As I was reading about autocrats, international and domestic injustice, division, and racism, my opinion of many political leaders was less than charitable. “Someday they will pay!” I thought to myself. It was so easy to castigate these leaders.

Yet the author of First John in the Bible pointedly says that if we hate our brother, whom we can see, then it is impossible to love God, whom we cannot see. In fact, he declares we are liars if we say we love God while hating our brother (see 4:20). That cut me to the quick as I realized how much anger had been fueling my thoughts. But it also lit the path I needed to walk. 

Of course, I didn’t desire to be identified as a liar. I really did want, as Mary Baker Eddy writes in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, “something better, higher, holier, than is afforded by a material belief in a physical God and man” (p. 258)—a material belief that paints an insufficient and inaccurate picture of the true, spiritual identity of each of us.