The loyalty that unites us

As the impeachment trial begins in the U.S. Senate, we can all play a role in supporting the spiritual loyalty that opens the way to harmony, progress, and healing.

Christian Science Perspective audio edition
Loading the player...

The impeachment trial beginning today in the U.S. Senate is an opportunity for heartfelt prayer. But how can we all unite in prayer?

What if we were to each commit to supporting right government and those serving it by affirming the inherent loyalty that everyone has to divine Love, God?

That’s not to say every thought and action necessarily reflects that loyalty. But it’s a spiritual reality that underlies everyone. All of us are truly spiritual, as the sons and daughters of divine Spirit, God. And in our Father-Mother God’s eyes, the sole allegiance of every one of Her spiritual offspring is to their divine Parent, whose love is impartial and inexhaustible.

In our heart of hearts we each have the capacity to do this – to pause and pray to overcome any feelings of fear or outrage we might be feeling. We can strive to become more conscious of divine reality – the spiritual creation God knows – and let that awareness displace the human will and opinionated reaction that can seem so tempting. We can let Christ, the healing idea of God’s all-embracing love, uplift us to the spiritual place where our true consciousness, at one with the divine Mind, sees what God sees.

I experienced the joy and freedom of doing this once when troubled by news of a long-running civil war. At one point, I read an interview with a high-ranking military officer who declared that peace would be restored to his country if all army personnel were loyal to their unified role, rather than serving the various warring factions.

This prompted me to dig into the Bible and the writings of Mary Baker Eddy, the discoverer of Christian Science, to better understand what kind of loyalty unites rather than divides. The Scriptures describe the beautiful friendship of the soon-to-be-king David and Jonathan, the son of the king that David would replace. Jonathan and David were loyal to the last, despite being perceived to be on opposing sides.

The source of that kind of loyalty is beyond human goodness; it’s divine. Mrs. Eddy’s book “The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany” suggests that such love is the only genuine loyalty. It says: “The government of divine Love derives its omnipotence from the love it creates in the heart of man; for love is allegiant, and there is no loyalty apart from love” (p. 189).

As I pondered this higher, spiritual nature of genuine loyalty, I had a very sacred moment of glimpsing that the real loyalty needed to bring the civil war to an end was already at hand. It wasn’t restoring loyalty to the nation’s government per se, but bearing witness to everyone’s inherent loyalty to God’s government. That loyalty was already present, because God calls it forth spiritually in the heart of each individual, including those in the feuding militias. I felt a joyous expectancy that we couldn’t be kept from seeing evidence emerging of the true loyalty to God’s government of all God’s children.

The war came to an end very soon after that precious time of prayer. The reasons were complex, of course, and deep divisions weren’t instantly eradicated. But the army played its part, and I felt I’d also played a part in supporting that progress prayerfully.

We can always spiritually challenge the temptation to resign ourselves to conflicts – even the most long-lasting of bitter standoffs. We can follow Christ as Jesus showed us. Jesus proved the healing power of knowing everyone’s forever-established oneness with God, which refutes limiting human perceptions of others.

What Jesus knew and proved, the Apostle Paul notably came to see, to some degree, after years of being anything but Christlike. Paul realized that we all truly “have the mind of Christ” (I Corinthians 2:16). This true Christliness is present for us to perceive – even where it seems that a self-serving mind that isn’t Christly defines the attitudes and actions of others. Everyone’s true mentality includes an ingrained loyalty to the infinite, all-embracing divine Love that is God. We can all yield to, and hold to, this true view of our fellow men and women in the U.S. Senate and beyond.

However we each feel led to pray over the coming days, we can unite in our loyalty to the truth that there is one all-good God, and one universally united spiritual creation. That’s the loyalty that God is creating in each of our hearts, moment by moment.

You can also find this article on www.sentinel.christianscience.com, where it is currently not behind a paywall.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

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.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to The loyalty that unites us
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/A-Christian-Science-Perspective/2021/0209/The-loyalty-that-unites-us
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe