalindirectly offers the preferred response to the AIDS epidemic: “…the demonstration of what we can understand, expressed in morality and spiritual purification, reverses the threat that disease can exist at all, much less spread, with the truth that God, good, is already everywhere….And the truth is that God, good, never created anything evil, harmful, or destructive.” * “Christian Science!” John Updike snorted in one of his novels. “As if there could be such a thing!” But apologists insist the two words make perfect sense together, that there is plenty of proof of spiritual healings of illness. And Mary Baker Eddy speaks from the grave on the subject. On her enormous, ornate, eight-columned monument in Mount Auburn Cemetery, we read: “The term science properly understood refers only to the laws of God…” To understand these beliefs it is useful to know something of this woman. In 1821, Mary Baker was born into a rigid Congregationalist household in Bow, New Hampshire, the youngest of six children. She was a sickly, delicate child, easy prey for whatever disease was going around. Her frequent seizures and tantrums had her family convinced she was not long for this world, but a kindly doctor found her symptoms could be partly controlled by mental suggestion. As an adult, Mary remained ill, sometimes virtually an invalid, reportedly given to taking morphine. She wrote poetry, married and remarried, dabbled in the occult. Then she learned of a healer in Portland, Maine, one Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, and her life was changed. In that pre-Freudian age, Quimby held the unusual view that his patients’ illnesses were related to their beliefs, and consequently he had them discuss their feelings with him. After she improved under his care, Mary could not get enough of him and the method of healing he called “Christian Science.” “Why even the winds and waves obey him,” she wrote. She tried to practice his cures on patients of her own. In the mid-1860s, Mary moved to Lynn, Mass., divorced her second husband, became more self-reliant, and fancied herself a healer. As Church legend has it, her own healing technique dates not from Quimby (whose influence Mrs. Eddy began minimizing shortly after his death) but from February 1, 1866, when she slipped on the ice at the corner of Market and Oxford Streets, and was cured of her allegedly mortal injury — actually there is reason to doubt it was all that serious — by turning to the Bible. She was a charismatic woman with a flair for the dramatic and, some say, for rewriting past events to suit her purposes. In 1875, she published the first edition of Science and Health and, for a price, offered to make anyone a healer in three weeks. Four years later, she officially founded the Church. The next years were a jumble of feuds and power struggles with patrons and proteges. Lawsuits and countersuits were filed; newspapers were asked to attack Eddy’s enemies. She asked her disciples to concentrate their thoughts against a former student, a young man of whom she had earlier been quite enamored, when she became convinced he was injuring her with his thoughts. At one point, eight of her most devoted members defected, citing “frequent ebullitions of temper, love of money, and the appearance of hypocrisy.” When her third husband died of organic heart disease, she attributed it to “malicious mesmerism,” which she and her followers later called Malicious Animal Magnetism and invoked to account for a variety of unpleasantness. When one of her proteges attracted a record-setting 50 pupils, a rule was passed limiting all classes in the field to 30. When a gorgeous $1.2 million edifice was built by the branch church in New York, construction was promptly begun on a $2 million church in Boston. By the late 1880s the Church was thriving; Eddy earned more than $100,000 from her classes in a six-year period. She labored to distinguish herself from rival mental healers, of which many varieties existed but no others were to survive. A skilled editor rewrote her textbook as it went through five more editions — providing a new source of royalties each time followers had to purchase the updated version. Even with all the improvements, Eddy declared that her book would not be fully understood for centuries. In 1907, a 34-room mansion in Chestnut Hill was purchased and renovated for Eddy to spend her last days.
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