True mother-love

IT was the end of my visit to the very hot country where my son was working in a primitive village. I was grateful for the wonderful way in which everything had worked out during my stay. Yet I found myself praying, ``Please, God, look after him in just such a wonderful way during the rest of his stay, and keep him safe!''

Then I had this clear thought, which I felt was from God: ``Of course I will look after him, because he is My son.''

The sense of God's motherhood, close around my son, was very strong. My anxious pleading dropped away as irrelevant. I saw the weakness and limitation of my parental love with its worry and fear; and then, far transcending it, the warm brightness of divine Love, God -- all-powerful, filling all space, enveloping His image, man. This realization was a constant comfort until my son's return.

The Bible makes clear that God is Love, that He made man in His own likeness, and that He eternally loves and cares for all His children. Certainly Christ Jesus illustrated this tender truth through his teachings and in his healing ministry. He demonstrated the spiritual reality expressed in I John: ``Behold, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God.... Beloved, now are we the sons of God.''1

We are all, in truth, God's children. And the offspring of God, Spirit, must be spiritual, because made in the Father's image. Each of us, then, is infinitely more than the limited, fleshly being he seems to be. The genuine selfhood of each one embodies all the qualities of God, such as love, intelligence, wisdom, strength.

Mother-love in its truest, spiritual sense claims for a child his or her divine parentage and acknowledges the presence of all of God's qualities in each one. If Godlikeness is obscured or lacking in some way, this love knows that God's offspring cannot be less than His perfect likeness and insists on this truth until it is outwardly evident -- until something of what is already and eternally true of God's creation comes to light. Reflecting the love of Love, we don't ignore sin but we do discern the reality of man, transcending the false, mortal sense of things.

Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, showed through the teachings of this Science God's motherhood as well as fatherhood and our ability to express the fulness of the divine nature. On one occasion a mother and her young son and daughter attended a gathering of Christian Scientists at which Mrs. Eddy spoke. As Mrs. Eddy looked at the children, the mother had a glimpse that the real Mother-love was something so much greater than her own human love. She saw this Love filling all space and pouring out to all who were there. Afterward she found that a very painful boil on her little daughter's head had completely disappeared.2

Parents, too, are inseparable from the infinite blessings that divine Love bestows on all. Any limitations or physical troubles that affect our parents are not true of them, nor are they true of us or of our children. In divine reality we are all the direct offspring of God, not simply one of a series of human ancestors.

A present-day mother found herself in a difficult position: her baby son would wake up at least once every night and cry loudly in fear. This would often upset and frighten others in the home, and even more disturbance would follow. Each time, the mother would quickly go and comfort the child. She prayed often that his fear would be overcome, but the situation continued.

Then one night she at last turned her thought totally to God and realized that He did not know and had never made fear. The child became quiet and never cried in the night again. Instead of seeing the boy as having an anxious mother and an upset father, the woman had finally identified him as God's child, the son of the all-harmonious Father-Mother. She realized that she could have seen this healing truth earlier, but was grateful that she had finally seen and applied it and that the healing had come.

Mrs. Eddy writes in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, ``Father-Mother is the name for Deity, which indicates His tender relationship to His spiritual creation.''3

Knowing the presence of the true Father-love and Mother-love, and bringing our own love for our children increasingly in line with it, result in great blessing to all.

1I John 3:1, 2. 2See Irving C. Tomlinson, Twelve Years with Mary Baker Eddy (Boston: The Christian Science Publishing Society, 1966), pp. 61-62. 3Science and Health, p. 332. DAILY BIBLE VERSE: Thus saith the Lord...As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you. Isaiah 66:12,13