There's a new Mary Baker Eddy biography...
A World More Bright: The Life of Mary Baker Eddy
by Isabel Ferguson and Heather Vogel Frederick
The Christian Science Publishing Society
Jenny Nelles and Jeff Ward-Bailey, the Sentinel’s Teen Editors, give you a glimpse into a new biography from The Christian Science Publishing Society: A World More Bright: The Life of Mary Baker Eddy by Isabel Ferguson and Heather Vogel Frederick. What makes this biography different from the rest? While the book certainly appeals to all ages, it was written with youth in mind.
Jenny: As someone who enjoys reading biographies in general, this book really spoke to me. It was cool to see an emphasis on how Mary Baker Eddy navigated relationships with family, friends, and even people who called themselves her enemies and pretty much made it their goal in life to bring her down. A lot has been said about her discipline and how spiritually empowered she was, but it really struck me how she also handled things with so much love and a readiness to forgive. She wasn’t a pushover, but she gave people so many opportunities to make things right. Her spirituality and her deep devotion to God really informed all of her actions. I think that’s a lesson we can all learn!
Jeff: That’s true—plus, not many of these instances were small misunderstandings with friends and family. Mary Baker Eddy was one of the most famous women in the United States in her day, and under her direction the Christian Science Church grew to include tens of thousands of people and important media activities, so those attacks against her were really very public. The fact that she engaged so lovingly with those trying to discredit her character and destroy her work really shows how she was animated only by love—by what she’d discovered of God’s love.
Jenny: There are many places in the book where I found out about something I never knew before. Especially in terms of family. For example, I always thought Mary Baker Eddy’s son, George, disappeared from her life after he was taken to live with the Cheney family as a boy, and to some extent this was true. But this book details several visits George made to Boston and talks about how his family would travel from out West, sometimes surprising Mrs. Eddy.
I got the sense that George was brash in his manners, but that he loved his mother in his own way, not really “getting” what her healing work was all about. The book talks about how he would have probably preferred a “normal” mom who cooked and cleaned.
I also liked seeing pictures of the gifts mother and son gave one another. In one, there is a photo of the Black Hills Gold pin George gave her. At one point, Mary Baker Eddy had a house built for her son and his family as a surprise. Seeing the photo for myself really showed her generosity of spirit.
Jeff: The authors also did a really good job explaining how Mrs. Eddy started to develop her ideas about God, and about spirituality in general. A lot of people who have grown up in Christian Science are used to concepts like healing without medicine, but those are (and were, a century ago) revolutionary concepts! Mrs. Eddy tried lots of different treatments during her early years, including conventional medicine as well as homeopathy and things like the “water cure.” Her experiences with those treatments gradually led her to wonder whether someone’s faith in the ability of a drug to heal or harm might somehow be linked to their physical health. And of course, later that led her to the clarity that not matter, but God, Spirit, heals. The book shows us how she got to that point, jotting down notes and questioning everything along the way.
Jenny: I looked for mentions of teenagers while reading. One page described one of two times Mrs. Eddy addressed the congregation in her newly built Mother Church. I liked this part: “Her topic on that May morning was sin and the need for repentance, yet a teenager who attended the service described Mrs. Eddy afterwards in a letter home as ‘all love. You simply feel as if she was your best friend’ ” (p. 147). It can be pretty tough to talk about “sin” without sounding morally superior. But Mrs. Eddy knew exactly how to touch the heart without making someone feel judged. It’s this kind of love that redeems and heals.
The book also describes what Mrs. Eddy's life was like when she was a teenager.
Another time, the book talks about how Emma Shipman (one of the early workers in the Christian Science movement) described Mrs. Eddy as she taught her last class on Christian Science. Mrs. Eddy was “perfectly natural. She was ever alert, with a keen sense of wit and humor, and at the same time, her listening attitude to hear what God would give her to say was apparent” (p. 161). How many times have we been healed by humor? I loved that the descriptions didn’t feel abstract.
Jeff: The book also describes what Mrs. Eddy’s life was like when she was a teenager, which I’d never thought about before. She was young once, of course, and she had to learn lessons, too, just like we all do. I especially liked the book’s discussion about the Baker daughters’ dating lives. Apparently their father, Mark Baker, had a habit of stepping into the room when boys came over and announcing sternly, “Let all conversation and pleasure be in harmony with the will of God” (p. 20). I can picture Mary and her sisters being absolutely mortified at that!
I loved hearing some of the quips and anecdotes and metaphors that Mrs. Eddy peppered her teaching with. One student quoted her as saying: “Christian Scientists should so live that they will not need to tune themselves like a violin when they are called upon to help—they always should be prepared and ready to meet the need” (p. 94). Isn’t that great?
Jenny: I also liked the sidebars and informational sections that brought out areas of interest and taught me more about the time period.
Jeff: I liked those, too. I think it’s easy to forget that Mary Baker Eddy was shaped to a certain extent by the time and place in which she lived. So it was fun to learn about the temperance movement in the United States (in which she was active), and about the Battle of Bull Run in the Civil War, and about religious reformers whose work Mrs. Eddy was familiar with—that background helped me get a better sense of who she was as a person, and what kind of world she was living in.
I think my favorite sidebar was the one on page 82, which showed a page of the Wycliffe Bible from the 14th century, which includes the phrase “science and health” in its translation of Luke 1:77 . The phrase “science and health” was in the Bible all along, but Mary Baker Eddy didn’t discover this until about six months after she’d selected that as the title for her book!
The sidebars also reminded me that Mary Baker Eddy interacted with lots of public figures in her day—people like Mark Twain and Bronson Alcott. Knowing a little bit more about them helped me remember that Mrs. Eddy didn’t spend her whole life as this quiet woman cloistered away somewhere; she engaged with the best minds of her era, and Christian Science drew lots of support (and hostility) from the famous thinkers of the late 19th and early 20th century.
Jenny: I’m all for sharing the books we get for our office shelves, but now I definitely want a copy of my own.
