Feeling estranged from someone you love

A Christian Science perspective on daily life

Family feuds, refusals to communicate, hurt feelings - these are all the stuff of drama on television and films.

But if we don't like the show, we can just turn the dial or walk out of the theater. They are harder to endure when they are the stuff of real life.

As much as we want resolution, sometimes it doesn't come. We have to pick up what seems to be the wreckage of our lives, but how?

No stranger to this dilemma, I find that my first step has to be to turn to God. I know God to be infinite Love, all-embracing Life, and that God also knows and loves me. Christ Jesus, through the gospel narratives, shows me the way.

I have found much comfort in the opening phrase of the prayer Jesus gave to all humanity, in the simple words, "Our Father." How embracing the word "Our" becomes in a time of apparently unrepairable personal relations.

This divine "Our" includes us all in the warmth of God's love. I also am deeply moved at these times by the spiritual interpretation of these words that Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of this newspaper, wrote in her major work, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures": "Our Father-Mother God" (p. 16).

The infinitude of God demands inclusion of all the perfect qualities we associate with both parents, since there cannot be a good quality without a divine source.

The perfect combination of the fatherhood and the motherhood in Deity assures me that I am never separated from the divine mothering of God, expressed in comfort, tenderness, and patience.

This is the solid truth, that the basis of all creation is the Father-Mother God, expressing infinite tenderness in all directions, bathing us all in Love.

I love the idea of getting back to the "Our Father" of Jesus' prayer. As I go to the source of all comfort in prayer, that is, as I endeavor to understand that the allness of infinite Love includes everyone, I find that the most important relationship turns out to be the one I have with God. And God is the divine Parent of all. As I pray to see the all-presence of the infinite divine Parent, I know that God knows each of His children and cares for every one.

I find more comfort as I look at Moses' prayer, sometimes called the "Song of the Sea," after the deliverance of the children of Israel from the Egyptian forces: "Thou shalt bring them in, and plant them in the mountain of thine inheritance, in the place, O Lord, which thou hast made for thee to dwell in, in the Sanctuary, O Lord, which thy hands have established" (Ex. 15:17).

I know that in God's time, He-She will "bring them in," bring all the sons and daughters and friends from the wilderness of estrangement, into the awareness of the infinitude of divine Love. It's my job also to stay in that awareness and to learn patiently that God's unfolding of events is inevitable and perfect, blessing us at every stage.

The Lord watch
between me and thee,
when we are
absent one from another.
Genesis 31:49