“God Is Mind; Matter Does Not Exist”

“God Is Mind; Matter Does Not Exist” is the Christian Science principle Edith Mittelstadt teaches Norma Jeane Baker: God is Mind, matter is unreal, and healing comes through faith. For Norma Jeane, the teaching offers a way to imagine that pain, illness, and bodily vulnerability need not have the final word. But when her own body demands attention, the principle becomes more than a belief to learn. It becomes a test she tries to pass by refusing to acknowledge what she feels.

The teaching and its limits

Norma Jeane Baker keeps this lesson to herself around her friends at the orphanage and at school. She knows girls who live in houses with families, but does not tell them about the way Edith Mittelstadt has shown her: the Christian Science understanding that God is Mind, Mind is everything, and matter does not exist. She has also been taught that God heals through Jesus Christ, but only when the believer has deep faith. In this account, the teaching is both an explanation of the world and a private resource, one she does not share even with her closest companions.

Edith has made the principle tangible through careful instruction and by reading together from Mrs. Eddy’s book, especially its section on Prayer. Norma Jeane understands the lesson when Edith explains it. That understanding, however, is not complete or consistently available to her. Alone with her thoughts, she feels as if their pieces have scattered across a floor: she believes there must be an order, but cannot find it. The distinction between learning a doctrine and being able to live by it is central to the expression’s role in her experience.

The body contradicts the lesson

In mid-September, during gym class, Norma Jeane Baker is playing volleyball when a dull abdominal pain comes on suddenly. She is among the tallest girls in the class and one of its better athletes, though she can become distracted or awkward and miss a ball at a crucial moment. When teammates accuse her of being unreliable, she tries fiercely to reject the charge. Then, in the humid gym, she drops the ball, feels a headache overwhelm her, and realizes that warm liquid has soaked her underwear. She decides to ignore whatever is happening. The thought that this could be happening to her is experienced as an affront, not as an ordinary bodily fact.

Walking back toward the orphanage, she avoids her friends, including Fleece and Debra Mae, and tries to keep apart from the boys calling to her on El Centro Avenue. She walks quickly, her thighs held close together, her eyes lowered to the pavement. The suddenly tight fit of her school dress makes her resolve to lose weight. The body she wants to govern through belief is at the same time exposed to discomfort, embarrassment, and the notice of strangers.

Her headache makes the conflict still sharper. She tells herself that what people call a headache is only illusion and weakness; yet, on the short walk from school to the orphanage, the pain throbs so violently that it almost blinds her. She longs for an aspirin, but does not take one. The Christian Science principle gives her a language in which symptoms can be dismissed, while the physical intensity of the symptoms keeps asserting itself. Her convictions do not make the experience disappear; instead, they turn the experience into a struggle over whether she is allowed to trust what her body tells her.

Faith, healing, and refusal

The passage she recalls from the Gospel of John says that the speaker was blind and now sees. Edith had explained how Jesus healed a blind man by spitting on the ground, making mud, and spreading it over the man’s eyes. Norma Jeane remembers the cure as easy, provided there is faith. The story offers an image of healing that seems to confirm the teaching: spiritual power can restore sight where the body appears impaired. Yet it also turns matter into part of the scene of healing—the mud is physically present even within a lesson that declares matter unreal.

Norma Jeane returns to the linked propositions that God is Mind, only Mind can heal, and faith will provide what is needed. Her wish for aspirin and her refusal to ask for it show the cost of applying those propositions to immediate pain. She also delays asking the storeroom keeper for a larger school dress, afraid of a sarcastic remark about putting on weight. For sanitary napkins she would have to approach the nurse, as the older girls do when they have their periods; she refuses to ask for those either. The refusal extends beyond an abstract denial of matter: it keeps her from seeking practical help for both her headache and her bleeding.

The private dream and the meaning of the expression

The principle does not encompass every part of Norma Jeane’s inner life. She often repeats the account of healing and keeps her doubts from Edith, but also conceals a recurring waking fantasy: tearing off her clothes and making herself visible at church, in the dining hall, at school, or amid the traffic on El Centro Avenue. The desire to be seen stands in stark contrast to the shame that sends her walking alone with her eyes lowered. The body is not merely an illusion she can dismiss; it is also the means through which she imagines being noticed.

In that fantasy, the Magic Friend is unafraid; Norma Jeane Baker is the one who is afraid. The contrast prevents the Christian Science teaching from serving as a simple account of her character or a straightforward cure for distress. “God Is Mind; Matter Does Not Exist” gives her a promise of healing and a discipline of denial, but the pain, bleeding, embarrassment, and longing to be seen remain materially consequential in her life. Its significance lies in that unresolved tension: Norma Jeane can repeat the lesson and grasp its logic, yet cannot make her bodily experience conform to it.