Article April 8, 2013 Issue

The moral courage that grows from Love

Bradley C. Bush

I love to contemplate the life of Mary Baker Eddy. I’m so grateful for the biographies that give us a glimpse of how she studied and practiced the Christ Science that she discovered and labored tirelessly to share with humanity. One account that has been most meaningful to me is related in the Amplified Edition of Twelve Years with Mary Baker Eddy by Irving Tomlinson (pp. 67–69). He tells of the Independence Day in 1897 when Mrs. Eddy invited her followers to visit her at Pleasant View. One visitor was a woman who came a great distance with her two children, one of whom was suffering from a painful boil on her head. After the speaking was over, those present were able to greet Mrs. Eddy as she sat on her porch. As the woman and her children passed through the reception line and paused for a moment to exchange smiles with Mrs. Eddy, the mother had a most illuminating experience. As she told it:

I wish I could make the world know what I saw when Mrs. Eddy looked at those children. It was a revelation to me. I saw for the first time the real Mother-Love, and I knew that I did not have it. I had a strange, agonized sense of being absolutely cut off from the children. It is impossible to put into words what the uncovering of my own lack of real Mother-Love meant to me.

As I turned in the procession and walked toward the line of trees in the front of the yard, there was a bird sitting on the limb of a tree, and I saw the same love, poured out on that bird that I had seen flow from Mrs. Eddy to my children. I looked down at the grass and the flowers and there was the same Love resting on them. It is difficult for me to put into words what I saw. This Love was everywhere, like the light, but it was divine, not mere human affection.