Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

At the climax of my play Ellen was present and keeping vigil when Mrs Eddy begged and pleaded for her dose of morphine. Ellen was horrified when one of her attendants seemed to be preparing an injection — clearly a traitor who was trying to poison the living God. She tried to dash the syringe out of the attendant’s hands and received a slap in the face for her trouble. Ellen watched in disbelief as the injection was given and peace came to the Pastor Emeritus at last.

At this point in my thinking, I realised that this was no longer a play about Mary Baker Eddy but about Ellen McAlvey. My title gave ground reluctantly with the burden of this new emphasis, and became The Colleen and the Prophetess .

Then at last I realised that there was no need for Mrs Eddy to appear in the play at all, since whenever Ellen had dealings with her she was either shrieking in terror or begging for morphine. I was writing a solo drama after all, but it was a one-woman show, and it wasn’t about a fascinating public figure but about a woman who didn’t exist. My title became The Colleen just before, with a final despairing crack, it splintered to matchwood.

I abandoned my grandiose scheme, retiring hurt from the competitive world of play-writing and leaving the field to Jimmy Kettle. I had no interest in writing a play I couldn’t perform. I couldn’t expect literary endeavour to take me out of my wheelchair, but I could reasonably expect it to get the wheelchair on stage, with me in it. That had been the whole point.

It was a shame. I would have liked to invite Granny to my first night, so as to hear what she had to say afterward. ‘What an abominable creature, and an historical personage of no interest whatever’? ‘A great and misunderstood woman, John, as you have helped me to see’? It would have been instructive either way.

The play-writing fiasco left me with a feeling of disgust. I wanted all my notes destroyed, and prevailed on one of my pet nurses to feed them into the hospital incinerator. I didn’t doubt that she did, although looking back I can see it as unlikely. But what I had written didn’t seem like ordinary neutral rubbish but something actively contaminated, in need of special measures for disposal.

When Mrs Eddy finally died, quietly, of pneumonia, in December 1910, her attendants were not so much grief-stricken as lost. They could hardly be surprised — Mrs Eddy had been warning them for years. The malice that had stalked her for so long had pounced on her in her flannel nightgown while the sentries dozed. If the watch had been kept as it should, she would have been a well woman still.

A will like a Möbius strip

The body itself was an embarrassment, since by its existence it contradicted the whole claim of her faith. Christian Science was lacking in something which every other religion has, something close to the root of the need for religion. A set of instructions for those left behind — a funeral service. Mary Baker Eddy wasn’t supposed to die. That was the whole point. But if a religion has nothing to say to the bereaved, what does it have to say to anyone?

Surprisingly the immortal one had made a will, but it was a document entirely characteristic of her. It struggled to anticipate the needs of a world in which Mrs Eddy was not alive and dominant. She left everything to her Church, which sounds splendidly sensible until you realise that she owned her Church. She had taken great care to be completely inseparable from her creation, and so in legal terms she was leaving everything to herself. There must have been quite a few furrowed brows when this fact sunk in. Individual Christian Scientists weren’t allowed to use the services of lawyers without Mrs Eddy’s express permission, but luckily her Church was richly supplied with them. They found a way round the little difficulty of a document that fed remorselessly into itself, a will shaped like a Möbius strip. Otherwise the institution couldn’t have lasted long enough to open a branch in Maidenhead.

It may be that my interest in Christian Science outstayed its welcome as far as other people at the hospital were concerned. There may have been a certain amount of eye-rolling behind my back, or to the side of my neck, or above my head — in one of the many places where eyes without the help of a supple and obliging spine can’t manage to penetrate. Perhaps I forgot that anti-proselytising becomes as oppressive as proselytising itself.

I didn’t presume to proselytise for Ramana Maharshi, I didn’t and I don’t. These affinities are very personal. I just read Arthur Osborne’s book again.

Between the hysterical millionaire, cowering in her bed and shrieking for the metaphysical Home Guard, and the beaming indifference of the pauper, the choice was not hard to make.

Christian Science is a religion defined by its attitude to the failings of the body. It didn’t seem to be asking too much to expect its philosophy of suffering to hold water.

In Ramana Maharshi’s teaching, like Mrs Eddy’s, pain and illness were unreal — but they weren’t singled out. They had no special, superior unreality. They were just part of ‘everything’, everything that surrounds us without being real. Christian Science actually gives pain too much credit, granting it a wrongful position of privilege.

Later, when John Lennon’s song ‘God’ came out it gave me another way of thinking about this. ‘God,’ Lennon sang in that winningly raw voice of his, ‘is a concept by which we measure our pain.’ Not so. Speaking softly, one John to another, my Home Counties breath in your Scouse ear, which bristles with sensitivity and grievance — take it from me, John. Pain is a concept by which we measure our God, and our guru, even our businesswoman lightly disguised as a prophet.

Mary Baker Eddy was a Messiah first and foremost, it was her job and her life’s work. She hardly qualifies as a religious thinker at all. To judge by her morphine habit, she wasn’t much of a Christian Scientist, but then Marx wasn’t a Marxist, Freud wasn’t a Freudian, even Newton wasn’t a Newtonian, being far too taken up with alchemy. Ramana Maharshi, though, really did embody his own teachings, in warm indifference to his own status. The guru is no more than the tiger in an elephant’s dream, making it start awake.

Outpouring of medicated hope

His teaching wasn’t opposed to medicine. The principle was simple, that everything must be addressed on its level. If you’re hungry in a dream, you need dream food. And if a dream appetite needs dream food, then a dream cut requires a dream bandage. Christ was offering his own version of this principle when he said that we should render unto Maya the things that are Maya’s, but Ramana Maharshi went further. Render unto the National Health those things that are the National Health’s.

When he became seriously ill himself, well-wishers contributed medicines of every description. To his followers’ dismay he had them all poured into a bowl and mixed up. Then he would take at regular intervals a small sample of that great outpouring of medicated hope. I loved that attitude, compliance with a trace of teasing, not quite colluding with the wishful thinking of it. But when Ramana Maharshi realised that if he went on taking doses of the compendious medicine everyone would follow him and devotees might become ill, he stopped his little game.

Ramana Maharshi had suffered from arthritis for many years without complaining. He didn’t have disciples, exactly, who had to be called from other walks of life, à la Christ, but devotees, self-appointed, some of them really only hangers-on who wouldn’t take no for an answer. His attitude to them was one of tender mockery. On one occasion a devotee scolded an arthritic visitor — an American woman — for her failure to cross her legs properly. Rather than scold them in his turn, Ramana Maharshi tried to force his limbs into the prescribed position. Then of course the devotees said that the rules didn’t apply to him. He replied that if there were rules, they obviously did. I paraphrase. He made the devotees look foolish without claiming the right to overrule them.