Mary Baker Eddy/Courtesy photo
BY MARY LANGWORTHY
A remarkable woman, worth getting to know, Mary Baker Eddy lived from 1821-1910. Healer, author, church founder, publisher, and teacher, when she passed on, she was one of the most famous women in America and the leader of a world-wide religious movement based on Christian healing. Click here for a 10-minute video about her life.
During Women’s History Month, the Christian Science Society, Los Alamos, is inviting the community to learn more about her. A book group will meet to discuss her life at noon on Friday, March 31, in the Christian Science Reading Room, 800 Trinity Drive, across from Smith’s. Bring your lunch!
Biographies are great and the Reading Room has plenty of them. But the best way to learn about her is by reading her primary work, the textbook Science and Health, with Key to the Scriptures.
That said, be careful. One woman began reading it with a cigarette in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other with one purpose: to prove that the book was nothing but a crutch. This woman was addicted to drugs and in a bad marriage. She underlined everything she thought was preposterous in red. But she also wrote favorite quotes in a separate notebook.
The first quote was “Love is impartial and universal in its adaptation and bestowals” (p. 13). She said to herself, “What if that were true?”
She also wrote down a quote about Love supporting the “struggling heart” which spoke to her because that described her. So she kept reading. And the ideas in the book transformed her life. The desire for drugs and cigarettes dropped away. That woman, Deborah Huebsch, has been in the public practice of Christian Science healing for half a century. (Read or listen to more about her story in “Getting It Right” in the November 2013 issue of The Christian Science Journal.)Biographies, Science and Health, and other works by Eddy are available to read, borrow, or purchase at the Reading Room. We hope you’ll stop in. It’s open weekdays from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. For more information about the March 31 book group, come by, call 505-709-7069, or visit CSSocietyLANM.org.