A Personal Relationship with Jesus Christ - Huh?

Here's the deal. I'm a busy guy. I lead a small church of 50 attendees each Sunday and I do it all--administrative, pastoral, Sunday teaching, Wednesday teaching, and SEE classes. I'm seeking ordination through Unity's Field Licensing program and am taking Ministry Development from Claudell County. Okay, I'm almost done (too much whine or wine is bad for a recovering alcoholic). As a  late arrival to this ministry gig, I feel woefully unprepared for the job people have entrusted me to do (after all, we're talking about issues of ultimate importance). That's why I'm auditing Dr. Tom's class. Back to being busy--I was challenged while writing my regular blog for our newsletter, preparing for my Sunday lesson, and getting ready to teach the SEE class, "Myrtle and Charles on Healing and Wholeness. I decided to drop the class. Dr. Tom asked me to reconsider, so I decided to affirm my decision to him on Monday (I knew my decision, by God). On Sunday, I asked my community to consider what they would tell friends about God and Unity. I didn't use Doctrine of God, but implied it. When we met for class after service, one of the students asked, "where's Jesus figure into this?" So, you see answering the question that Tom asked last week became essential. Enough! I'm here and will do my best to not waste your valuable time with my blogs and my conversations. Here we go:

Myrtle Fillmore's spiritual life focuses on human relationship to God as Father. This focus ranges from the metaphorical to the seemingly literal. This relationship leads her to define Jesus as the "ultimate child." In chapter 1 of How to Let God Help You, she says, “we are really God’s children and that we have inherited from Him a perfect mind which is capable of unfolding the wonderful Christ qualities, as Jesus Christ unfolded His God Given Mind.” This statement reiterates the image of “child of God,” and introduces the idea of Christ holding a meaning other than a surname for Jesus. She never defines the meaning of this word. We are left to assume her definition of Christ is similar to Charles Fillmore’s which is recorded in the Metaphysical Bible Dictionary. I won’t repeat this extensive definition here, but it essentially describes the perfect potential of the divine in all humans. Christ is an adjective and noun always implying a potential in all humans reached by Jesus, the man from Nazareth.

This description of Jesus removes the mantle of “only begotten son” (John 3:16) affirmed by the creeds of Catholic and Protestant Christians. Not to be sidetracked, but this phrase seems to be a response to Bishop Arius. Arius claimed that Jesus was made and not begotten and that the author of John actually wrote that Jesus was a “unique son.” Mr. Fillmore doesn’t discuss the Arian heresy, but suggests that the only begotten is the Christ that is what the author of John was writing about.

Occasionally, Myrtle seems to substitute Christ for Jesus and vice versa. As an example, “The mistake some of our teachers makes is that they believe in Christ intellectually and deal with his truths intellectually—whereas spiritual things must be “spiritually judged.” (Chapter 1). She seems to be talking about Jesus rather than The Christ. This inconsistency appears to be a component of her embedded theology. Remembering that these are letters rather than academic papers requires some latitude in interpretation.

As a spiritual teacher and Wayshower, Mrs. Fillmore’s Jesus is very personal. She even claims oneness with Him and feels his presence. This connection gives a sense of power to her. She writes, “Our teaching is that Jesus Christ is ever with us, and is able to handle all these overcoming in the right way. When we identify ourselves with Him and seek to think, speak, and live in harmony with the ways of Jesus, we get along nicely, and are able to handle each and every situation in a splendid way.” Myrtle teaches us to have a “personal relationship with Jesus Christ.” This phrase is deeply ingrained in current fundamentalist language and often causes Unity folks to stop listening. Although Myrtle occasionally appears to use Jesus, Christ, and Jesus Christ interchangeably, I think she’s deliberate here. She is calling on us to accept our oneness with the person Jesus through the Christ common to us all. She wants us to be so close to his teachings that we feel like he is whispering in our ear when a challenge arises. Like Myrtle, I am comfortable in my personal relationship with Jesus and might even wear a WWJD bracelet—I will not give this away to my evangelical brethren.

Myrtle's God

Myrtle Fillmore did not write books and her lectures were not collected into books. Her writings are archived in the library at Unity Institute and Seminary. These writings consist of Silent Unity Correspondence and magazine articles. She did not write books. The books we use as source material are collections of her letters, articles, and lectures. Editors select the included materials, their order, and how much of the source document is included. So, our study may be more about the theology of the editors than Myrtle Fillmore. This is not new, the Bible and any translation to another language will have the same issues. However, it is an interesting issue for an English-speaking figure from the 20th century.

In How to Let God Help You, we begin with Myrtle speaking of God as presence followed by God as Father or parent. She says we need a broader idea of God:

"We are studying spiritual science to get a broader conception of God, rather than holding to the view that He is a personal being with parts like man, a being subject to change and capable of varying moods. Though personal to each one of us, God is IT, neither male nor female, but Principle. God is not a cold, senseless principle like that of mathematics, but the Principle of life, love, and intelligence. God is All-Intelligence; there is but the one Mind and in reality, there are no separate men and women." Fillmore, Myrtle. "Chapter 4, Spiritual Science." In How to let God help you, Lee’s Summit, MO.: Unity School of Christianity, 1956.

This broad idea of God is an infinite presence and power that is somehow personal. How can an infinite power be personal? One way Myrtle does this is by suggesting this power is within us and there is no place that God is not. She holds the view that we are one with this deity while keeping some individuality—she tells us we must achieve what God has planned for us. Her language makes it difficult to pinpoint whether she is a pantheist or the panentheist that many Unity folks want to see. Her idea of “God’s will” separates humans from God despite her claim of oneness with God. Myrtle stresses God’s good (and God as good), God’s presence (everywhere), and God’s power.

It seems to me that her sense of God as One stems from her experience in what she calls the silence. This is a mystical state where she senses the presence of the Divine within her. She describes this experience as experiencing the presence of God.

Pray and Get to Work

Myrtle Fillmore and Charles Fillmore co-founded the Unity movement during the last half of the 19th century. Mrs. Fillmore experienced a lifetime of poor health and achieved an extraordinary healing by using a very simple affirmation: “I am a child of God and therefore I do not inherit sickness.” Her husband, Mr. Fillmore watched her transformation, but remained skeptical for several years. He studied many religions and developed a unified theology ultimately called Unity. Compared to the simple faith of Myrtle, Charles seemed to make more of his theology than it needed. He searched for scientific terms and proofs that would make everyone believers. Myrtle’s theology used language that is very similar to the language I heard growing up as a Methodist. She probably didn’t worry in the same ways that our current crop of ministers do about specificity in language. Myrtle used her embedded theology with the modifications that made “Christian healing” work for her. There is something comforting in her language. Personally, I applied what I learned from Mrs. Fillmore after my earliest exposure because she was simple and direct. Sometimes, I would catch myself wondering why things were not different after so much praying and I remember that Myrtle said that we should not spend too much time in the silence. We should instead get out into the world and assume our prayers were answered. I recall some exasperation in her letters. She wrote that she couldn’t understand why a woman would stay with her alcoholic husband and keep writing letters with complaints. I suspect that she did not suffer fools or whining much. She relied on what she knew and believed and has a lively group of followers, including me.

A favorite quote that I remember is when she told a correspondent that she’d prayed about her predicament and needed to move on rather than worry about the answer. That simplicity attracts a behaviorist like myself. My graduate training relied on changing behavior rather than resolving psychological injuries. If someone was overweight, we worked on the issues that prevented exercise and healthy eating rather than searching for the childhood insult that led to the overeating. Myrtle says to pray and get to work. I suspect she wouldn’t worry too much about exactly where God is and how we should address him, her, or it. Just pray to what you understand, assume it’s answered, and move on. She knew that God was good and everywhere present and that was that — pretty simple. I am not suggesting her ideas weren’t revolutionary for her time, but since she used the language of her Methodist upbringing to communicate them and many could understand her.

As a collection of memories, the above may be completely wrong. I may have read Myrtle as a heroine in my story of redemption and modified her quotes to suit my experience and education. The truth is likely in-between. Mrs. Fillmore filled a void in my life as a plainspoken mother that trusted God and faith with her life because God and faith saved her life. Considering that I was barely one year sober and dealing with issues that I had not faced in 20 years of drinking, I didn’t have anything to lose by doing the same.