Healing family conflicts

Steven R. Ryf

Our concept of what constitutes family is crucial to our ability to deal with family conflicts. Over the years the media, especially television, have given us a smorgasbord of families and family values. In the United States, these include somewhat simplistic television families of the past, who never met a problem they couldn't neatly solve in thirty minutes. Today the pendulum has swung in the other direction. Now there are "in your face" confrontational talk shows, where every family difficulty and tragedy imaginable is aired. Here friction and conflict are the order of the day.

If we are looking for a better way to deal with family challenges, the answer doesn't lie in sorting through and choosing collective media images. The real answer begins with healing individual thought about family. Christian Science can contribute a fresh outlook on this question. It leads to an understanding of the true nature of family and helps bring more harmony and order to our human relations, including those in families.

The spiritual work of strengthening family builds on the understanding of God as our Father-Mother, the sole creator of man, who is His spiritual image and likeness. This relationship of God and man constitutes the true family. It is a unified, unbreakable relationship, and God, divine Love, is its Principle. We get a good sense of this in a verse from the Bible where Jeremiah reports that God says, "And I will give them one heart, and one way, that they may fear me for ever, for the good of them, and of their children after them" (32:39).

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