Professional Documents
Culture Documents
The book was Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, the author
was Mary Baker Eddy, and the system of religious belief she founded was
Christian Science.
My journey with Science and Health and Christian Science has been a
bumpy ride, and this adaptation is, in part, my attempt to resolve the
contradictions raised by my experience with this remarkable teaching and
the human institution perpetuating it.
My journey
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asked what that was, and he began to describe the philosophy to me.
Another student, who had been raised in Christian Science, joined the
conversation. Finally, I asked, “Well, is there a book or something? At this
point both of them burst out laughing. At the time, I couldn’t understand
what I had said that was so hilarious. Eventually, I would read “the book”
fourteen times.
Mary Baker Eddy’s book changed my life. Within a few months, I left
chiropractic college in order to devote myself to the study and practice of
Eddy’s teachings. I would join the Mother Church in Boston, serve on the
board of directors of my local branch church, teach Sunday school, take
class with a Christian Science teacher, and, briefly, open a practice as a
Christian Science practitioner.
In 1986, I came out as a lesbian. This was a tumultuous time for me, as I
was in a heterosexual marriage, and I lost not only my husband, but also
my church. At that time, the Mother Church in Boston had adopted openly
homophobic policies, and these had become very public in 1981 with their
firing of a lesbian journalist from the Boston office of The Christian Science
Monitor. This firing generated national publicity when the journalist filed a
lawsuit, and an unofficial organization of lesbian and gay Christian
Scientists began to engage in protest actions against the Church.
At the time of my leaving the Church, I put away Science and Health, as I
put away so many other artifacts from my former, heterosexual life. It was a
period of grief and anger, and also tremendous excitement as I found my
voice and my tribe, and began my lifework as a lesbian playwright.
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One afternoon, I took out a pen and began editing the text, replacing all the
false generics (“man,” “mankind,” etc.) and all the masculine pronouns
associated with deity. I found myself making more and more changes,
engaging in an overdue dialogue with the book that had changed my life.
Ironically, the courage and integrity I had gained from reading Science and
Health were the very qualities that led to my claiming an identity that the
Church deemed unacceptable.
These talks with my friend sparked my curiosity about the Church’s current
position regarding sexual orientation, and I began to visit sites on the
Internet. In the process, I discovered a downloadable version of Science
and Health in an accessible word-processing format. I realized that the text
must now be in public domain, and there was nothing to prevent me from
adapting the book and uploading it to a self-publishing, print-on-demand
website.
Mary Baker Eddy was a spiritual seeker, and an invalid. Life had not been
kind to her. Widowed young and then remarried to an abusive man, she
had been manipulated into relinquishing her son to a foster family who,
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apparently without her knowledge, moved out West, taking the boy with
them. She would not reunite with him until he was an adult.
Pursuing healing for herself, she began to study and experiment with the
alternative medicine of her day: homeopathy, the water cure, dietary
regimes, hypnotism, and what might today be called “therapeutic touch.”
Deeply religious, she also wrestled with the perennial conundrum of why
bad things happen to good people in a world supposedly run by a
benevolent deity.
It was her answer to that question that had captured my imagination and
changed the course of my life.
Most religions that entail worship of a deity respond to that question one of
two ways: Either cruelty and injustice are part of some unknowable divine
plan, or else they must be outside of God’s jurisdiction. In other words, the
deity must be sadistic, negligent, or impotent.
Her solution to the problem of evil was breathtaking: She questioned the
reliability of the testimony of the five senses. A century before the discovery
of quantum physics, she challenged the legitimacy of the material world.
Starting from the premise that the spiritual power of the universe is
benevolent, omnipotent and omnipresent, she deduced that what we
consider “reality” must, in fact, constitute a form of delusion. Furthermore,
she would insist that the understanding of this could effect instantaneous
cures, regardless of the so-called facts of the disease or the condition. She
backed up her theories with a remarkable history of just such instantaneous
healing, and it was on the foundation of these healings that she built her
church.
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devoted to sharing stories of personal healing, and the publications,
including Science and Health, always contain sections for first-person
testimonies. Healing is available to anyone with an understanding of the
teaching and a willingness to apply it. Christian Scientists who have taken
class from an authorized Christian Science teacher are qualified to call
themselves “practitioners,” and charge their patients for metaphysical
treatments.
Eddy claimed the Bible to be the source for her authority. She asserted that
she was only elucidating the principles that underlay the so-called miracles
and healings performed by Jesus. It was her contention that these were not
miraculous dispensations, but “demonstrations” of a higher spiritual law
that, when understood and applied, overruled material, so-called law. Her
contention was that Jesus was not a deity, but a human being whose
understanding of divine Science enabled him to express the idea of Spirit,
and this “divine manifestation” she called “the Christ.” Her “Key to the
Scriptures,” which constitutes the latter portion of the textbook, contains an
exegesis of the first and last chapters of the Bible, Genesis and
Revelations. Her glossary also contains her metaphoric definitions of
names and places from the Bible.
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In spite of this, she employed the traditional male pronouns when
referencing this dual-gendered deity. In addition, she followed the practice
of using “man” or “men” to refer to all people. As a result, Science and
Health appears, from a contemporary grammatical standpoint, to be a book
for and about men and their filial relationship to a male deity, albeit one with
mitigating female qualities.
Replacing “God” with “Goddess” would have been an obvious choice, but,
as feminist theologians have pointed out, putting God in a skirt does not
necessarily reflect a radical paradigm shift. In separating the metaphysics
from Christian theology, I wanted to be careful to avoid some of the
limitations of that deity.
One of the most dated aspects of Science and Health for 21st century
readers is Eddy’s reference, based on Scripture, to divinely-sanctioned
human entitlement to “dominion” over the earth and all its forms of life.
Since the founding of Christian Science, this ravaged and polluted earth
has seen a century and a half of the results of unchecked human
arrogance, greed, and shortsightedness. Eddy appropriated animals as
metaphors for human qualities and also pejoratively applied words like
“beast” and “bestial.”
The use of “Gaia,” however, is problematic. If the word is used in the same
sense as environmentalists are using it, this suggests a higher power that
is synonymous with nature—either that, or else a higher power that
expresses itself through nature. In either case, the spiritual seeker is again
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brought up short by the arbitrary cruelties and inconsistencies of the
material world. Such a reading of “Gaia” in this instance would contradict
the fundamental tenets of Eddy’s theory.
Eddy was intentionally shocking in her use of the word “science” to refer to
what the world might consider the antithesis, a religious philosophy.
Christian Science was founded on her insistence that spiritual law underlay
her theory, and could, in fact, be proven by demonstration to trump the
supposed laws of the material world. My use of “Gaia” is intended to be a
“scientifically” spiritual definition.
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preservatives, pesticides, and genetic modification. Many substances never
intended by nature for ingestion are now marketed, purely for enhanced
corporate profit, as “food.” If our bodies are metaphoric, then surely the
food we eat is also a metaphor, and choosing to eat simply, naturally, and
in a way that does not deplete resources or pollute the body reflects the
more spiritual idea of divine sustenance.
Two other words in Eddy’s text have historic connections with Christian
morality: “purity” and “righteousness.” In the first instance, I have
substituted “integrity,” and in the second, “right-doing.”
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Since 1874
Since 1874, physics and psychology have made discoveries that offer
interesting perspectives on Eddy’s work. Psychology has identified and
named Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), a syndrome associated with
trauma. A survivor with DID may inhabit a variety of personas, each of
which relate to the world very differently. Eddy did not have the language of
“dissociation,” but the phenomenon she describes as “mortal mind” could
be framed as a collective dissociative disorder.
Quantum physics has made astounding discoveries about the nature of the
atom, and specifically the electron. The atom has been considered the
building block of matter—the foundation of the “real world.” Physicists now
tell us that the electron exists as a probability. If located in time, it cannot
be located in space. If located in space, it cannot be located in time. What
does it mean that the building block of matter exists as a probability?
Testimonies
I have not attempted any revision of the final chapter of the book, which
contains the personal testimonies of healing. These testimonies reflect the
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Christian beliefs of the majority of the patients, frequently citing the
Christian references in Science and Health. My first thought was to omit
them from the book, but to do that would be to separate the healing from
the teachings, and Eddy’s insistence on demonstrating faith through works
was and is the touchstone of her radicalism. It would be my hope that this
iteration of Eddy’s system of metaphysical healing will result in a future
section of testimonies, reflecting women’s understanding of Gaia and Her
creation.
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