Editorial August 12, 1972 Issue

Message to a Single Parent

Naomi Price

Christian Science has a practical message of hope for single parents. It shows how unnecessary it is either for them or their children to suffer, and how mortal theories attached to the lack of one parent can be proved groundless when the truth of spiritual completeness is understood.

There are times when a parent—a mother or a father—has to face the challenge of raising a family single-handed. She (or he) may feel an almost overwhelming personal responsibility to provide the children with all the care that both parents would bestow on their offspring, as well as all the financial support—to try to compensate for a missing human father or mother by expressing all the qualities that this one would normally be expected to manifest if he (or she) were in the home. Otherwise, it is believed the children may lack some essential element of masculine or feminine qualities in their surroundings and, as a consequence, develop abnormal disciplinary or dispositional traits—even, perhaps, become physically ill.

In God's universe there are no orphans and no Fatherless children. Christ Jesus taught mankind that God is the eternal Father of all. And Christian Science reveals that God is also the incorporeal Mother, the divine Principle, Love, the one creative power of the universe including man. So, since God is both Father and Mother, in reality there are no child-victims of parental loss or divided homes. When this Christly understanding of spiritual truth comes to humanity—that man is the manifestation of the one divine Mind rather than the offspring of two mortal parents—it destroys the false belief of deprivation when one human parent seems to be missing. It heals the strife, the rebellion, the sadness, the sense of loss and lack that sometimes accompanies a break in the home, and adjusts the balance so that each member of the family may develop normally.

Send a comment to the editors

NEXT IN THIS ISSUE

Testimony of Healing

Many years ago when one of our daughters was five years old...