All Living is Meeting

Or why life consists of the threads between (Relationships Series Part 3)

Many of our minds and hearts this week are on what is happening in Palestine and Israel. I didn’t feel I had much constructive to offer on that here, other than to share this musical lament by Thomas Tallis which I have been listening to a lot. I do however work closely with an organisation called Larger Us, and contributed to this piece about what our work on polarisation and mutual radicalisation can teach us in this moment.

What do you want your life to be defined by? This isn’t an easy question. For centuries it would have been a ridiculous one - nothing beyond survival could be the focus. For centuries after that humans were offered an answer, often from religion, which at least gave them a default. Now though, it can easily cause panic. Not for you, probably, you wonderfully self-selecting bunch who have signed up to receive these missives, most of whom I’d guess are in conversations (in spiritual, psychological or other intentional settings) which mean you ask it, or something close to it regularly. This isn’t the norm. Often, when I ask a guest on my podcast what is sacred to them (which is another way of getting at this) I can tell they have never really thought it about it. It can feel intrusive, trying to lever open space in their mental chatter for that pregnant, silent, droplet. I hope that it lands as a seed, burrowing deep roots of meaning.

I first became aware of my answer to this question when I was in my early twenties. A major accident in which I smashed my right leg into splinters meant I had to move back with my parents. It came straight after I’d blasted out of university into a job at the BBC. One minute I was playing the Sex and the City theme tune in my head while I sashayed around London’s media land, the next I was being showered by my mother, standing on one leg, sobbing. I was four months into my first six month contract with the corporation and had no idea if I’d get another one.

This miserable rehabilitation period aligned coincidentally with a flurry of funerals. I couldn’t even make myself a cup of tea and carry it, so I was taken by my parents to the send-offs for various distant relatives or family friends. They wheeled me into a series of crematoria, blurry with frustration and opiates, to listen to three obituaries in the space of a fortnight.

Another way of asking the question “what do you want your life to be defined by?” is “what do you want people to say about you at your funeral?” I don’t know if you’ve been to one lately, but eulogies tend to boil lives right down. They are the balsamic glaze of human description, everything dilute and unimportant evaporated off. Unless the person was spectacularly stylish or attractive (and even then) physical appearance doesn’t feature. Professional success, likewise, barely gets a mention, unless the work left a legacy of care, compassion, or genuinely consoling creativity . Status or money seem irrelevant in a eulogy. No one cares how nice your house was when you’re dead. Instead, the bereaved will focus almost entirely on the relationships their loved one nurtured. Who they were as a friend, sibling, parent, colleague. Wether they showed up, made others feel seen. How much they loved.

You can tell the funerals when there isn’t as much of this material to draw on as the eulogist might wish. The speech is short, the crowd a bit thin. Guests disperse rapidly and sheepishly.

After the last of these funerals, I sat in my parent’s magnolia living room (my friend

Jonathan Rowson

once visited and said “Oh! You grew up in Privet Drive!“) and prayed: “God, don’t let me forget this lesson. Please let my relationships define my life. Help me not get distracted by all the other stuff”. In that moment I could see clearly, despite the painkillers, that it would be easy to let the people around me become incidental. Without meaning to, I could end up treating them as nice company while I worked on Project Self, supporting roles for my Main Character energy. My ego was (probably still is) large enough for that to be a danger. The funerals coming at such an early age, when I was just on the cusp of adulthood were a gift, because they made the danger visible. They left me knowing that the threads which connected me to other people would be what was left of me.

Later, I discovered some theoretical underpinnings for this intuition about the centrality of relationships. One of the key places I found language for it was in the work of Martin Buber.

Buber was an Austrian and later Israeli Jewish philosopher and theologian. He is often labelled an existentialist and mystic and also wrote poetry. My kinda guy. He is most famous for his short 1923 essay I and Thou, and Between Man and Man in which he develops what he called his “theory of dialogue”.

I don’t like this label. It sounds dry, like multi-lateral diplomacy (though God knows, some times that is exactly what we need). When Buber says dialogue he means something deeper and more viscerally experiential. He calls these I-thou moments, when we turn to another person in full openness, with our guard down, and really connect with them. As we adopt this open posture, they are “cut free from their entanglements in bustling activity” and become “successively real…they step forward in their singleness and confront [us] as thou”. In less archaic language, it’s “hello, you”.

His premise is that most human encounters are I-It, not I-thou. We can too easily move through the world as if other people are just service providers, types, means to an end, even those closest to us. I-it is subject-object, and therefore can’t help but be objectifying, erasing the full complexity of a human in favour of a mental shortcut or single characteristic, what tasks they can deliver for us. And Buber is pragmatic enough to know that sometimes this is fine, that the deep encounter of an I-thou moment is not something we can maintain all day, with everyone. But I-thou is a posture we can grow better at and actively seek out. We can consciously weave the threads between us, tend them, notice when we are tempted to sever them. This, for me, is fundamental to being Fully Alive.

Buber agrees that the most important thing in life is this relational tending, our repeated encounters with other humans. He says “All living is meeting”, that these relationships of two or more “thous” are all that are “really real”, the only way in which we become fully human. While rereading him recently I wrote in my journal:

We are made for each other

We are made by each other

Becoming is a group activity

As I discussed in part one of this series, this deep commitment is hard to hold onto. We spend a lot of time understanding ourselves individually (inner reflection, personality tests, therapy) and also collectively as groups (organisational theory, sociology) but what is in between seems intangible. As Buber says poetically

“The separated it of institutions is an animated clod without a soul, and the separated I of feelings an uneasy fluttering soul bird…neither knowing person or mutual life…neither of them have access to real life”.

I don’t want to be an “uneasy fluttering soul bird”, I want “mutual life”, because I believe the deepest logic of the universe is connection.

Iain McGilchrist compares these threads of connection to the weave of a musical piece.

“Music is the perfect example of what I call betweenness, it’s only connection….the notes in themselves have no significance, it’s only as they come together in the patterns we call music that they come to have their meaning “

Real life is in the inbetween. As my ambitious, individualistic, barely-adult self realised in those funerals, playing my one note louder and louder isn’t going to make a song. Instead,

1If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a ringing gong or a clanging cymbal¹.

Without love, relationship, the threads between us, life is

a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing².

I want to be growing up my soul, becoming the kind of person the world might need in these times. If I’m not careful this will become a very individual pursuit and other people just distractions and blockers to my enlightenment. Soren Kierkegaard gave up his fiancée for precisely this reason. Buber reprimanded his fellow existentialist, saying “people are not hurdles on the road to God. They are the road”.

McGilchrist again

The only world that any of us can know, then, is what comes into being in the never-ending encounter between us….neither is of course ‘made up’ by the other, but both are to some extent, perhaps to a great extent, ‘made’ what they are through their relationship.

The relationship comes before….the ‘things’ that are supposed to be related.³

He is talking here both about what is between people but also between us and the world, us and the divine. That last line is startling. How could the relationship come before that which is related?

This thought makes no sense to me, until I connect it with another idea that makes “no sense” in a left hemispheric understanding of the world: the trinity. If the world was given birth by a creator already in relationship, and humans are made in the image of a God both one and three, then relationship exists before we do. It runs through us, through everything, all the way down, and invites us to dance. This then, is how I boil down my faith, which is handily how Jesus does too: Love God. Love People. Strengthen those threads, and together, maybe, we can weave a cloth strong enough to hold us.

1. I Corinthians 13 verse 1

2. Macbeth, Act 5, scene 5

3. https://www.essentiafoundation.org/iain-mcgilchrist-consciousness-is-the-stuff-of-the-cosmos/reading/#:~:text=Think%20of%20it%20as%20like,are%20supposed%20to%20be%20related.

Photo by Tom Wheatley on Unsplash