‘Mary Baker Eddy: her life and times’

from spirituality.com

Why do you think Mary Baker Eddy’s life is as important as her discovery?

I’d like to use a quote from Mary Baker Eddy herself regarding that. And this is a quotation from a letter that she wrote in 1893 to her student Edward Kimball. She says, and this is just a postscript to the letter: “For the world to understand me in my true light, and life, would do more for our Cause than aught else could. This I learn from the fact that the enemy tries harder to hide these two things from the world than to win any other points.”

I think part of it is this idea that we have to respect the message of Christian Science, as well as Mary Baker Eddy as the person who brought this message to the world.

I never thought I could be a worker in Mrs. Eddy’s household. Did you have to be practically perfect to be a worker? Did she have to release any members of her household from time to time because they did not measure up?

There were a number of people who served in Mrs. Eddy’s household for long periods of time, and there were people who served for short periods of time. I think the reasons really varied from person to person. I don’t think that you had to be perfect to work for her, but I think that you had to be striving to reach, perhaps, a higher level in your thinking when you did work for her.

I always felt part of Mrs. Eddy’s strength stems from the fact that she was a New England woman, born and bred. Do you think her upbringing had an effect on her courageous life and discovery?

Yes, I very much think it did. If you read some of the wonderful published biographies of Mrs. Eddy, you can get a better sense than I can ever describe here of the kind of upbringing that she had in New England. She had very fine parents. And I guess I can describe the community that she lived in as being small but very much tending toward education and tending toward a very active church life. So I think that this all had a great influence on her.

Her brother, as some of the listeners may know, was college-educated, which was really quite an extraordinary achievement during that time, and [he] was for a while a member of the New Hampshire state legislature. So she knew some very extraordinary people, and some very well-educated people, and I think this had a profound influence on her.

Are you still getting more records, letters, etc., that relate to Mary Baker Eddy’s life, or do you think there’s not much more out there?

This is a perfect opportunity for me to describe the fact that our collections are about far more than Mary Baker Eddy and her life and times. We have collections that relate to the whole history of the Christian Science movement, from its very beginnings in 1866 down to the present day. And we are answering questions that relate to the history of the Christian Science movement past 1910.

But there still are materials out there, and we still are getting things in, even some letters written by Mary Baker Eddy herself. So that’s quite exciting. And if you or someone you know comes across something, and you just simply assume that it must already be in the Library collections, I would very much urge you to give us a call and find out for sure, because there are still some things out there that we’d love to be able to have in the collections, and thus be able to share with the world.

Someone I spoke with recently heard that Mary Baker Eddy had secretly eloped at some point in her life, and then claimed that she was abducted. This person feels that such an incident discredits her work. I’ve never heard such a claim or accusation before. Is there any truth to this, or an incident that could have been misinterpreted? Just want to be able to give the correct information, or explain where this came from, if anywhere.

No, I have to say I’ve never heard that story before. And I can’t think of how it could even be a distortion of any other event in Mrs. Eddy’s life.

But maybe this gives me a little place to talk about the fact that one of the things we do for people is to verify either events that people have heard about that supposedly took place in Mary Baker Eddy’s life, or various quotations and essays that seem to circulate around that sometimes have Mrs. Eddy’s name at the bottom, but in fact, as far as we can tell, did not originate with her. We do this kind of authentication work pretty regularly.

Can you give us some background on Christian Science Reading Rooms? What were they like in her day?

Well, rather than give you the background, let me tell you to contact us, because we have a great handout, as we call it, on Christian Science Reading Rooms, and I really can’t summarize it—it’s about four or five pages long. And it gives some nice background on what Reading Rooms were like in Mrs. Eddy’s day, and also gives some references to some of the articles that appeared in the monthly Christian Science Journal, and weekly Sentinel on that topic.

One thing that I’ve found fascinating, and we’re still doing more digging on this, is the relationship of Christian Science Reading Rooms to the other reading rooms of the period. Publishers’ reading rooms were not uncommon during the late 19th century. And one thing, perhaps, that we forget in this day and age is that books were much more expensive in the late 19th century than they are today. Therefore, many publishers in their rooms, where they sold their products, would provide an area where people could sit down and read, because this was a major purchase …. So people would definitely sit down, read a book, and then decide whether they wanted to buy it or not. And that and much more is in the handout, so contact us if you’re interested in a copy. [There is a small charge for handouts.]

If there was only one thing you could tell us about Mrs. Eddy, what would you tell us?

I actually was thinking about that over the last few days. And I was thinking that something that I find really extraordinary about Mrs. Eddy was that when she discovered Christian Science in 1866, she decided that what she most wanted to do was to take this discovery, and to use it to help other people. That desire to help others was what really empowered her life for 45 years, and even before that, she always had a desire to help people. That’s something that’s really important to consider when looking over her whole life story.

Anyone can submit questions to the Library.
E-mail: research@marybakereddylibrary.org; phone: 617-450-7218.