Customer Reviews

Blue Windows: A Christian Science Childhood

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

Whether you are familiar with Christian Science or not, you will be absorbed by this memoir. It is nearly novelistic in its writing, not surprising given that its author is also a novelist. Somehow she survived a childhood impacted by incest, mental illness, disease, and death. She survived efforts by a stepmother bent on turning her into the frilly, silly teenager she could never be. Barbara Wilson laces her story with absorbing asides into philosophy and theology, always bringing it back to Christian Science and its devastating effect on her life. Read this book!

This is an outstanding book! As someone who also was raised in Christian Science, and who also lost her mother to the religion, I have never read a better book. I was riveted by it. It brought back all the old memories, while providing a lot of information I never knew about the religion. I highly recommend it.

It's interesting that not one of these reviews mentions Christ Jesus and that he healed without medicine. Christian Science is often condemned because it's proponents don't go to doctors. This infers that using conventional medicine and doctors is the only right option. Other religions also practice spiritual healing. Jesus disciples did it and his adherents did it into the 3rd Century at which time Jesus was arbitrarily designated as God and healing through prayer for all intents and purposes ceased. That decision made healing prayer a miracle and not natural. Understanding man as the image and likeness of God (not an manlike/anthropomorphic God) is the key to seeing healing. The emphasis in the book and a few of the reviews is that Christian Scientists claim matter isn't real. Again that is like trying to state a truth by beginning with the falsehood. The truth is that God is all therefore the human existence has no substance - which physicists know is the truth. Mary Baker Eddy received her inspiration by reading the Bible and she kept reading it. She had struggles throughout her whole life with very human problems just like all of us do. She makes a clear distinction between the relative human experience and the absolute divine thought acknowledging that we have to grow into the understanding of God as all. She specifically states that we can't demonstrate what we don't know. This religion does not hypnotize, mesmerize or otherwise brain wash people. People make their own choices. I know many Christian Scientists who have had phenomenal healings of deadly diseases. And I know Christian Scientists who have used conventional medicine and I know Christian Scientists who have died under medical care as well as under Christian Science treatment. Don't be tempted to pillory the religion over the ability or lack thereof of it's adherents to heal. If you do so you are then like those who put Jesus on the cross out of fear of what they didn't understand.

I am always so sorry for those who blame a religion for what they, the person, does not understand, but who refuse to condemn orthodox medicine for the deaths it actually causes! It is not the religion that has failed, nor is it the religion which has caused the death or discomfort, or unhappiness, or whatever, but of course that is an easier place to put the blame than on one's own mother who actually made the choice...........

Ms. Wilson's entitled to her views, of course, and any autobiography is going to be subjective, but she really should have gotten the facts correct. Christian Science is not about the human mind and body connection. It's about the power of divine Mind in our lives. Mark Twain did indeed write an entire book about Christian Science. And before his death he retracted and reversed his thinking on the subject. Christian Science does not, as Ms. Wilson states, insist that reality does not exist. I'm surprised that she intimates her version reality is all that should be considered real.
Ms. Wilson claims to have done considerable research for this book. How much or how deeply is suspect to me. To claim that the best of the books critical of Christian Science is the long since discredited Willa Cather and Georgina Milmine's biography, shows that either Ms. Wilson did not delve very deeply or her choices of what research to use have been influenced by her situational bias which overrides facts.
While "New Thought" and "New Age" practices both draw on aspects from a variety of philosophical and religious traditions, Christian Science remains exclusively a Christian religion, founded for the express purpose of "commemorat[ing] the word and works of [Jesus], which should reinstate primitive Christianity and its lost element of healing" (Church Manual of The First Church of Christ, Scientist).

... then you were raised in Christian Science and may be struggling to make sense of your experience. Read this book. If you love someone who is a lapsed Christian Scientist, read this book. Wilson lends historical perspective and emotional insight as she lovingly and thoughtfully articulates that peculiar childhood. I found her explanations thought-provoking, tremendously helpful and well-written.

My father was raised in a household of three women. His mother and aunt were CS, his grandmother was not. He respected women all his life and at a time (the 50s) when few men did. Long after he abandoned his childhood faith he respected the CS determination, optimism, and power of both sexes to achieve worthwhile goals. Wilson's book helped me understand why he was able to do that.

I you grew up in Christian Science and left the church like I did, you'll like this book. If you are still a Christian Scientist then you'll hate it if you let yourself read it, which Mrs. said you probably shouldn't do. if you know nothing about Christian Science, don't read this until you read God's Perfect Child:Living and Dying in the Christian Science Church.