When Nathanael, an early follower of Christ Jesus, first heard of the Master, he asked, "Can there any good thing come out of Nazareth?" Nathanael quickly learned that there certainly was came something or—more accurately—someone very good who came from Nazareth.

Nathanael was from Cana, a rival town only a few miles from Nazareth. Of course, Nathanael's pejorative outlook on his neighbors isn't limited to small towns that existed centuries ago. These feelings can spring up between nighbors whose homes lie only a few yards from each other. We had new neighbors once who thought our family was Jewish, I don't know why. But I remember how relieved they seemed when they learned we weren't. I was young at the time and didn't fully understand the nature of prejudice; I remember I didn't feel relieved by their relief.

It's an old story, the conflict that can spring up among people. No country or community is entirely free of such troubles. Thus it is that when spiritual love and brotherhood transcend individual and cultural differences, such an experience is healing.

Perhaps this is why the world seemed a little freer when the Berlin Wall was breached. After decades of ideological conflict, people felt new hope for the world. There might have been plenty of untested euphoria and naiveté about the challenges that were ahead as West and East had to learn new relationships and better understanding of each other. But there was something unmistakable and genuine as people in many countries felt awakened to a realization that peace and mutual progress are truly possible.

I remember a day not long after the opening of borders in Europe. Two people came to my office on the same day, one from West Germany and the other from East Germany. While they didn't share exactly the same point of view on what had taken place, it was clear that something deeply spiritual and common to both had been tapped by recent events. Both were Christian Scientists who had long prayed for the amelioration of conflict and tension in their divided nation. They had each grasped something of the fundamental spiritual truth that man is God's child, and this truth had extended into the details of their lives and into how they responded to others.

In microcosm, I caught sight of the potential for healing in the lives of these two people long separated by walls, barbed wire, bureaucracies, and ideologies. Yet for many years they had, in fact, been united in their prayer.

Our conceptions of the family of mankind are inseparable from our understanding of God. If we believe God to be only a personal power, shaped in the image of our own outlook, culture, forms of expression, and ideas of what the world should be like, then there are going to be differences that will look impossible to overcome—differences in marriages, in neighborhoods, in churches, and in communities as well as in the world at large. But to begin to sense spiritually the allness and infinite nature of God is to begin to see that He can't be limited by personal, material barriers. He's not a capricious being who works in behalf of one and against the true spiritual welfare of another.

The Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy, understood that the chief commands of Christianity—to have one God and to "love thy neighbour as thyself"—transcend cultural and political boundaries. "It should be thoroughly understood," she writes in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, "that all men have one Mind, one God and Father, one Life, Truth, and Love. Mankind will become perfect in proportion as this fact becomes apparent, war will cease and the true brotherhood of man will be established."

Isn't such spiritual understanding what's most needed to heal the divisions that exist between people?

Europe, a battleground of horrible atrocities against the human race, can hold within her future profound lessons for all of us. Physical borders long intended to keep people apart, no longer do so. But in the process, ethnic and regional hostilities are again surfacing. We all have an interest in the welfare of this part of the world, especially if it can become a place in which freedom, dignity, and spiritual unity are wrought our in the lives of millions of people no longer militarily separated by the force of devastating weapons of war.

Spiritual lessons and gains in Europe can spread to the hearts and minds of people in Asia, Latin America, Africa, North America, and the Middle East, who yearn to be free from ethnic and racial conflict.

Whenever people desire freedom and dignity, they respond to an innate spiritual sense or identity that confirms man's real selfhood as God's child. Our own role is essential. We can embrace this truth and live it through our won growing recognition of our neighbor's relationship to God. Then the actual experience of brotherhood and peacemaking penetrates physical boundaries and emotional barriers and is manifested in our own prayer and actions.

Prayer that yearns for spiritual good to be experienced in the lives of all people is more than human desire. Such prayer discovers God, who knows all His children as His spiritual ideas. Our own spiritual growth along these lines will open our eyes to see ourselves and our fellowman as man spiritually is; it will prevent our being blinded by physical, ethnic, or ideological difference that contrasts with our own familiar customs.

Christ Jesus saw the spiritual identity of man as God's child. This was the impulse of his love. We can come into this understanding as well and experience the love that leads to God. This heals social as well as physical illness.

Michael D. Rissler