The Chaplaincy Team
Freedom and Equality
While we struggle with our masks and social distancing, we might look back on 2020 as a watershed year. Leading up to 2020 we saw the Je Suis Charlie movement, the Me-Too movement and the Black Lives Matter movement. The fact that we can discuss these issues is a sure sign that freedom and equality are coming, albeit not fast enough.
2020 has given us time to focus, reassess and prioritise. 2020 also marks 100 years since women got the vote in America (Australia gave women the vote some 18 years earlier, in 1902). However, American Black Women and all Indigenous Australians were denied that right until much later. This year, the US holds its presidential election. With that in mind, it was interesting to read the August 7 article by Karla Vallance in the Christian Science Monitor:
'Voting was only one of the ways American women were denied a voice in the 19th century. So how did a farm girl from New Hampshire come to be considered one of the most influential, accomplished, and controversial women of her era?
At a time when few women spoke in public, much less encroached upon all-male clerical territory, Mary Baker Eddy’s voice was prominent. Besides founding the (Christian Science) Monitor, Mrs. Eddy is best known for establishing the Christian Science Church and the religion behind it. She published its textbook and her most significant work, 'Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures' in 1875, and it became a bestseller. She gave public talks that eventually attracted thousands. She wrote articles on issues of the day.
Born in 1821 and raised in the Congregational Church, Mrs. Eddy had long been a deeply spiritual thinker and seeker, willing to challenge convention. A turning point came in 1866, when, walking to a meeting of temperance activists, Mrs. Eddy fell on an icy sidewalk in Lynn, Massachusetts, badly injuring herself. After three days of suffering, she asked to be left alone, and turned to her Bible. Pondering one of Jesus’ healings, she had a flash of insight into the relationship of spiritual understanding to health. She was suddenly well.
She sought to understand how she had been healed, and closeted herself away for years to pray, write, and test her ideas about a scientific system of healing prayer that all could use and understand. Many people saw her approach to Christianity as breathtakingly expansive, but others found the ideas objectionable: some, simply because she was a woman; others, because her theology was unconventional, even radical – for example, her theological position that the God of Christianity is feminine as well as masculine.
She founded The Church of Christ, Scientist, in 1879 to, she wrote, 'reinstate primitive Christianity and its lost element of healing.' The movement she started grew rapidly. She started The Christian Science Publishing Society, which produces numerous religious publications as well as the Monitor.
Mrs. Eddy has left her mark on women’s leadership:
- In 1992, the Women’s National Book Association named Science and Health as one of 75 books written by women whose words have changed the world.
- Mrs. Eddy is one of only eight women on The Atlantic’s 2006 list of “The 100 Most Influential Figures in American History.”
- She was on Smithsonian Magazine’s 2014 list of the “100 Most Significant Americans of All Time.”
When Mrs. Eddy was elected to the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 1995, she was recognised for being 'the only American woman to found a lasting American-based denomination.'
Huntingtower was founded in 1927 on the values of Christian Science. The school is totally independent from the Christian Science Church and welcomes students from all religions and cultural backgrounds. Across its Board and Executive, it comprises equal numbers of men and women (currently 7 of each) and reports annually to the Workplace Gender Equality Commissioner on its equality of conditions. Huntingtower’s purpose is to uplift thought. It encourages all students to recognise and demonstrate their spiritual nature by expressing their freedom from limitation. Its hope is that all oppressed peoples are enabled to demonstrate their freedom from injustices in the same way.
