UNITY OF ROSEBURG - Key Persons
Charles Fillmore was a positive person with a sense of humor. Ten years ago a friend of mine interviewed the owner of the Kansas City Royals baseball team. His first job, as a boy, was as deliverer of laundry, and Fillmore was his favorite customer, because each time a package of laundry was delivered, Fillmore would tell him a joke-some of which were surprising coming from a religious leader!
Unity's founder, Charles Fillmore, once wrote that Unity was a return to "first century Christianity." In the time of the first disciples, Christianity was far less concerned with its theology than with its results in the lives of Christians. It was open-minded about beliefs, but definite about the power of prayer.
Myrtle Fillmore attended a, Kansas City lecture on affirmative healing by E. B. Weeks. She used one affirmation, "I am a child of God-therefore I do not inherit sickness," as a daily positive prayer until she experienced a total healing of both conditions. I'll let her tell what occurred: "What the revelation did to me was not at first apparent to my senses, but it held my mind up above negation .... I gained In health and understanding. Then others saw that there was something new in me and asked me to share it. I did. Others were healed and began to study." .
Later, her husband Charles joined her in this study. He was in his eighties when he described his experience in this way: "I was nearing the half-century mark and I began to get wrinkled and gray. My knees tottered and a great weakness came over me .... My cheeks have filled out, the wrinkles and crows feet are gone and I actually feel like the boy that I am! By silently affirming my unity with the infinite energy of the one true God, I gained renewed youthfulness and power."
Ralph Waldo Emerson is read by every generation of high school and college students, and is probably America's best known religious philosopher. He also has the distinction of being the author that Unity founder Charles Fillmore quoted most often. Along with the poet Whittier and the essayist Thoreau, Emerson led a movement known in its day as New England Transcendentalism. A lesser-known transcendentalist, Phineas Quimby, provided the link between Unity and that philosophy.
Quimby was a 19th-century hypnotherapist who noted that many of his, patients had fearful and rigid attitudes regarding religion that damaged their responsiveness to treatment. He tried to teach them a different way of looking at religion, one that he had gleaned from Emerson's writings. One of his patients, a Mary Patterson, received successful treatment for chronic invalidism from Quimby. Later, under the name Mary Baker Eddy, she founded Christian Science, incorporating some of Quimby's ideas.
Xan Miller - Chairman, Treasurer