The loyalty that unites us

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.

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