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Faces on Faith: Reconciliation vs Retribution

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In December the Prime Minister of Japan, Shinzo Abe, visited the Pearl Harbor Memorial. He was the first Japanese leader to do so. He and President Obama went to the USS ARIZONA Memorial and commemorated the victims of Imperial Japan’s attack 75 years ago.

Seven months earlier, President Obama became the first sitting president to visit Hiroshima, the city destroyed by an atomic bomb dropped by the United States in 1945 to end Japan’s involvement in WW II. Yet neither leader demanded an apology from the other. In President Obama’s remarks, he suggested that these occasions are opportunities for reconciliation, rather than retribution, and that we find it all too easy to resort to tribal behavior and demonize others who are different. “Too often former enemies resort to using past wrongs to score points in the present.” The United States and Japan have shown how former enemies can not only become allies but friends, lifting each other up and letting deeds say as much as words.

In her seminal work, “Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures,” Mary Baker Eddy writes: “One infinite God, good, unifies men and nations; constitutes the brotherhood of man; ends wars; fulfills the Scripture, ‘Love they neighbor as thyself’, annihilates pagan and Christian idolatry, whatever is wrong in social, civil, criminal, political, and religious codes.”

The Apostle Paul in the King James version of the Bible exhorts us to “be filled with the knowledge of his will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding, that we walk worthy of the Lord, who were sometimes alienated and enemies, but are now reconciled.” As people of faith we are called upon to reject the cheap tribalism that seems to inhabit our political atmosphere, and embrace all mankind as God’s people, held in the harmony of love.

-June Sieber, Christian Science Church