Can what's broken so badly ever be mended? we may wonder.

Perhaps there has been adultery or physical harm in a marriage. Or maybe the offenses are small and continual, apparently wearing away love over a lifetime. Can what's broken so badly ever be mended? the heart keeps crying out.

There are times, we know, when dissolving a marriage may be humane and nearest right. But even then there will afterward be a need for healing. The strongest basis for this healing or for the repair of a relationship in the first place is progress in the spiritual understanding that in the deepest, broadest sense, family is never broken.

How can anyone conceivably say such a thing? People have been hurt, harmed, embittered. And we're talking here not about minor marital frays or teen-age siblings' quarrels. We're talking about serious family unhappiness, injustice, anger, deep alienation.

Well, we could go on talking about it, bowing to it as an irreducible fact of human life. Or we can be driven by its seemingly despairmaking hopeless character to be willing to consider another point of view.

Many have found remarkable, practical healing in terribly difficult family situations through this other and different point of view. And, most important, they have seen that it isn't a question of trying to force themselves to have a positive attitude but of actually discerning something new about the way things are.

Forgiveness is certainly part of it. Most of us forgive to some extent by instinct. We would rather "forgive and forget" than be angry. For one thing it's pleasanter, and for another it feels right. But instinct carries us only a little way. Suppose that someone has decided everything about us is deeply wrong and this person has in effect become our "enemy," a constant opposing force. What then? When something more is involved than a passing slight, we need understanding rather than instinct.

From the Bible, Christ Jesus' emphasis on the need for continual forgiving—"I say not unto thee, Until seven times: but, Until seventy times seven" ^{Matt. 18:22.} —can be an anchor. But why all this forgiving? Christian Science provides this answer: forgiving holds us in line as we learn the extent to which evil is a deception—everyone's enemy—and good is everyone's great reality.

It really is possible to begin to discern that evil, in whatever form we encounter it, is actually false. Lust, disdain, and rage, demeaning or lying—all that divides and separates us—can literally be found to be mistakes about what's actually present. What's present—and it's possible and natural to recognize—is the pure love and goodness God is pouring out for all of His children, His family. There is more than enough for all. Seeing even a little of this enables us to see how it could be that God's family is never broken, no matter how fierce a personal battle has been or how long the hurt and alienation have gone on.

The truth is that the nature of the always-existing, underlying relationship between all human beings is family, is love, is joy in the fulfillment of another. It is true whether we go away from each other forever, after having been humanly related, or whether we are supposedly total strangers. It is true whether we are single or married, divorced, widowed, or just alone.

The reason for this unity is that there is a spiritual law in regard to God's man, His universal family, that is endlessly binding and strong. You couldn't break this family relation any more than you could casually break the law of gravity operating throughout the solar system. Whatever the personal human tie we think has been damaged or cut, that tie was only an indication of God's actual spiritual family of man to which we all belong—and which remains unbroken.

This law of unbroken relationship is part of what Christian Scientists call the Science of being. In a book titled Unity of Good, Mary Baker Eddy, who discovered and founded Christian Science, explains: "This Science of God and man is the Holy Ghost, which reveals and sustains the unbroken and eternal harmony of both God and the universe." ^{Un., p. 52.}

Several years ago a film told the story of prisoners of war humiliated and horribly treated. Incredible cultural gaps added to the complete lack of communication. But at one point a Japanese sergeant smiles at the lieutenant colonel, his English captive, and spontaneously releases him from awful punishment. Not entirely knowing what he's saying, he grins and pronounces in English, "Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence." It becomes the deeply moving theme of the film.

It isn't just an idealistic theme, easy to value in a film. It represents a truth written in our bones, so to speak. Many have found it to be the deepest truth even in the most punishing of real-life situations.

How very much we need to know more of the Holy Ghost, or divine Spirit. It is possible to look up out of the murky feelings of anger, hurt, and revenge and see what God, Spirit, is showing us. What has seemed smashed beyond repair has actually never been broken. It never can be. We're only going to learn more and more of the wholeness of man in God's image and of the unbrokenness of His family.

Allison W. Phinney, Jr.