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Is love useless in the face of brutishness?

A Christian Science perspective: There is no power greater than Love.

  • By Rich Evans

Is love useless in the face of brutishness? The recent attack in Manchester again raises the question. When the MOAB (Mother of All Bombs) was dropped in Afghanistan, it was a show of power. Such demonstrations may quell aggression for a moment, but they may also exacerbate the undercurrent of fear and even escalate into other shows of force.

Love, on the other hand, is a power beyond the brute. Christian and Muslim mothers of Liberia, courageously uniting in public protest, put down the civil war in 2003 because they could not tolerate the nation’s sons being destroyed. Their love-motivated actions brought about a new reality for that nation.

Love like theirs has everything to do with the caring divinity that contradicts the man-generated vision of God as judgmental and punishing. It illustrates the all-compassionate God and the practical yet universal love exemplified by Christ Jesus.

It is the Motherhood of God, not bombs, for which the world yearns and has proven a greater power when lived. Divine Love is the only true power and ultimate reality. Nothing naïve. Ask a Liberian.

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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