"This is for you," she said as she took the banana from her handbag. It was a generous gesture to me, someone she'd only known for one hour. In this recently liberated Eastern European country, such fruits had once been available only at Christmas, and to those willing to pay a good part of their month's salary. Such fruits were a little freer on the market now in September 1991, but still exceedingly costly.

During the ten hours I had been in Czechoslovakia, every hour had been filled with some expression of friendship and helpfulness from train attendants, people on the street, and those in bureaus. One elderly woman closed her place of work, put her arm around me, and walked me down to the train to be certain I took the right one—all this without one word of a common language between us. My whole three-day sojourn there was one shower of love.

During the week before this trip, while I was studying the Lesson-Sermon outlined in the Christian Science Quarterly, it dawned on me that I was making my trip to Prague not simply as a tourist but as a Christian Scientist. I was taking with me my highest understanding of what man truly is, the beloved child of God, who is the Father and Mother of all. I was taking the greatest tool for communication there is: spiritual love for the people of that country, who are really my sisters and brothers. I would be what the Bible shows us we can be: "ambassadors for Christ" (II Cor. 5:20).

Certainly Christ Jesus was the most radiant example of demonstrating hourly that all are the beloved children of one Father. Even in several encounters he had with those who were not Jews, he included them in his healing outreach. One might say he lifted them to see something of their citizenship in the kingdom of God. As my thought was filled with these spiritual sentiments, they became my experience. I reached out to others in joyous sharing and found myself the recipient of joy and affection.

Actually, this adventure of discovering the family of man with one Father-Mother God began for me many years ago—shortly before I came to live in Europe. I was reading this comment from Paul: "Now therefore ye are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellow-citizens with the saints, and of the household of God" (Eph. 2:19). For "household of God," one Italian translation of the Bible puts "the family of God." I saw that I had the divine right to accept my spiritual status as a fellow-citizen of the kingdom of heaven together with all whom I would be meeting. I could cherish their true nature as members of the one family of God. It was also my right to reject the dividing theory that I would be a stranger and foreigner among strangers and foreigners. This I did wholeheartedly. In all the countries in which I have lived I have felt welcomed by their citizens and have been included as a member in many families.

Paul's bold statement is a truth powerful enough to right the wrongs so evident in the world today—to end wars caused by divisions within nations, to correct the problems that arise from the shifting of entire peoples from their homelands. Authority for this can be found in the opening chapter of the Bible, which describes God, Spirit, as the one creator, who creates His universe, down to the last detail, good, the very outcome of His own infinitely good nature.

As we read of this universe created totally in light, we have a sense of magnitude, of universality with no limits, no outside. The one good, universal cause could create only one good, universal effect—man in His image and likeness. In this account of creation we read of no territorial boundaries, divisions, races, clans, or families scattered here and there. Rather, there is the all-embracing One, the only author, universal Love, fathering and mothering all. And this is the reality that Jesus came to reassure us of, proving its presence by healing the sick and the sinning and raising the dead. He lived and taught the Christ, the image and likeness of God, the one cause, and reassured humanity that the real identity of us all is to be found in God, as His reflection, and that therefore God's family is undivided.

It is interesting to note that creation, as viewed in the following chapters of Genesis, is not brought forth in light; light is not even mentioned. Everything is fragmented, supposedly formed from dust. Adam and Eve are first inside Eden; then they are outside Eden—strangers and foreigners! The first fratricide takes place with their offspring, Cain and Abel. Here is one of the results of the sense of brotherhood based on biological ties. At its worst, this viewpoint underlies such things as ethnic cleansing.

Mary Baker Eddy proclaims the spiritual and scientific truth of creation, as revealed in the first chapter of Genesis, and the demonstrable unreality of the views of creation given in the second version. In Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures she writes of the false view of God, "This human sense of Deity yields to the divine sense, even as the material sense of personality yields to incorporeal sense of God and man as the infinite Principle and infinite idea,—as one Father with His universal family, held in the gospel of Love" (pp. 576–577).

This understanding of God and man can bring about harmonious solutions to the problems of displaced peoples and ethnic wars, as the Bible and Science and Health show. But there's a responsibility to be taken by me and by you. We have the privilege of accepting as real only the first, illumined interpretation of creation, of basing our prayers for the world on it, and then living it to the best of our ability.

Paul writes: "For as the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of that one body, being many, are one body: so also is Christ. For by one Spirit are we all baptized into one body, whether we be Jews or Gentiles, whether we be bond or free; and have been all made to drink into one Spirit" (I Cor. 12:12, 13).

We must, indeed cannot help but love our neighbor as ourselves—because each is a member of the one body of Christ, held in universal Love, and therefore all are members one of another. This undefeatable truth makes our prayers for the world mightier than all the age-old claims of a creation apart from Spirit. Don't we want all people to know that they are beloved members of this beautiful family of God?

ISAIAH

Now, O Lord, thou art our father; we are the clay, and thou our potter; and we all are the work of thy hand.

Isaiah 64:8