Testimony of Healing December 31, 2001 Issue

A lovable father

Douglas Mason

My relationship with my father was from an early age full of anger, resentment, and hurt. I saw him as intolerant, emotionally abusive, and unloving. I yearned to distance myself from him and vowed to be nothing like him. By the time I prepared to leave home for college, ugly verbal exchanges were common.

I became interested in Christian Science in my early 20s, and gained a new view of myself as the son of an all-loving Father, a Father who could do nothing but love me because He was Love itself. A Father who knew nothing of unloved, unlovable son. I learned to see myself as His image and likeness. And this image and likeness was not the victim of imperfect fathering.

The turnaround in my approach to my father happened this way. At a family gathering about 23 years ago at Christmastime, I approached my father with the haughty arrogance of moral superiority. I had decided it was my "Christian duty" to tolerate him. A predictably nasty exchange followed. Later as I prayed about this encounter, it dawned on me that while I had been willing to see myself as loved by God, I had not been willing to include my father in this same love. I'd continued to see him as flawed.

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