Installment 8

ONE MORE MARY

I grew up with a picture of Mary Baker Eddy on the wall of the Sunday school I attended. I thought she went to our church and was my friend’s grandmother. Mrs. Twedell had the same fine features, kind eyes, and soft curly hair as those in the picture. When I saw her on Sunday mornings I would greet her with great affection. She was, so I thought, the author of the prayer I said every night:

Father-Mother God,
Loving me,—
Guard me when I sleep;
Guide my little feet
Up to Thee.

Now that I’m all grown up, I appreciate Mary Baker Eddy in a whole different way. She was fifty-four years old, both a widow and a divorcee, when she first published the work she is known for today. Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures is still in print, one of those perennial classics every author dreams of writing. She was fifty-eight when she founded her church, sixty when she chartered her college, sixty-two when she began her publishing house. Throughout the rest of her life she continued writing and speaking extensively. She also healed.

Her healing work and that of her students gave her credibility in many quarters. It also brought fame—both benign and malevolent. The “media” in America at the turn of the nineteenth century consisted of two major newspaper groups, headed by two powerful and influential men. Because the son of William Randolph Hearst had been healed of polio with Christian Science, the Hearst newspapers treated Eddy kindly. Not so for rival Joseph Pulitzer. Speculative, lurid stories about a woman who was a successful religious leader sold papers. Pulitzer even went so far as to instigate a lawsuit against Eddy on behalf of her heirs, known as “The Next Friends Suit,” which questioned her mental capacity to handle her own business and personal affairs. Had she lost this suit, she would have become, in effect, a prisoner in her own home. However, it was quickly resolved in her favor when she had opportunity to speak for herself before a panel of five male “masters,” appointed by the court for the purpose of examining her competency. Just and fair men, the panel quickly deemed her fully competent, and the suit was dismissed.

Her response to the whole experience was loving and pragmatic. In her eighty-seventh year she founded The Christian Science Monitor, a newspaper whose motto she dictated, and which still appears on the masthead: “To injure no man, but to bless all mankind.” The Christian Science Monitor is still in publication—and has won numerous Pulitzer Prizes for journalism.

Gillian Gill, one of Mary Baker Eddy’s more recent biographers, writes of her a passage that might also be applied to Guadalupe: “She transcends the boundaries not only of her historical period but of the religious movement she founded.” Gill continues, “Conventional in her twenties, weak in her thirties, struggling in her forties, a social outcast in her fifties, indefatigably working in her sixties, famous in her seventies, formidable in her eighties, [Eddy] rewrites the female plot and offers new ways to strive and achieve.”

Okay, I’m working in my sixties, will happily skip being famous in my seventies, but if I get to my eighties, I intend to be formidable. Formidable not like Coatlicue with her snakes and talons, but formidable like Mary Baker Eddy. Perhaps in following that particular Mary’s lead, I entered Virgin Territory a long time before I ever moved to Mexico.

© 2010 by Susan J. Cobb. All rights reserved.

Editors Note: We plan to publish an instalment of Virgin Territory periodically for the next year and a half. If you cannot wait that long you can always buy the book from the publisher’s web site here. For even more information visit Susan’s web site.