Myrtle Fillmore: Where Unity Began

Unity Was Founded on Myrtle Fillmore’s Healing

People often suggest that Unity cofounder Charles Fillmore was the intellect and his wife Myrtle the loving heart of Unity, but those may be stereotypes. Myrtle Fillmore was brilliant, well-read, and well-educated, especially for a woman of her day. She believed that women could take responsibility for their lives and choose their thoughts and actions. Both Charles and Myrtle were deep spiritual thinkers, and both were described as warm and loving people. Together they signed a handwritten covenant in 1892 dedicating themselves, “our time, our money, all we have and all we expect to have, to the Spirit of Truth, and through it, to … Unity.”

Myrtle’s physical healing by spiritual means sparked the creation of Unity and everything it became. Myrtle had suffered all her life from a constellation of unexplained illnesses that doctors at the time labeled tuberculosis, and at 40, she was given six months to live. With her illness as a catalyst, Charles and Myrtle undertook a spiritual search when doctors could not help them. 

One night in 1886, they heard a lecture by metaphysician E.B. Weeks, and Myrtle lay hold of a single idea: I am a child of God, and therefore I do not inherit sickness. Spending hours every day in prayer and meditation, she healed her body and lived to be 86. What she learned about the power of prayer and the power of thought are the fundamental teachings of Unity today.

Myrtle’s Early Life

Myrtle was born in Ohio in 1845 with the name Mary Caroline Page, the eighth of nine children. Her father, a farmer, called her “Myrtle” and the nickname stuck. She was a mystical child who quietly chafed against her parents’ rigid Methodism. She preferred to lie beside a creek where her spirit could float up to the fleecy clouds and green treetops, free from her sickly body. She promised her friends, “Things will hum when the new world comes out.” 

“There’s no such thing as disease or incurable condition. Anything that does not measure up to the Christ pattern of perfection can be changed.”

Myrtle read everything she could find, including material intended for boys. At 21 she enrolled in The Literary Course for Ladies at Oberlin College, the first coeducational college in the U.S. She received a teaching certificate and accepted a teaching position in Clinton, Missouri.  

Later she lived for a year in Denison, Texas, hoping for a better climate, and started her own progressive school that parents loved for their children. She also met a much younger man from the Minnesota territory named Charles Fillmore. They courted by letter for three years before they married in 1881 and traveled by stagecoach to Colorado, where they settled in Pueblo. 

Two of their three sons were born there—Lowell Page in 1882 and Waldo Rickert, known as Rickert or Rick, in 1884. (He was named for Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose Transcendental writings were a major influence on the Fillmores.) The little family eventually settled in Kansas City, where Charles built a successful real estate business. A third son, John Royal, was born in 1889, after Myrtle’s healing and the same year Unity was founded. 

Myrtle’s Healing Teachings

When people asked Myrtle how she healed her body, she said she did it by changing her thinking. Up until then, she had been told she inherited poor health from her father and would likely die young. She stopped believing it with her epiphany that I am a child of God and therefore I do not inherit sickness. She wrote, “I have been laboring under the belief in inherited ill health, and the Truth of my divine parentage freed and healed me.”  

Each day, she shut herself in a room with an empty chair where she imagined Jesus to be, read the Bible, prayed, meditated, and talked to her body. “Life is simply a form of energy and has to be guided and directed in man’s body by his intelligence.” She firmly believed, “Our bodies are the fruits of our minds.” More than a decade later, she wrote a detailed description of her healing process in a Unity Magazine^® essay titled “How I Found Health.”

For her remaining 40 years, Myrtle taught that only our belief in aging and illness blocks the flow of Spirit. Health is our natural state of being. She said the same Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead gives life to our bodies. They are vehicles for our souls to carry out God’s plan on earth, so how could they be anything less than perfect? Along with prayer, she advocated pure food, exercise, and clean living, although she admitted to a lifelong sweet tooth. 

Myrtle believed unequivocally that our health reflects our consciousness. “There’s no such thing as disease or incurable condition…” she wrote. “Anything that does not measure up to the Christ pattern of perfection can be changed.” 

Charles took notice of his wife's healing, and she assured him he, too, could be healed. Charles had suffered a hip injury in a childhood skating accident, and one leg was four inches shorter than the other. He walked with crutches. Over the years, using the power of prayer and thought, Charles said, his leg grew longer. As an older man, he needed only a built-up shoe and a cane to get around. 

Myrtle began to help friends and neighbors heal themselves by impressing upon them this new way of thinking. She and Charles offered “mental healing” appointments in their home for the next 20 years. Through their periodicals, they also offered prayer support to people outside the Kansas City area and were flooded with letters asking for help with healing. Myrtle established the Unity Prayer Ministry in 1890 as the Society for Silent Help. It later became Silent Unity^®, which now responds to 1.3 million requests for prayer each year, submitted by letter, telephone, and website.

The writing that we have from Myrtle is her correspondence with some of those letter writers. Many of the original letters have been lost, but her answers survive in the Unity Digital Archive and Museum and in two books, Myrtle Fillmore’s Healing Letters and How to Let God Help You. 

Myrtle’s Love of Children

The first action Charles and Myrtle took to establish Unity was to publish a magazine, Modern Thought, later Unity Magazine. They wanted to share what they were learning about spiritual principles. 

In those early months, Myrtle had a vision of her own. A voice within her asked, “Who will take care of the children?” The answer she heard was, “You are to take care of the children; this is your work.” 

In 1893 she started a magazine called Wee Wisdom, which enthralled children for 98 years. At one time it was the longest-running children’s magazine in America. Myrtle, the editor for its first 29 years, used her magazine to teach New Thought principles to kids through stories, games, puzzles, poems, and artwork. 

“The mission of Wee Wisdom is not to entertain the children but to call them out,” she wrote. “To be always entertained is to be dwarfed and dependent. To be ‘called out’ is to follow the harmonious law of the soul’s unfoldment.”  

Her three boys were drafted as pint-sized assistants. They consulted on the serialized stories Myrtle wrote, suggesting to her what boys would authentically say and do, and they contributed their own essays and artwork. Children who read the magazine sent letters, drawings, and poems, and they frequently asked about the Fillmore family. 

Myrtle loved the ways her young readers saw beauty and magic in the world, the way she had as a child. She wrote in Wee Wisdom that her childhood beliefs were a “truer true than all the ugly shapes that come through the hardening experiences of belief in time, toil, and trouble.” She desperately wanted to affirm the children’s innate belief in a friendly universe and assure them they were loved by God and created in God’s image. 

Myrtle believed prayer was as important for children as for everyone else. She found a poem by Hannah More Kohaus called the “Prayer of Faith.” It first appeared in Wee Wisdom in 1898 and became the most popular item Unity ever published:

Myrtle’s Family Advice

Now that Myrtle was editing a children’s magazine and overseeing a prayer ministry, she received scores of letters from parents asking for help in rearing their children. She sympathized with parents but, by and large, she told them to back off. 

“See your children as eagerly growing souls,” she wrote. “See them as individuals unfolding their own faculties and powers, individually doing that which seems to them best at the moment.” She had no patience with parents who pushed their children or criticized them for being overweight or stubborn. “Why dear, he has a right to be stubborn if others keep at him too persistently! He must release his own powers and be permitted to try them out unprompted much of the time.” Let God work within him, she said. 

Charles and Myrtle became vegetarians in 1895 and eventually established a vegetarian restaurant next to their offices in downtown Kansas City, featuring the fruits and vegetables grown at Unity Farm, the predecessor to Unity Village. They also tried to instill this ethic in their sons.

When Royal, the youngest son, was attending the University of Missouri in 1909, he let the family know that he was bringing several classmates home for Thanksgiving dinner—and he demanded turkey. His vegetarian mother stood firm. “Suppose, dear boy, we cut the turkey out for Thanksgiving and have better things. It doesn’t seem quite consistent for people who believe as we do, in the sin of taking the creature life, to dish murdered things up on our table.” Royal went on to become managing editor of the magazine Weekly Unity and wrote a regular column about the virtues of vegetarianism. 

All of Myrtle’s sons married, but Royal’s wife died shortly after childbirth and Royal followed two years later. A diabetic with high blood pressure, he was 34. Their toddler daughter, Frances, went to live with her uncle Lowell and his wife Alice. 

Lowell Fillmore worked his entire life at Unity, taking over operations long before his father Charles died. Rickert was a prominent businessman in Kansas City and a self-taught architect who designed the buildings for Unity Village using the Mediterranean style he had seen in Europe. When he designed a cottage at Unity Village for his parents, called The Arches, he omitted a kitchen so Myrtle wouldn’t have to cook. Her mother-in-law across the street fed the family.

Myrtle’s Passing

Myrtle Fillmore died in 1931, not because there was anything wrong with her body but because she had finished her work on earth. She seemed to float out of her body the way she had as a little girl watching the clouds. This account is from a writer for Weekly Unity. 

Charles lived another 17 years, active until he died just before his 94th birthday. Years later, their granddaughter Rosemary, who was Rickert’s daughter, summed up the lives of Charles and Myrtle, their healings, and their teachings: “They had absolute faith that with God all things are possible. Two sick, poverty-ridden people found a faith—made the quantum leap from darkness and despair into the light of all possibilities.”