Article January 13, 1986 Issue

How a spiritual sense of family heals racial prejudice

JULIO C. RIVAS T.

While growing up I saw much evidence of racial prejudice. The city I lived in had for many years been the setting for confrontations between various racial groups. It had suffered riots and was continually facing violence among young people of different races.

As a teen-ager attending a Christian Science Sunday School, I found the Bible and Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy of great benefit in protecting my thought from the violence and divisiveness of racial prejudice. Christian Science, discovered and founded by Mrs. Eddy, teaches us to look beyond prejudice, mistrust, fear, and hatred to God's spiritual creation. In God, divine Love, no discord, divisiveness, or hatred exists. Whether prejudice appears to be a part of others' thinking or harbored in our own, it really is not a part of the loving man created by God. In our true, immortal selfhood, we are reflections of infinite Love. God is the Father-Mother of all, and we all live in His universal family.

The unity of all mankind is clearly expressed in the following words of Mrs. Eddy: "On this basis the brotherhood of all peoples is established; namely, one God, one Mind, and 'Love thy neighbor as thyself,' the basis on which and by which the infinite God, good, the Father-Mother Love, is ours and we are His in divine Science."^{The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 281.}