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Overview
From Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of the Church of Christian Science, to Deepak Chopra, Americans have struggled with the connection between health and happiness. Barbara Wilson was taught by her Christian Scientist family that there was no sickness or evil, and that by maintaining this belief she would be protected. But such beliefs were challenged when Wilson's own mother died of breast cancer after deciding not to seek medical attention, having been driven mad by the contradiction between her religion and her reality. In this perceptive and textured memoir Blue Windows, Wilson surveys the complex history of Christian Science and the role of women in religion and healing.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781466888869 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Picador |
| Publication date: | 03/26/2024 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 408 |
| Sales rank: | 465,258 |
| File size: | 770 KB |
About the Author
Barbara Wilson is the pen name of Barbara Sjoholm, an award-winning translator of Danish and Norwegian, and the author of many travel books, memoirs, and biographies. In the 1980s, Wilson’s mysteries were some of the first lesbian crime novels to appear. One series features Seattle printer and feminist Pam Nilsen as she discovers her sexuality and investigates crimes in her community. Another showcases Cassandra Reilly, an Irish-American translator of Spanish based in London. The first Cassandra Reilly novel, Gaudí Afternoon, won the Lambda Literary Award and the Crime Writers’ Association Award, and was made into a film of the same name. The most recent Cassandra Reilly mystery is Not the Real Jupiter (2021). For more information, visit www.barbarasjoholm.com and www.barbarawilsonmysteries.com.
Read an Excerpt
Blue Windows
A Christian Science Childhood
By Barbara Wilson
Picador
Copyright © 1997 Barbara WilsonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-8886-9
CHAPTER 1
Absent Treatment
One of our next-door neighbors, when I was a child, had a model railway in his garage, and occasionally he invited me and my brother and other kids over to see it run. Mr. Bear put on his striped engineer cap and pulled the sheet off the big plywood table resting on sawhorses. The garage door was always kept closed, the car parked in the driveway, and the darkness of the garage, thick with the scent of grease and metal, with boxes of newspapers and old clothes mildewing in shadowy corners, made the scene before us, lit only by an uncovered light bulb or two, as dramatic as a theater stage before the play begins. Engineer Bear blew his tin whistle, switched a gear, and the miniature train began its journey, bringing everything to life. Circling in an endless figure-eight, the locomotive and the flatcars piled with logs and tiny chunks of coal (barbecue charcoal), the boxcars with Santa Fe and Burlington Northern lettered on the sides, the passenger car with a tiny blue-uniformed conductor visible at one end, passed over bridges and through tunnels, by groves of matchstick trees and along blue-painted streams the width of a ribbon. Around and around the train chugged, humming electrically, occasionally tooting, sometimes stopping at the station to take on or let off minuscule passengers, sometimes steaming straight through the small village to the railroad yard, where cars could be hitched and unhitched.
We kids would watch the train looping around for fifteen minutes or so and then, depending on our age and attention span, get bored and wander off. If we'd had leave to run the trains ourselves, we would have turned the speed up high and crashed the trains as they went round the curve, or put two trains on the track and watched them smash headfirst into each other. We would have put a plastic cow on the crossroads and shrieked, "Get out of the way, you stupid cow. Whoops! Hamburger!" But disasters were something Mr. Bear would never allow, and we never thought of asking permission to wreck everything for the fun of it. His railroad existed only to maintain the status quo, and he was the only person who never got bored with it. He was always planning a new row of houses for his village or increasing the number of barnyard animals in the outlying farms. The endless looping for him was predictable poetry, the closed system a safe place where imagination, of a cozy and limited kind, could flourish.
I think of Mr. Bear and his miniature train when I try to explain Christian Science, and how it was to be raised in a small religious sect. From the outside all sects seem to be closed systems, the same ideas traveling like boxcars pulled by the locomotive of revealed truth along the same routes, circling and recircling in a figure-eight that admits no outside influence and that never deviates, speeds, or crashes. From the inside, of course, it feels completely different. A sect creates a safe haven, a world where the trains run at stable speeds and are always on time, where the streets are swept and no breeze dislodges even a leaf, where barnyard animals neither defecate nor procreate, and where people do nothing but get on and off a train that takes them round and round the same familiar landscape.
When I was growing up, the place that was most like the miniature railroad world of Mr. Bear was Battle Creek, Michigan, the small town where my grandparents lived and where my mother was born. We used to go there for weeks at a time in the Fifties, traveling from Southern California by train or plane, always in the summer, the high summer when the Midwestern sky was an enormous heavy blue with forceful white clouds blustering across it. When the humid air vibrated slowly with the hum of insects and shadows hovered, dark without being cool, under the thick elm trees that broke the sidewalk with their roots. When the thick sweet smell of cherry and apple pies cooling on the white-painted kitchen counter mingled with the underground cellar fragrance of wash going through the old-fashioned wringer. When it was thunderstorm weather, lightning and wind driving my younger brother Bruce and me inside to play with our uncle's old Lincoln logs or tin soldiers in the attic. When the rain barely relieved the tension in the air and immediately rose in steam from the red brick street in front of the house, a fizzy locomotive of a noise.
We lived in Long Beach, California, where summer meant going to the ocean and spending hours building sandcastles and letting the waves hurl us up and down and back and forth. In Michigan the water was in lakes and in the rain of those hot midafternoon and early-evening storms. Summer in the Midwest meant swimming in those lakes with their oozy mud and plants that grabbed. Summer in Battle Creek was a wet smell of lake water and mildew, and washing and thunderstorms. But there was something toasted about it too. Day and night trains ran through Cereal City, long lines of boxcars bringing corn and wheat and oats from silos in the prairie states. During the day the trains were full of importance, hurtling through town, stopping traffic, making everybody stare and sometimes wave to the engineer, who gave a friendly and powerful wave back. Yet in the middle of the night, it seemed as if the trains called out lonely and aching in the dark. Raisin Bran came from Battle Creek, and Special K and Kellogg's Corn Flakes and Frosted Flakes. When we visited the Kellogg factory we could hear the pinging and spronging of grain roasting in the big metal vats, hear the cascade of millions of tiny particles cascading through chutes, and breathe in the vast swelling warm scent of toasted grain. Facts were thrown at us as we filed along gangways suspended above the huge stainless-steel machinery, facts to do with numbers of ears of corn, and how many acres of grapevines went into how many boxes of Raisin Bran, and how Tony the Tiger got his name. At the end of every visit we were treated to a bowl of vanilla ice cream sprinkled with Cocoa Puffs and given a six-pack of individual-sized cereal boxes.
Other than going to the Kellogg factory there was not much to do in Battle Creek. My brother Bruce and I would run from the cellar to the attic until they made us go outside; we'd play in the backyard and try to climb the cherry trees; we'd walk slowly to Willard Library to get more books, down streets of roomy old houses, saying to each other, "Look at all those stories. Look, there's a three-story and a four-story. There's a turret and a balcony." The houses seemed to us old-fashioned and romantic, for in California we lived in a flat-roofed bungalow that looked like thousands of others in the spreading subdivisions of the L.A. Basin. These often-shabby Battle Creek Victorians had belonged to wealthy families once; now they were being turned into rooming houses and apartments. The boom days of Battle Creek were over, even though the downtown still bustled during the week and on Saturdays. By the late Sixties that bustle would be gone, too.
On Sundays we all went to the Christian Science church that was set firmly on Church Street along with all the other massive edifices that served Presbyterians, Methodists, and Episcopalians. Bruce and I wriggled on the hard wooden pews, surrounded by ladies in flowery dresses and white gloves. Afterwards we wriggled even more through a Sunday afternoon in Grandma's tiny parlor with its fireplace mantle lined with photographs and its small piano that no one was allowed to play because of the noise, and where Grandma's lady friends, buxom or withered, brooches at their necks, pocketbooks on their laps, hats with tiny veils skewered firmly to their upswept hair, sat on the horsehair furniture and visited over a plate of cookies or slices of cherry pie. Lace doilies were pinned all over the scratchy sofa and chairs, like so many chloroformed white moths. It was ancient Auntie Grace who made those doilies. She lived a block away and, whenever we went to see her, pressed crocheted items into our hands.
Life in Battle Creek revolved around the Christian Science church even more than it did in Long Beach. Much as my mother tried to keep our world at home small and closed, it was clear that, while Christian Science was the best way—the right way—not every single person believed in it. There was no one else on our street and no one else in my school who went to Christian Science Sunday School. My father didn't go to any church at all. He stayed home every Sunday morning and reveled in his privacy. Wearing his old red flannel bathrobe, he cooked himself strange breakfasts—scrambled eggs with left-over spaghetti—which he ate with powdery white "donettes." Sometimes he'd leave a few in the box for us, and sometimes he just had to eat all twelve. He was a stout man then, with wavy brown hair, bright blue eyes, and a cleft chin. He had a hearty laugh and an easy way that belied an inner carefulness and sense of being set apart, of having been, as an orphan, set apart his whole life. He and my mother never discussed religion, even to agree to disagree. He said simply and often, "I respect the Christian Scientists," but that was as far as it went. To him, they were just a bunch of nice, deluded but well-meaning people, going about their church affairs in a harmless and quiet manner. It didn't concern him very much at all.
But in Battle Creek we moved inside a Platonic world where every daily thing reflected a larger truth, where every day was structured around reading and studying the Lesson for the week, and where there was much talk of healing. My grandparents were both practitioners, which meant that they not only earned a living from healing the sick and distressed, but that they were influential and respected in their church. My grandfather had an office in the Post Building, and my grandmother worked from a glassed-in sun porch off the parlor. Sometimes I could hear her talking firmly to people on the rounded black phone, telling them they were well, if they could only see it. And sometimes, running by the sun porch on the way outside to see if any more cherries had fallen to the ground, I saw my grandmother through the glass door hung with Auntie Grace's creamy tatted curtains, her white head bent in prayer, her face thoughtful and absorbed. I knew then that she was engaged in the private ritual of absent treatment, of working on the problems, physical and spiritual, of people who were somewhere else, across town or even across the state.
* * *
Many years after my first childhood visits to Battle Creek, I walked into Willard Library again. It was now a large new building with an entire downstairs, the Michigan Room, devoted to local and state history. I sat there for several hours one day and then another, at a maple table piled with books, both scholarly and lively, and there I began to trace the history of my grandmother's people, the Lipscombs, and of Battle Creek itself.
My great-grandparents, Allen and Margaret Aldrich Lipscomb, whose own parents had been pioneers on what had been the wild Michigan frontier—north of Detroit—had settled in Battle Creek in 1875, just after they were married. The town was about thirty years old then, and flourishing, with a population of approximately 5,000. Into this boom town came Allen Lipscomb, a carpenter and self-taught architect, who designed and constructed many of the local buildings, including the Maple Methodist Episcopal Church, which still stands. Later he went to work for Nichols and Shepard, one of Battle Creek's largest employers, makers of the famous Vibrator Thresher, as foreman of their woodworking department.
Yes, Battle Creek was a flourishing town, an ordinary Midwestern town, but already one with a peculiar hospitality to eccentric ideas, particularly those centering on health and spirituality, and to the eccentrics and their followers who espoused them. One of the first free-thinking sects was the Alphadelphia Society, an experiment in socialist living which was, like Brook Farm and many other utopian groups, based on the principles of Joseph Fourier, who believed that society should be broken down into units called phalanxes. The community of 300 managed to exist about as long as most utopian colonies, that is three or four years, from 1844 to 1848, just west of Battle Creek. There the members constructed a tabernacle, a school, and a communal dwelling place, and published religious journals, The Alphadelphia Tocsin and The Primitive Expounder; there they quarreled, disbanded and moved back into Battle Creek. The Swedenborgians also gravitated to Battle Creek in the 1840s, where they built the New Jerusalem Church, and the Spiritualists came along soon after. Battle Creek became a hotbed of Spiritualism; in fact, the movement that had begun with the Fox sisters in Rochester, New York, in 1848 and that focused on occult communication with the dead via spiritual mediums, Ouija boards, table tippings, and slate writing, was so pervasive in Battle Creek that even the Quakers who had arrived there in the 1850s found themselves experimenting with séances and mediums. In 1855 a group of these Quakers bought land six miles from Battle Creek and platted out a settlement called Harmonia, where Sojourner Truth lived for about ten years before getting fed up and moving back into town. More than six feet tall, in Quaker dress, smoking a pipe, the riveting speaker was a familiar figure in Battle Creek for twenty-five years. She's buried in Oak Creek Cemetery, with a monument right next to that of C.W. Post, the cereal magnate.
The deranged and visionary continued to come to Battle Creek. One of the most colorful was James M. Peebles, who arrived in 1856 as a self- proclaimed "spiritual pilgrim," and who lectured on spiritualism, temperance, and morality. He had his own church for a time, and on the side assisted stage mediums who came through town. In order to cure his own ill health he found a way to contact the spirit of Chief Powhatan, of colonial Virginia, who instructed him in the art of picking wild herbs and pounding them into medicine. Peebles wrote great numbers of books, from Who Are the Spiritualists and What is Spiritualism, to Hell Revised, Modernized and Made More Comfortable.
In the 1860s Peebles left Battle Creek to wander in California and New Jersey. Amazingly enough, he was appointed United States Consul to Trebizond, a Turkish Black Sea port, and after he left that post he traveled three times around the world studying occult forces and chronic diseases. In 1876 he procured a diploma from the medically suspect Philadelphia University of Medicine and Surgery and set up psychic healing institutes all over the U.S. Finally back in Battle Creek at the age of 73, in 1896, he set up Dr. Peebles Institute, a business that specialized in mail-order diagnosis. "Hundreds of patients who have been speedily cured," Peebles wrote in his circulars, "have never seen the doctors who treated them."
My Great-Aunt Shirley, who married my grandmother's brother Guy Lipscomb, was Dr. Peebles's stenographer for many years. It was she who sent out the promotional circulars that claimed he had extraordinary powers of curing, even that he could restore life, claims that brought him an indictment for fraudulent medicine in 1901. As a reporter described his court appearance:
District Attorney Gordon bellowed at Peebles on the stand: "Do you, before this jury of God-fearing men, now claim, under oath, that you have the powers of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, to heal the sick and restore the dead to Life?"
Peebles rose from the chair to his full height of six feet four and raised his fist above his head. He looked like Moses in a Cecil de Mille supercolossal epic. "I do!" he cried in a rich baritone voice that reverberated through the old court chambers. "I do! And may God strike me dead on this spot if I am not possessed of such power! He gave it to me. Speak, O God, and give this jury the proof! The proof!"
The jury and I waited for divine action. The air was tense ... Peebles stood there with his arm still high, waiting, waiting, waiting. For about a minute he stood, then relaxed. He turned to the jury in a soft purring voice and said: "Gentlemen, you see for yourself."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Blue Windows by Barbara Wilson. Copyright © 1997 Barbara Wilson. Excerpted by permission of Picador.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
Introduction: "How Long Has It Been Since You've Been Home?",
Epigraph,
Part One: A Taste of Heaven,
1. Absent Treatment,
2. Mother Church,
3. Science,
4. Health,
5. Blue Windows,
6. Splinters,
Part Two: A Taste of Hell,
7. Warpaint,
8. Eleven,
9. Writing an Autobiography,
10. Orphans,
11. Wicked,
12. Jail Bait,
13. Fire and Brimstone,
Part Three: Testimony,
14. Stand Porter at the Door of Thought,
15. Meeting Medusa,
16. Testimony,
Some Notes on Further Reading About Christian Science,
Praise for Blue Windows,
About the Author,
Copyright,