Blue Windows: A Christian Science Childhood [Hardcover]

Barbara Wilson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 15, 1997

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, Wilson surveys the complex history of Christian Science and the role of women in religion and healing.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Frequently caricatured as the religion that rejects medical treatment, Christian Science gets a balanced, nuanced appraisal in this memoir by a writer who grew up within the faith. Barbara Wilson appreciates Christian Science's unusual openness to women, who gained self-respect and status as its practitioners and healers, but she bares its inadequacies in a wrenching account of her mother's battle with cancer, suicide attempt, and eventual death. Her precise, unsentimental prose delineates a decades-long journey toward self-knowledge and peace with her past: it's a very American saga, sensitively told.

From Library Journal

Christian Science, a belief system with over one million adherents, pivots on the premise that the material world, and therefore physical illness, is an illusion. Recently, its consequent doctrinal rejection of conventional medicine has led to government prosecution of several church members whose children have died because of the refusal of such treatment. Wilson (Trouble in Transylvania, LJ 10/1/93) here recalls her childhood as the daughter and granddaughter of Christian Scientists, focusing on her crisis of faith as a 12-year-old, triggered by the mental breakdown and premature death of her mother. (Wilson told this story previously in her work of fiction, If You Had a Family, LJ 10/1/96). Despite the potentially provocative subject matter, bathos here conspires with a paralytic writing style ("The picture is by Norman Rockwell, or would be, if he'd painted it") to undermine the work. A better Christian Science memoir is Thomas Simmons's The Unseen Shore (LJ 5/1/91). Wilson's work is a marginal purchase.?Bill Piekarski, Southwestern Coll. Lib., Chula Vista, Cal.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Picador; 1st Picador USA ed edition (January 15, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312150660
• ISBN-13: 978-0312150662
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.8 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,794,320 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars absorbing, sensitive, and true-to-life, July 22, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Blue Windows: A Christian Science Childhood (Paperback)

I could not put this book down. Wilson gives an absorbing account of growing up in Christian Science that matches fully with my own experiences and those of other former-CS friends.

Living in a sectarian environment, in which believers strive to "deny the evidence of physical senses," powerfully affects your life. Wilson manages to give a fully nuanced account without being unfair to her former religion, and without getting lost in abstract detail.

She accomplishes all of this while telling a dramatic human story.

This book is a wonderful memoir from a literary standpoint, and the best CS memoir you'll find. Well worth buying.

20 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Well worth reading, June 23, 2007

By 

documentboy (Seattle, WA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Blue Windows: A Christian Science Childhood (Paperback)

This book is a fairly good memoir, despite long digressions into overly detailed memories. I skimmed some chapters, especially in the first half. However, as therapy for a recovering Christian Scientist, it was a wonderful experience that I would highly recommend. Particularly in the second half of the book, when Ms. Wilson gets into the meat of her family's troubles, her writing style hits its stride and the insights are especially clear and penetrating.
It may be flogging a dead horse to critique Christian Science these days, as it fades away with the passing of the last generation to grow up without antibiotics. However, those of us who were raised in it need to critique it for our own benefit. The public image of CS has to do with shunning doctors and medicine. There's much more to it. In my family, as in Wilson's, the greatest pain was caused by the avoidance of relationship problems and mental disorders. An untreated infection may kill you quickly, but an abusive parent can affect your quality of life, and those of the rest of your family, over many years.
My father was a third-generation Christian Scientist, First Reader of our church, and served on the board of a CS sanitorium. He went to church twice a week and served on countless church committees. I'm sure he never once tasted alcohol or tobacco, he never went to a doctor, and he always had one of us sitting by the TV (in the days before remote controls) to turn down the volume when ads for medicine came on. He was also an abuser with chronic untreated depression and suicidal impulses.
Nobody could acknowledge that my father's abuse was happening because we had to pretend that life was Perfect. This made us all enablers. Society is full of abusers and people who enable them, but few have a basis for enabling that's as powerful as the belief that the abuse literally doesn't exist. In Christian Science, if you see abuse, this is a problem in your perception--an instance of Error. You need to work on your perception, not on the person who seems to be imperfect. Domestic abuse thrives in such a setting. There are statistics that show Christian Scientists live shorter lives. I don't know of any statistics on how common abuse or mental illness is in CS families. My guess: very common.
Kudos to Barbara Wilson for talking about this in her own life, and helping the rest of us survivors of CS to confront and fix the problems in our families that medicine can't touch.

15 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Thoughts from a Christian Scientist, December 10, 2007

By 

Margaret C. Turnbull - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Blue Windows: A Christian Science Childhood (Paperback)

As a Christian Scientist I actually think that books like these are important, because they remind us that unless we are alert, a culture of conformity, pretense and stiffness can steal into the church (indeed, into any human institution). This undermines the true spirit of Christian Science, and hinders the spiritual progress of our members.

As a dedicated member of my church I have no hesitation to openly state, with my name signed above, that Christian Science, aflame with love and understanding, is first and foremost _practical_. Why? Because divine Love meets _every_ human need--in fact these very words are stenciled on the wall of almost every Christian Science church in the world. God can give aid through a doctor as well as through a spiritual healer. As stated in our textbook, Science and Health, page 444, line 7: "If Christian Scientists ever fail to receive aid from other Scientists,--their brethren upon whom they may call,--God will still guide them into the right use of temporary and eternal means. Step by step will those who trust Him find that 'God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.'" I think the vast majority of Christian Scientists understand this and realize that we are gentle and kind healers, not judgmental martyrs.

I am happy to see that the younger generation of Christian Scientists is more practical, inspired, and open about discussing these issues and practicing pure Christian Science without peer pressure, false pretenses, or condemnation. I am also happy to see many people asking for an alternative to the world of medicine, and I pray to be ready to help. And I also hope that this book will help anyone who felt they were hurt by an erroneous church culture (be it CS or otherwise), and remind us all not to make the same mistakes. That said, it is very good to recognize the difference between Christian Science, and a corrupted, fearful, angry sense of it.