Myrtle Fillmore
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Mary Caroline "Myrtle" Page Fillmore (August 6, 1845, Pagetown, Ohio - October 6, 1931) was co-founder of the Unity Church with her husband Charles Fillmore. Prior to that time, she worked as a schoolteacher.
Known as Myrtilee as a child, she had long suffered from tuberculosis, and was not expected to live very long.
Myrtle Fillmore studied spiritual healing in 1886. She attended lectures by Dr. E.B. Weeks, a student of Christian Science. By 1888, her health improved as she began to pray with positive affirmation for her health - “I am a child of God, and therefore I do not inherit sickness.”
She took to this belief, thanked her body and saw its wholeness and gradually experienced a total recovery, eventually living forty years longer than expected. Her husband saw the effect on her and started using her techniques to heal himself.
The pair established Modern Thought meetings designed to be held Sunday afternoons after participants had attended church. The Fillmores did not set out to create a new denomination, but eventually did so, calling it Unity, Unity Farm, and eventually, Unity School of Christianity. Unity, along with Religious Science and other denominations, is part of the New Thought movement.
Myrtle did not produce nearly the output of writings that Charles did. Her major works are "The Prayer of Faith" and the collection, Healing Letters.
An ardent vegetarian, she refused to have a "murdered thing" on her table on Thanksgiving Day, even when her son, Lowell, bought one. She was bothered in particular by the neighboring families who would slaughter pigs for their meals. She once prayed for the safety of the pigs, not a beseeching prayer, which in Unity is seen as weak and ineffective, but visualizing in the love of God, free and safe. No one ever saw the pigs again.
Myrtle Fillmore lived many decades longer than any of her doctors believed possible. Concerned that she might be seen as a cult figure to be worshipped, as Unity advocates that God is in all of us as it was in Jesus (cf. Psalm 82:6, John 10:34, John 14:12, etc.), her burial place, though somewhere in Unity Village, remains secret to all but her family so that it could not become a shrine.
Neal Vahle has written a biography of Myrtle Fillmore titled Torch-Bearer to Light the Way.
