'To Bless All Mankind' May 23, 2016 Issue

The power behind brotherly love

Liz Butterfield Wallingford

There’s a single ingredient that can tangibly help people and nations around the world, explains the column on the facing page: “The substance is philia, which goes by its generic name brotherly love.”

I have to admit, it seemed so obvious that at first I felt a little underwhelmed. Of course behaving kindly to one another makes the world a better place, right? But as I continued reading, I realized there’s much more to it than that.

Brotherly love in its deepest, truest sense is imbued with a power that goes far beyond simply human acts of kindness, to the very essence of what it truly means to love. “Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God,” we read in the Bible (I John 4:7). Mary Baker Eddy puts it simply: “God is Love” (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 2).