In observance of the United Nations' INTERNATIONAL YEAR OF THE FAMILY

Healing family conflicts

Our concept of what constitutes family is crucial to our ability to deal with family conflicts. Over the years the media, especially television, have given us a smorgasbord of families and family values. In the United States, these include somewhat simplistic television families of the past, who never met a problem they couldn't neatly solve in thirty minutes. Today the pendulum has swung in the other direction. Now there are "in your face" confrontational talk shows, where every family difficulty and tragedy imaginable is aired. Here friction and conflict are the order of the day.

If we are looking for a better way to deal with family challenges, the answer doesn't lie in sorting through and choosing collective media images. The real answer begins with healing individual thought about family. Christian Science can contribute a fresh outlook on this question. It leads to an understanding of the true nature of family and helps bring more harmony and order to our human relations, including those in families.

The spiritual work of strengthening family builds on the understanding of God as our Father-Mother, the sole creator of man, who is His spiritual image and likeness. This relationship of God and man constitutes the true family. It is a unified, unbreakable relationship, and God, divine Love, is its Principle. We get a good sense of this in a verse from the Bible where Jeremiah reports that God says, "And I will give them one heart, and one way, that they may fear me for ever, for the good of them, and of their children after them" (32:39).

This sounds great, but how do we make this spiritual concept practical? What if we are thinking, "Sure, I love my family, but my child is disobedient, my spouse doesn't understand me, and we always argue about money"? To bring healing to such troubled relations, we can begin with our own thought, cultivating a deeper love for the spiritual sense of family.

Growing in our understanding of the inseparable relationship we truly have with our Father-Mother, we find ourselves thinking less about the child of God. Instead, more and more we think and act as the child of God, the reflection of divine Mind. This helps shift our efforts away from trying to improve a personal, mortal mind—ours or a family member's. Rather we increasingly yield to the power of God, the only Mind. Mrs. Eddy writes in Science and Health, "When the mechanism of the human mind gives place to the divine Mind, selfishness and sin, disease and death, will lose their foothold" (p. 176).

A personal sense of intelligence, a belief in more than the one divine Mind, is essentially divisive. It would separate us from our true identity as Mind's perfect reflection, or idea, and presume identity to be composed of human personality traits, in conflict with themselves and with other people. Because it would define man from the perspective of illusory mortal belief, this personal sense can only see man as incomplete, always in a state of lack. But the truth is that man is the complete, fulfilled expression of Love. In prayer we acknowledge that man's entire being is sustained by Mind and is not subject to the empty, distorted beliefs of personal sense.

Does this kind of prayer mean that we just ignore family problems? No. All that a personal sense of intelligence, mortal mind, or human will, wants is to be left alone, free to roam around in thought, identifying us and others from its false perspective. We can't be satisfied to remain rooted in the mortal view of man, hoping to grow out of it some day. We must, moment by moment, yield to the Christly view. The Christ, God's healing power, is always present, active in human consciousness. Christ comes to us where we believe we are, perhaps waist-deep in family friction, and shows us where we actually are—safe and secure in Love's infinite embrace.

When a potential family conflict arises, a good test of how much we are yielding to the Christly view is whether we react to error or respond to Truth.

When a potential family conflict arises, a good test of how much we are yielding to the Christly view is whether we react to error or respond to Truth. Reaction implies opposing forces. If we allow ourselves to be pushed or dragged by human will, conflict and friction are often the result. If, however, we yield to Truth, to God's will, we acknowledge one Mind with no opposing power with which a reaction can take place. Light doesn't react to darkness; it acts as light, destroying darkness.

Admittedly, great moral courage and persistence are required to stick to Truth and resist the temptation to react; nevertheless our efforts are well worth it. But what if, for instance, parents are faced with disobedience in a child? The spiritual need is to see that God's child—which means both us and our youngsters—can be obedient only to God's law of Love. We can always work to practice more consistently the law of Love in our own lives. This helps our children see how to conform to Love's self-enforcing law.

If we allow ourselves to be pushed by human will to believe that disobedience is actually part of anyone's true identity, this does not solve the problem. The Christly view refuses to identify disobedience or insubordination as man's God-created identity. This is the purest form of love we can give, for this is the love that heals. It fulfills God's law. When some form of discipline is warranted, we turn to divine Love and can be guided to use the appropriate means. Because Love is Principle, it is both tender and firm.

The constancy and consistency of God's love can also govern our relations with our spouse. If this sounds idealistic or impractical, perhaps we need to examine the difference between a human sense of love and a spiritual sense. Spiritual love, originating in God, is unlimited, universal. It just loves. A personal, or human, view of love is limited and needs an object, usually one it deems worthy. When we love spiritually, we're giving back, or expressing, the love we have from God through reflection.

If we see love as limited and fickle, as being parceled out from one human personality to another, we may find it hard to love and to forgive. But patience, selflessness, and forgiveness are natural to us the more we understand that we include such Christly qualities by virtue of the fact that we are actually God's likeness. Expressing these qualities evidences man's oneness with God.

As we learn to love selflessly as Christ Jesus did, we become more spiritually receptive and bear witness to the power of divine Love, lifting us out of a limited sense of love. This is prayer in action, dissolving friction and healing family conflicts. When our motives are purified by the desire to be and do good, we express Christly qualities in our lives, and healing is the result. The power of this prayer is unlimited. It blesses and unifies our own and our universal family.

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Second Thought
June 13, 1994
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