RELATIONSHIPS October 30, 2006 Issue

SNAKES, LIONS, AND LOVE

GLYNIS BURGDORFF

Earlier this year I read two stories on the BBC website that brought to mind some of the lessons about the nature of God's creation that our family has been learning through our study of Christian Science. One told of a snake in a zoo in Japan that had befriended a hamster it had been given to eat for lunch. They had been living together for many months. The other story was about a lioness that had been tenderly caring for a baby antelope that had lost its own mother.

These articles reminded me that, from a spiritual standpoint, a world filled with victims and victimizers, prey and predators, or haters and hated, is not the natural state of creation, but represents a distorted concept of it. The true creation is one in which all of God's children, or ideas, live together safely, peacefully, and harmoniously, expressing the love God has given to each one of them.

It occurred to me that if a snake and a hamster, a lioness and an antelope, could learn to live together, certainly God's love could dissolve the unnatural qualities in people that would tempt them to devour one another with hatred and unkindness. God's love teaches us to care for one another as brothers and sisters, children of one Father-Mother God.