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.