Who (in her own words) is Sue Bissonnette?
From the early years forward: I am a lifelong Christian Scientist! In the very early 1940’s, and prior to my birth, my mother, along with my grandmother found Christian Science one day as they were returning home from grocery shopping.
While they were walking, and laden with purchases, the thunderclouds suddenly opened up above them and it began pouring rain! Unprepared, and with their bags of purchases, they hurriedly followed a crowd of people into a nearby Methodist Church, just to escape the deluge! Once inside, it turned out to be a Christian Science lecture! The title of the lecture was “Unwinding One’s Snarls.” My mother indeed had snarls. She had lost each of two children in childbirth. She was wholly distraught and had been diagnosed by the medical field as now being “unable to bear any children.” Over the earlier intervening years, she subsequently had looked into every philosophy and psychology then known, but with no answer to or relief from her deep and all-encompassing mortal dilemma. This revelation of ‘Christian Science’ which she found that day healed her completely! She was healed of the claim of barrenness, and of so much more! My appearance on earth followed naturally, and in a timely way, thereafter. My father very soon embraced Christian Science.
I was raised in the Christian Science Sunday Schools from three years of age onward, until the age of twenty. Subsequently, I took up membership in both “The Mother Church,” and in a local branch.
Christian Science was always my “first and dearest love.” At a particularly crucial time in my life, as I contemplated and was engaged in pursuing my choices for higher education, a confluence of unimaginable coincidences (too many to elaborate here) began to converge and overtake me. As I readied to pursue my final University choices, I was gradually, quietly being flooded by the growing awareness that there was actually a “Science” of Christian Science.
Through a set of humanly unfathomable circumstances—i.e., by divine design alone—very shortly thereafter, I found myself sitting in the front row of a Summer School in Pasadena, California, entitled “The Epistles in the Light of Christian Science,” (taught by Dr. Max Kappeler in the summer of 1962).
My higher education, and the real adventure, was about to begin!
Sue Bissonnette
“The education of the future will be instruction, in spiritual Science… “
(Miscellaneous Writings, Mary Baker Eddy, p. 61:4–6)
The new and higher “spiritual education.”: Grateful Acknowledgments!
My earliest background in the new “spiritual education” can be highlighted as follows. John W. Doorly and “The Doorly-line”: From seminal beginnings and on . . .: My deep gratitude for the work of John W. Doorly, and for the early workers in the Doorly-line, is no less than profound! Through his revelatory and seminal work, as set forth in his talks on “The Science of the Bible” he expounded upon the seven days of creation as the foundational seed-plot of the Bible in its entirety, unlocking the thousand-year periods of Bible history and pointing toward our own contemporary 6th and 7th thousand-year periods of human history as the operational glory of the 7-fold divine nature of God. Complementary to this, he gave us his foundational work, “God and Science.” Mr. Doorly had already been a bona fide Christian Science Practitioner, Lecturer, and Teacher, and at one time was President of the Mother Church.
Yet, his spiritual vision burst beyond any parochial sense: he saw the universality of Mary Baker Eddy’s discovery and could not incarcerate it merely in religious forms. Hence, his mission surpassed these forms, and their expression. By the time of his passing, he had already left us and all mankind with an everlastingly rich spiritual and truly scientific legacy. He also left a line of devoted followers to elucidate, educate and point the way. Though I never knew him personally, I am grateful truly beyond words for the steps and stages of scientific and spiritual maturing which have accompanied the deep study of his work. This way of true maturation awaits each and every student of Christian Science who lays claim to it! In this light, I am especially filled with joy and awe in the remembrance of my early tutelage and voluminous one-on-one interactions, while in England, with Peggy Brook, Muriel Nelson, John and Marjorie Morgan, Gordon Brown, Laurie Sinton, and many others (as early on as the beginning 1960’s). These revolutionized, clarified and purified my thought and understanding, overturning it from an old base to the new.
My evolving education in Christian Science as the Science of all Being/being was further radically and fundamentally revolutionized through the teachings of Max Kappeler, a further pupil of John W. Doorly. Attendance at Dr. Kappeler’s early class, “Introduction to the Science of Christian Science,” given in Zurich, Switzerland, in October of 1962, was life-altering! It changed consciousness fundamentally and established it on the basis of an understanding of the Christian Science Textbook—not as parts, pieces, or favorite references, but as a spiritual scientific structure—a whole, understandable through, and indivisible in its holistic spiritual categories. I am so grateful for the ensuing years which bore witness to the establishing of the “Kappeler Institute”, and for Dr. Kappeler’s profound work, and for my many decades of affiliation therewith, having been afforded the generous opportunity to teach in its yearly summer schools in America, and its many seminars and introductory classes throughout the United States, Canada and England, until the close of the 20th Century.
The “Thank You” of today!
Today, our gratitude points and focuses in a new direction! Namely, towards those individuals who welcome and embrace this evolving legacy of the idea of Christian Science and want to give the world the knowledge of it, openly offering it to others. The role that this plays in our world today is incalculable!