The divine ‘Us’

Recognizing our – and everyone’s – inherent unity with God, our divine Parent, lifts us out of a divisive “us” and “them” outlook.

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Imagine a sense of “us” and
“them” not so indelible, but
more an empty notion to be
simply erased – the way a
line drawn in the sand just
goes as water washes over it.

I consider the sun and its
radiance, one indivisible whole,
a kind of altogether brilliant
“us” – no shafts called “them” shut
out or separate, as if the sun
didn’t hold within itself the very
shine of its every ray.

Prayerfully I take this in – this
hint of the enveloping blessed
Us: our divine parent, God – Love
itself, pure good – flawlessly
one with all of us: spiritual,
bright, equally-loved-by-Love
children of God – everyone the
reflection of God’s goodness.

This spiritual truth – Christ’s
message, ever streaming into
consciousness – can fill all
corners of our open thought,
washing away every invalid,
clung-to limit.

Blaming lets up, dug-in heels and
opinions are let go, until entrenched
views of “us” and “them” vanish
like a shadow – all at once gone
in the full blaze of grasping our
unity with God, with each other
– a unity altogether divine.

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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.

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