Relationships

Note: Last Updated 7/29/2024.

N. T. Wright:

Of course, being by yourself is often very desirable. If you work in a noisy factory, or even if you live in a crowded home, getting away, perhaps out into the countryside, can be a blessed relief. Even those of us who like being with lots of other people can sometimes have enough of it and enjoy curling up with a book, or going for a long walk and thinking about things without other voices intruding. Differences of temperament, upbringing, and other circumstances have a large part to play in this.

     But most people don’t want complete, long-term solitariness. In fact, most people, even those who are naturally shy and introverted, don’t normally choose to be alone all the time. Of those who opt for a solitary life, some do so for religious reasons, becoming hermits. Others do so to escape danger, as when a convicted criminal chooses solitary confinement rather than face prison violence. But even those who make such choices are usually conscious that what they’re doing is abnormal. Indeed, sometimes when people are locked up by themselves they quite literally go mad. Without human society, they don’t know who they are anymore. It seems that we humans were designed to find our purpose and meaning not simply in ourselves and our own inner lives, but in one another and in the shared meanings and purposes of a family, a street, a workplace, a community, a town, a nation. When we describe someone as a “loner,” we’re not necessarily saying the person is bad, simply that he or she is unusual.

(N. T. Wright, Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense, [San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2006], pp. 30-32.)

N. T. Wright:

We search for justice, but we often find that it eludes us. We hunger for spirituality, but we often live as though one-dimensional materialism were the obvious truth. In the same way, the finest and best of our relationships will eventually end in death. The laughter will end in tears. We know it; we fear it; but there’s nothing we can do about it.

     If this is paradoxical—we’re meant for relationship, but all relationships come to an end—we find in both parts an echoing voice that reminds us of the echoes we have heard in the first two chapters. Those faith-systems which are rooted in the scriptures we call the Old Testament speak of human beings as made, irreducibly, for relationship: for relationship with one another within the human family (and especially within the male-female complementarity); for relationship with the rest of the created order; and for relationship, above all, with the Creator. And yet, within the story of creation which remains foundational for Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, all things within the present world are transient. They are not designed to be permanent.

     That impermanence—the fact of death, in other words—has now attained the dark note of tragedy. It is bound up with human rebellion against the Creator, with a rejection of that deepest of relationships and a consequent souring of the other two (with one another and with the created order). But the motifs of relationship and impermanence are part of the very structure of what, in the great monotheistic religions, it means to be human. We shouldn’t be surprised that, when we think of human relationships, we find ourselves hearing the echo of a voice, even if, as in Genesis, the voice is asking “Where are you?”

(N. T. Wright, Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense, [San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2006], pp. 35-36.)

καὶ αὐτός ἐστιν πρὸ πάντων καὶ τὰ πάντα ἐν αὐτῷ συνέστηκεν ~ Soli Deo Gloria