Mirror my God to Me

The sermon Sunday referenced the hymn "Nearer My God to Thee" as the song the doomed passengers on the Titanic sang as the ship slid into icy waters. The version in our inclusive language hymnal departs from the original by changing the pronouns and thus the rhyme by prescribing, "Nearer my God to You." When we sang it as the Hymn after the Sermon, some insisted on singing the original words and I played with the narcissist reading, "Mirror my God to Me."

From a theistic perspective such a sentiment is heresy, even blasphemy. But from the perspective of extravagant welcome, it is really good theology. What might it be like to participate in a worshipping community in which we each took on the ministry of mirroring back to each other, not how we see each other, not how others see themselves or even how they want to be seen, but how God sees them? What if we reflected back to each other how God sees us, cares for us, loves us, welcomes us? That's the faith community I long for.

Complex Relationships

In its simplest form, a relationship is between two discrete entities as between two objects (the table is on the rug) or between two people (Sue and Frank are dating each other). There are also what we might call amorphous entities which can be complex collections of discrete entities. A community is such an entity.
Communities are made up of people. A person is a relatively discrete entity. I say "relatively" because we tend to think of a person as that entity contained within a specific skin bag but, in fact, we are each incredibly complex. Nevertheless, communities are more complex by a factor of how many people there are in the community.

In addition, communities also have relationships with other communities. Therefore, many of the characteristics of relationships between discrete entities are also true for relationships between amorphous entities. For example, just as some people have a fiduciary responsibility for the welfare of others (as a teacher for her students) so do some organizations have responsibility for the welfare of other organizations (as a bank for the investments of a corporation).

Nevertheless, relationships between amorphous entities are likely to appear simpler because they have to be able to condense down to clear terms the nature of the relationship. This is why it is so important for organizations to have a mission statement. Without it, the boundaries and agendas become too diverse and too fuzzy...too amorphous.

My vision is for a community in which all of the members are intentional about how they create themselves, their relationships with other individuals, and their role in the mission of the broader community.

Our Most Precious Commodity

Gordon Gekko: Greed captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.

I recently watched the two "Wall Street" movies. I had never seen the 1987 version with Charlie Sheen as Bud Fox and Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko. In the 2010 Oliver Stone sequel Bud Fox makes a cameo appearance but Gordon Gekko is one of the central characters. He is a rapacious speculator who is only interested in the game of amassing as much money as possible. Though as he says often and easily, he is not interested in the money. Money is only the measure by which you know if you are winning the game.  But in the end, even Gekko recognizes that the $100 million that he stole from his daughter and only living relative is not as important as the relationship that he would like to have with her and her imminent family.

Our most precious commodity is the relationships we have. One might say that Gekko transformed from someone whose primary relationship was with money to someone who valued the art of the deal to someone who wanted relationships of love and trust. What has value is relationship and what has most value are the relationships we construct which have the greatest depth and complexity. The more robust are our relationships, the more precious they are.

All the People

I am a member of a Christian denomination called the United Church of Christ. We have a promotional advertisement that is being aired currently in St. Louis that is a 30 second spot that starts with a girl doing a finger play to the words, "Here is the church (fingers intertwined with the knuckles up), here is the steeple (index fingers pointing up), open the doors (thumbs move apart), and see all the people (hands invert to point the fingers upward)."

I remember learning this as a child and the spot has poignancy in part because of that memory and in part because it focuses on the phrase "all the people." As the visual images make plain, the thrust of the message is one of radical inclusivity...of extravagant welcome. "No matter who you are or where you are on life's journey, you are welcome here."

As important and obvious as this message is, there is another message imbedded in it that is less obvious but even more important. What makes the church the Church, and what gives the Church vitality, is not the people, but the relationships between the people.

We can have beautiful buildings, we can have many members, we can have creative and effective programs, but unless we have vibrant relationships, we are not being a vital church.

My purpose in this blog series is to explore what it might mean to be a worshipping community that takes seriously the relationships we have. I hope to grow in my own capacity to describe the potential for intentional relationships and to discover others who wish to join me in this community.

Qualities of Relationships

Several years ago I made great use of a computer application called InfoCentral. I no longer use it as it hasn't been supported for years but it was a very powerful (though hard to learn) tool for managing information. At its simplest it had as its data a set of objects of different kinds which had relationships with the other objects. So an object might be a person and another object a place and the relationship would be that the person attended a meeting at that place at a given time. So the time, the place, the event, and the person were all objects in the application which were all held in relationship to each other.

What was especially powerful about this application was that the relationships themselves had qualities. For example, I could create an object which was my Thursday night therapy group and connect to it each of the members of the group. Each person had a relationship to the group which had the qualities of when they joined and when they left. It was possible to select a point in time and see who was in the group at that point.
 
You can see why it was complicated, but I hope you can also see how powerful it was. It allowed for entry of all sorts of data and then allow one to look at the data from far more points of view than one can easily do with a standard relational database.

We easily think of objects as having qualities. They may have color or weight or hardness or texture. We less often think of relationships as having qualities.

When we pay attention to the qualities of our relationships with others, and engage with them in a consideration of those qualities, we find that we can choose what we want the relationship to be like. We can consciously and collaboratively select the qualities we want and work together to create them. We can...but we seldom do so.

Intentional Relationships

Two events today:

• Diane Rehm interviewed David Brooks about his new book, The Social Animal, in which he argues that our relationships are more important to us than we normally acknowledge and he stresses that our emotional connections are vital to our wellbeing. One of the things he noted was that decision-making face to face works better—more effective decisions are made in less time—than when the process is done online or by teleconference.
• An email exchange between members of my local congregation devolved into bitterness and anger when they each felt their concerns were not understood and appreciated by the other, even though they are working together on a project important to them both. The exchange finally evoked a truce called by our pastor. This is in the context of a congregation that has been quite intentional about how we build relationships and address and resolve conflict.

These events resonate with me because I have been giving quite a bit of thought recently about being intentional about nurturing a community in which the quality of the relationships we construct is an active object of consideration. We don’t normally look at our relationships unless they are in trouble. Thus we are not comfortable looking at them at all. Thus they grow almost by accident. “Almost” because we are secretly or even unconsciously very committed to our relationships. We need them to be as robust as possible.

So what would it be like to gather folks who are aware of their need for robust relationships into a community that has as a central purpose the development of relationships which have greater depth and durability?
I have some ideas about what such a community might look like. If you are interested, follow along. I will be blogging about my thoughts here over the next few weeks.