The ‘divine Us’ – a basis for unity

Deep in thought on my porch, I hear wind chimes blending with the bells from a local church just blocks away. I’m feeling a fresh breeze, literally and figuratively.

Reading the news in the last few years, it’s seemed to me as if there are tectonic plates of thought moving and impacting every angle of the human experience. More recently, protests have ripped through our neighborhoods in regard to one of these issues, race. They have mostly been peaceful but sometimes violent.

But there’s a shift happening, and I’ve been looking for higher reference points of a diviner truth needed to secure a justice, equality, and peace that benefit one and all. Ibram X. Kendi – author, historian, and director and founder of Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research – hits on one such reference point, posting on Twitter: “I love. And because I love I resist. There have been many theories on what’s fueling the growing demonstrations against racism all over America, from small towns to large cities. Let me offer another one: Love. We love.”

Of course, people’s motives can vary widely, even within the same protest movement. But the Love that is God is a spiritual basis for a unity that brings lasting reform and progress. This infinite Love, whose nature is expressed in all of God’s children, instills hope and feeds us with courage to step up to a higher ideal, even when that means leaving our comfort zone.

As we learn more of God as Love, a clearer sense of everyone’s unity in the form of our common good, whose source is that divine Love, comes forth. Christian Science explains that God is infinite, and describes the nature of God through several Bible-based synonyms. Love is one of these synonyms; another is Mind, which the textbook of Christian Science defines as “the only I, or Us; ... the divine Principle, or God, of whom man is the full and perfect expression;...” (Mary Baker Eddy, “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures,” p. 591).

We are each the reflection, the very evidence, of divine Love. As we mentally rise to see ourselves spiritually in this way, we draw closer to the fulfillment of the two commandments Jesus reiterated: to love God and to love one another as ourselves. This points to the universal Principle of Love that Jesus demonstrated, in which we are all one with God and therefore with one another. We each reflect God, Love, Mind, the divine Us.

Recognizing the divine, healing Principle empowers us to uncover and denounce whatever isn’t rooted in Love, including prejudice and bigotry. It gives momentum to humility, compassion, and forgiveness. Such qualities are inherently ours as sons and daughters of “our Father which art in heaven,” as God is described in the Lord’s Prayer.

In the spiritual interpretation of this prayer found in Science and Health, the opening line is rendered as “Our Father-Mother God, all-harmonious” (p. 16). The one all-harmonious Father-Mother presents the timeless framework of our spiritual reality – we are all one, and we all share the same divine Parent.

This is a radical oneness. It does not mean mindless conformity to a religious or political dogma, nor a loss of individual identity. Instead, it urges an even wider acceptance of the diversity of Love’s infinite expression. The reflection of Love, divine light, has infinite facets. And we can delight in one another as the infinitely rich and varied children of God, finding in one another a greater sense of purpose and a deeper solidarity.

Unselfish prayer is never an isolated effort. One’s tireless desire for peace and yielding to divine Love contribute to a movement of thought that lets go of the weights of ignorance, hatred, and prejudice.

As our view of each other shifts from a limited material basis to a spiritual one, we see more tangibly the colorful, holy, and harmonious diversity of what we all represent: the unified reflection of the one God, Mind, the divine Us.