Carpenter – Mary Baker Eddy Spiritual Footsteps ~ Gilbert C. Carpenter Sr. & Jr.

Introduction

If the teaching of Christian Science be correct – that the spiritual method is always the reverse of the material – might not this same rule apply to the writing of the life of its Discoverer and Founder, Mary Baker Eddy? The human method selects outstanding events in one’s life, incidents of significance and moment, and records them as characteristic and explanatory of the life of the individual in question. Logically, the reverse of this would be to set forth the spiritual cause from which came not only the thought-arresting events but the minutiae of experience, and to emphasize and interpret it so correctly that the life and purpose of the individual are revealed in their true greatness, comprehended through countless consistent revealings, much as the beauty of woman’s hair is the summation of numberless individual strands.

The Master said, “The very hairs of your head are all numbered.” If every effect has a mental cause, the hairs of the head might represent the entire mentallife-of-man, as revealed through his daily thoughts. Hence, the correct effort to write such a life of Mrs. Eddy should be to number her hairs, or to recount the orderly way in which she brought every thought into captivity to Christ, until her work was completed.

If feet symbolize spiritual understanding, then, when Mary Magdalen wiped the Master’s feet with her hair – as is recorded in the Gospel of Luke – that act represented a pledge to bend every effort of her mind to the attaining of Jesus’ spiritual understanding. Thus, her future endeavors would comprise the numbering of the hairs of her head, as she spiritualized each thought that it might measure up to the Christ ideal. It was as if she said, “I dedicate my life to the attainment of right thinking as revealed through the Christ, and I will not neglect one thought in this effort.”

Every act in one’s life signifies something, and reveals that individual’s ebbing or flowing state of thought. Hence, properly to number the hairs of one’s head requires having the spiritual insight to write his or her mental history, as traced through the outward experiences, thereby determining the orderly development of that one’s thought as it approaches the Christ ideal.

This unfolds the possibility of each student of Christian Science writing our Leader’s mental and spiritual history, through the effort to understand the spiritual footsteps which she took, in their order. But this is a history which is inscribed in the heart and mind, imperishably established in the understanding.

Written from 1934 to 1951.

293 pages
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