Your Daughters Shall Prophesy

“There’s a marble bust of a stately Victorian woman sitting on my grandparents’ hearth in Seattle, and for part of my life I thought she was Mary Baker Eddy. The bust’s craftsman detailed each ruffle in her collar, the fine downturned corners of her mouth, a neck tendon—handiwork so thorough and lifelike that, as a child, my mother’s cousin was regularly inspired to jam his finger up her nostril, whispering, “Pickin’ Gramma’s nose, pickin’ Gramma’s nose . . .” The reasons for my confusion were complicated and have to do with the way my family tells and does not tell stories about itself—but these were Eddy’s problems, too.

Reverend Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, is recorded as having been sick for most of her life: anxious, erratic, doubled-over, her frail body racked by mysterious intermittent pains. Eddy’s temper tantrums and day terrors alienated her siblings and forced her parents into a lifelong tiptoe. She required constant rocking as a child, and when she was an adult her family commissioned an oversized cradle in which she spent many of her days. Harold Bloom describes Eddy as “a kind of anthology of nineteenth-century nervous ailments,” though I suppose many Victorian women could have been characterized that way. Female nervousness was being written prolifically into diagnostic manuals at the time, one strain of which was even called “Americanitis.” Is it surprising?

The cognitive dissonance of the 1870s was sharp: the blitz of postwar wealth, a booming middle class, half a million young men dead, and 3 million freed slaves expected to begin anew and forget—along with the emergent progressive majority—that anything had happened at all. We were tripping on the heels of the Industrial Revolution, which had sped everything up, and we were struck dumb by the realization that all Western powers were in cahoots and had been for a long time, and that millions were perishing in their colonial crossfire. Women were indoors getting splinters, dying in childbirth next to the window through which they’d watched the world pass them by. Time was no longer linear, but fragmented.

So when Eddy established the Church of Christ, Scientist in 1879, she offered an irresistible alternative: Life, as you suspected, is happening elsewhere. Disease and death are metaphysical glitches. Maybe the members of this new religion could feel it in their marrow, maybe Eddy more than others. After all, as scientist and novelist C.P. Snow asserted in his 1959 Rede lecture “The Two Cultures,” it is scientists who “have the future in their bones.” It was Eddy’s lifetime of illness, and her subsequent encounters with newfangled medical therapies, that poised her as an instrument of revelation. The Christian Science hermeneutical stance is that the whole Bible is a literal guide toward psychic and physical restoration, and that Eddy, as evidenced by the prophesied “little book” mentioned in Revelations, was uniquely appointed to reveal it through her explication of the Bible, Science and Health with Keys to the Scripture.

In it, she writes that “health is not a condition of matter, but of mind,” a conviction undergirding all of Christian Science—the controversial principle blamed for the deaths of those who refused hospitalization for their ailing parents or their kids. But Eddy’s call issues from the belief that Creation is inherently good, and that every physical or psychic aberration is an illusion that can be willed out of consciousness, vaporized by prayer. She saw all manner of disease as requiring only a “re-alignment between Mind and God.” Any perceivable darkness or disorder is the consequence of wandering, as in a dream from which you cannot wake. And rather than believing in the divinity of Jesus, she held that “Christ” is a spirit which flowed through him, and through all men and all women, granting everyone the potential to “demonstrate the Christ,” to be a healer.

The marble bust on my grandparents’ hearth was made, of course, not in the likeness of Eddy but of Mary Stevenson Semple, my fifth-great-grandmother, whose husband founded the shoreline city of Elsah, Illinois, which—for no particular reason having to do with his governance—became the site of Principia College, the world’s only Christian Science university. Maybe this was the source of my confusion. The Semples were Methodists when they arrived in Illinois and Episcopalians later on. And then their only daughter, Lucy, converted to Christian Science following the death of her business-tycoon husband.

Her family worried she’d joined a cult, but Lucy didn’t give a shit. She was rich, a businesswoman in her own right, summering her last decades on a rolling estate overlooking the Missouri River. Meanwhile, her younger brother Eugene had left Illinois, gone farther west, starting but failing to complete all of his entrepreneurial endeavors on the Pacific Coast, as large and optimistic as they were: cedar mill baron, filler of tide lands, canal builder, state printer, police commissioner, appointed governor of the Washington Territory, and three-time Democratic loser for elected offices. When his wife ran off with a businessman and the new baby, Eugene filed as a widower and sent his three young daughters to be raised by Lucy in Illinois.

She brought up her nieces, Maude, Zoe, and Ethel, in the Church of Christ, Scientist. Then Ethel begat Lulu, and Lulu begat my grandfather George, who begat my mother. I know all of this now. But which of my ancestors believed what, and for how long, and how those beliefs faded—in one lifetime, in one generation?—is still unclear to me. Did Eugene’s daughters cleave to Science to salve the wounds of their father’s abandonment? Was Lucy’s conversion to this rather egalitarian religion a radical response to Victorian restrictiveness? And how has the irreligious thrust of my immediate family been informed by the inheritance of a religion whose optimism allows for a near-complete disavowal of pain, of disorder, of chaos? Because there is no spiritual continuity in my ancestry to speak of, and because no one really knew why Lucy converted to Christian Science, I imagine unbroken lines of connection wherever they’ve never explicitly been debunked, and so when I was younger, having Christian Science relatives might as well have made me Eddy’s descendent.

And what if Eddy was my relation—my grandma, even? Being too weak to hold me, she’d ask a relative to set me beside her in a chair designated for children, her cold, thin hands folded in her lap. She wouldn’t even pat my head or crinkle a smile, and she’d be rocking, still rocking, as she had been doing her whole life. I’d listen to her chirp about the various miracles and revelations that had led to the founding of her church: the monastic fasts of her childhood, her experiences in mesmerism, a slip on the ice in Lynn, Massachusetts, that, by one account, left her paralyzed, cured only by reading one of Jesus’ healings—after which she sprung from bed in full form.
But origin stories are unstable. Even the New Testament accounts for this. There are, after all, four gospels. Some biographers claim that after the fall in Lynn, Eddy was treated with morphine, and that the injury was not a dire one. In her autobiographical writings, Eddy claims that the revelation happened when she was a child, bedridden by stomach ulcers, and later that it was some other sickly girl, then woman, then man, who’d revealed to her the true spiritual reality. But that’s all make-believe.

It was my wealthy ancestor Aunt Lucy who had the marble bust made of her mother, and it was passed down from household to household until it was set in my grandparents’ living room—a place which, before my lifetime, held all-night parties, endless packs of Pall Malls, jugs of Carlo Rossi on the coffee table, bespoke packing cubes for the VW van, great American novels and psychology tomes, my grandfather’s endless stories, and my grandmother’s tipsy, intellectual wit, which kept everyone from going to bed when they otherwise ought to have—and which is now a tomb of cobwebbed furniture and old bicycle parts. The bust, however, sits in the same place it always has and is, at best, a prompt for jokes and tall tales about the religious zealots from whom we descend.”

~ Adrian Shirk, And Your Daughters Shall Prophesy: Stories From the Byways of American Women and Religion