Nona L. Brooks

Nona Brooks was in her twenties, in Pueblo, Colorado, and seriously ill with a throat condition that had made eating difficult for months, when her sister persuaded her to come to a class. The teacher was a student of Emma Curtis Hopkins, and Brooks found the material implausible and kept going anyway.

Her account of what happened is one of the more striking in the movement's literature and she told it consistently for the rest of her life. During a session she became aware of a light that filled the room and, as she described it, filled her as well; she found herself standing, the condition was gone, and she ate normally that evening. Whatever is made of the report, the change in her life is not in question: she moved from a sceptical attender to a teacher within a few years.

With her sisters Althea Small and Fannie James she worked out a statement of the teaching, met Malinda Cramer, adopted the Divine Science name, and set about the thing the movement generally did not do, which was to build something durable. She was ordained in 1898 and in 1899 became pastor of the first Divine Science church, in Denver, a position she held for most of the next four decades.

What she did not do was treat the episode as a credential. Her later teaching returns constantly to the point that the light was not given to her because she was ready for it, and that the work is the ordinary and repeated turning of attention afterwards rather than the moment itself. It is a notably unglamorous position for a movement whose literature is full of sudden healings, and it is one reason her students went on to build institutions rather than to seek experiences.

Divine Science stayed small and did not fragment, and the reason is Nona Brooks. Where other New Thought teachers taught classes and left the graduates to do as they liked, she built a college in Denver, presided over it, edited the magazine, and ordained ministers under a recognised standard before sending them to found churches elsewhere. That is an ordinary denominational apparatus, and in this movement it was unusual.

The teaching she transmitted is the omnipresence of God worked out consistently: if God is all and is everywhere, then there is no place for a second power, so evil, sickness and lack are not things to be fought but errors to be seen through. Her own emphasis was less on technique than on the practice of turning attention, deliberately and repeatedly, to the presence she held to be already there.

Among those who came through the Denver church was Emmet Fox, who went on to fill the largest halls in New York and to reach an enormous readership, and whose writing carried Divine Science formulations to people who never heard the name. Others in her orbit fed into the wider culture of self help and recovery that grew in mid century America.

She retired from the pastorate in the 1930s, continued teaching, and died in 1945. The Divine Science churches that exist today descend from the Denver institution rather than from the San Francisco one.