Kinship

John B. Willis

In human belief, individual experience is very largely shaped by family relationships. Not only do hereditary influences and parental example determine the disposition and course of the young, but the helpful or harmful intimacies of the home, and later perchance of married life, supply motives and ends in large part for the more mature, and thus fashion character and conduct through the whole span of human life.

While many have the sweetest memories of much that home and kindred have meant to them, there are relatively few who do not trace their deepest regrets and griefs to the unidealities—past or present—of family relations or conditions, or who do not feel that their greatest handicap of habit or impulse is a direct outcome of them. The skeleton in the home closet explains unnumbered heartaches, and one cannot overemphasize the need of having such a right apprehension of family relations as will enable us to profit by all that pertains to them of good, and escape from all that may pertain to them of ill. Hence the question of how this realm of the hearthstone may be cleansed and ennobled, is vitally significant to us all.

Like everything human, kinship bears the hall-mark of belief in both good and evil. It prompts the finest heroisms and the most selfish brutalities; it brings the sweetest joys and the most poignant griefs; it gives expression both to tender affection and to bitter hatred, so that the fireside may become the rendezvous either of angels or of devils, and like all else, its redemption can be effected only through the spiritualization of thought.

Christian Science enables one to see clearly that here as everywhere the physical must grow less and less dominant, the spiritual more and more controlling. Sensual impulse must give place to thoughtful consideration, animal instincts to unselfish attachment, personal absorption to individual recognition and respect, clannish fealty to fraternal affiliation, the claim of a possession that is devotedly kind today and cruelly domineering tomorrow, to that unexacting affection which would have nothing that its winsomeness has not won; and this transformation must go on until the sense of fleshly kinship has entirely yielded to the recognition of the family of God, the brotherhood which knows but the one infinite Father and Mother. Then spiritual realization and love will indeed be enthroned in every heart, and the spirit of that paradoxical requirement of the Master, "If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple," will have been met.

Christian Science at once begins to effect this uplift of sense. It reveals the inevitability of the inharmonies and unmentionable wrongs recorded in the history of so many families. It discloses the unworthy and unsatisfying nature of all that mortal man hopes for in fostering the flesh and founding a home, and by purifying and expanding the affections it banishes the cause of every family sorrow and multiplies a thousandfold every family joy. In this ascension of thought there is no loss of the practical in the transcendental, no sacrifice of the spirit of true romance and chivalry. Every human relation is made more dear and happifying because it has become more divine. Christ Jesus inculcated the love of father and mother, brother and sister, and evinced in his own habits a spontaneous entrance into and sweet enjoyment of family relations; and yet how unequivocally he rebuked consent to the flesh as the basis of kinship and intimacy when he said, "Call no man your father upon the earth: for one is your Father, which is in heaven."

As revealed in Christian Science, the redemption of kinship is to be found in that perception of man in the image and likeness of God which brings escape from all thought of him as "of the earth, earthy," and in the cultivation of that pure attachment which has no taint of selfishness or sensuality. This divine ideal, loved and sincerely sought for in every human relation, will surely usher in the dawn of that consciousness and that home experience which is named heaven, and from all the borders of which sorrow and sighing have fled away.

John B. Willis.

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