While it's not possible to know how everyone may feel about any particular issue, it seems safe to say that everyone must be deeply grateful to see the cessation of open warfare in the Persian Gulf area. The outpouring of prayer that we've all read about in this magazine, and in every major news organ in this country, has been extraordinary and a sign of the deep spiritual roots of people's lives. While it may appear that we live in an age of almost total materialism, people feel—even if they can't always explain what it is and why they have such feeling—that there is a benevolent divine power that ultimately governs the destiny of mankind.

War tragically imposes itself on humanity as the only possible solution under certain conditions. But when war begins, the cost in people's lives makes clear that war cannot be a glorious or good thing. We come to the realization that war is a terrible detour on the road to peace and reconciliation.

Before this recent tragedy is distanced from our memories and from daily news reports, we all need to consider the extent to which our continuing prayers can forward us in the aftermath of conflict. Racial, religious, political, economic, and historical reasons can be cited for all wars. But the multiplicity of explanations that is needed to understand the complex issues of human life can't be allowed to obscure what is within reach of us all. And that is the spiritual capacity to love, to desire justice for others as much as we cherish it for ourselves, and in the final analysis to be as earnest and persistent in peace as we are in defense.

Man is God's child. In the teachings of Christian Science this isn't simply an affirmation of religious idealism. It's a realization of each individual's infinite worth as a spiritual expression of God's being. This is why spiritual healing is so crucial to humanity. Such healing isn't just setting things aright so that we can get on with the routine of material existence. It is the outward and present confirmation of divine Love's, God's, reality and presence in our lives. Without some mustard-seed consciousness of such Love, human existence would be totally darkness, wholly chaotic, hopeless. The fact is that human existence isn't this way, even for people who face the hardest of life's situations.

It has been said many times, and rightly so, that salvation is individual. That is, each person has to make his own way to the spiritual understanding of God and of his own spiritual selfhood that overcomes the evils of this world. But while salvation is individual, our lives must be lived as if one's own salvation depended upon the saving of all humanity. Such living—with compassion and concern for the welfare of all— opens the very gates of heaven and reveals the all-embracing reach of divine Love. Thus the roots of war are destroyed— hate, prejudice, racism, greed, fear, disregard, callous apathy.

What one comes to realize is that destroying the roots of war is an inner moral and spiritual effort. That's the good part, because there's not one of us who can be left out of this peacemaking. In fact, such activity underlies the mission of The Christian Science Monitor.

In the Boston Herald of March 5, 1905, an article appeared by Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, under the headline "Prevention and Cure of Divorce." Interestingly, Mrs. Eddy linked the ending of divorce and the ending of war. She saw both family and national conflicts as battles that would end as the motives of men and women are transformed by divine Truth and Love. She saw a new manhood and a new womanhood in her discovery of God as the sole and total Life of every individual. Such an understanding saved her own life and brought her to the foot of her mountainous discovery of God as real, omnipotent, and the true governor of man—and even of our own hearts and lives. "Look high enough," she wrote, "and you see the heart of humanity warming and winning."

May we all look long enough at our fellow Muslims, Jews, and Christians until we see past differing religious identifications and discern the spiritual and precious nature of man as God's image and likeness. Once this is seen in others, we won't be able to attempt to destroy one another. And, of course, if movement in this direction is what this latest war brings, then we'll be ready to see beyond the differences and find common cause with our fellowman; not only in Riyadh, Kuwait City, Baghdad, or Jerusalem, but in our own towns, where mortal mind divides people into classes, races, neighborhoods, and argues that we're so different we can't share common love for one another.

To feel God's love and the demand of divine law to heal, to save, and to share of one's own good with all, is to understand and experience the spirituality that is derived from knowing God. We can trust this transforming experience to save ourselves and humanity.

Michael D. Rissler