FATHER-MOTHER
On page 124 of Mary
Baker Eddy: The
Years of Trial (2nd edition) we find author Robert Peel (speaking of the motherhood of God) telling us that Mrs. Eddy never, in her final
renderings of her works, used the pronouns “She” and “Her”. While she certainly
emphasises the Father-Motherhood of God, I find that she does not use “Mother”
by itself in speaking of God.
There
are instances of “Father and Mother”.
For instance, on page 530:10 of her book Science and Health with Key
to the Scriptures she writes:
"…Jesus once said, ‘Take
no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink,’ – presuming
not on the prerogative of his creator, but recognising God, the Father and Mother
of all, as able to feed and clothe man as He doth the lilies."
And
in her Miscellaneous Writings 1883-1896, for example page 33:11:
“All clergymen may
not understand the illustrations in ‘Christ and Christmas;’ or that these refer
not to personality, but present the type and shadow of Truth’s appearing in the
womanhood as well as in the manhood of God, our divine Father and Mother.”
She
can refer to herself (as the Discoverer of Christian Science) as Mother,
as in the phrase “Mother, thought-tired” (Mis. 125: 23). She was mother of the idea of divine Science,
Christian Science.
The
whole sentence reads:
"Beloved Brethren,
Children, and Grandchildren: – Apart from the common walks of mankind,
revolving oft the hitherto untouched problems of being, and oftener, perhaps,
the controversies which baffle it, Mother, thought-tired, turns to-day to you;
turns to her dear church, to tell the towers thereof the remarkable
achievements that have been ours within the past few years: the rapid transit
from halls to churches, from un-settled questions to permanence, from danger to
escape, from fragmentary discourses to one eternal sermon; yea from darkness to
daylight, in physics and metaphysics."
GILBERT
EDDY
On
page 88 of Peel’s book, the first full paragraph speaks of the time when the
Eddys were living in Lynn and Mrs. Eddy was giving Sunday lectures in Boston. She
and her husband, Gilbert Eddy, would travel by public transport.
Longyear
Museum’s “Mary Baker Eddy’s weekly commute”
offers some details of this journey:
"On Sunday
mornings the Eddys might well have started out on a horse-drawn trolley, on
rails that ran past their Broad Street home down the dirt road to one of the rail terminals in
central Lynn. There they would board a train (perhaps the Eastern Railroad or
the Boston & Maine, or perhaps the new Boston, Revere Beach, and Lynn
narrow-gauge line) and travel south along the shoreline to East Boston.
Transferring to a ferry, they would cross the harbor to Atlantic Avenue on the
Boston side. A short walk would bring them to Haymarket Square in the city’s
North End, where they would board another horse-drawn trolley car for the jolting
ride far out along Shawmut Avenue. At the end of the line, they would walk the
rest of the way to the church in the South End. The round-trip journey could
take three or four hours."
Meanwhile, Peel
gives an insight into the man Gilbert Eddy (p. 88):
"While Mrs. Eddy gave
the lectures, Gilbert, “...always faultlessly attired in a Prince Albert,
ushered, took the collection, and talked with interested newcomers
afterward. One of these, Arthur True
Buswell, wrote later:
While
Mrs. Eddy, the eloquent, earnest pleader for her infant Cause was the chief
object of interest, it was the gentle, yet evidently strong nature of Asa
Gilbert Eddy which formed a necessary “background,” and seemed to make the
meetings altogether complete.”"
Joyce Voysey
