Relationship is built into the genetic fiber of life. It is an innate spark that live-kind, fairly early in its evolution, exhibited — the propensity to move toward other live-kind, other life forms. A plant that is standing tall when it feels sunlight will move toward that sunlight. Without sunlight, the plant cannot live. It cannot do its work, cannot accomplish photosynthesis.
As evolution occurred and animal life became possible, there registered something we describe as joy or pleasure. Science doesn’t know when it first began, but, by the time this evolutionary movement blossomed into bird life, it seems that animal life experienced pleasure, and coupling.
This relational pleasure and relational help – living in tribes or in community forms – soon became normal occurrences. It soon appeared to be more of an anomaly for life forms not to live in community than for them to live in community. With human life forms, we call this family. In families, relational energy develops, joy and pleasure are experienced, and help and support are available for survival and emotional well-being.
Relationship is not something we educate. It is something present, in the fabric of life, enlivened, given the opportunity to come into being. In families, if parents enjoy and delight and emotionally support their child, the child thrives. If parents experience their child as a burden, or as something scary, or as an extension of themselves, enlivening does not occur. The child does not receive the help it needs to thrive and to emotionally develop into a full, healthy, adult human being.
In order to step into the world with confidence, vitality and a healthy appreciation of self and others, a child has to experience this first in the family. Then, the natural movement toward being with another in relationship is well grounded. This movement out of the self allows the individual to move into the mystery of the other as well as learn those things about the self one can only learn in relationship with another. Relationships, then, are doors out of and into the self.
As part of the evolutionary process, humankind is one with nature and yet privileged. Man is the conscious part of nature, that part of nature that can reflect and make choices from a conscious perspective. This does not mean man is above nature. It means man is more responsible than a bird or plant life for the future of nature and for other life forms. This is his role in the relational web of all life forms.
Because of his ability to be conscious, self-aware, man is also capable of experiencing the divine energy in the universe in conscious ways. All life forms experience divine energy flowing through their particular form, but we do not know if they experience this as conscious energy. It is certainly sacred energy. Man has the ability to relate to the divine in personal, conscious ways.
Man calls this relationship to divine energy beyond his human understanding God.
Man evolves as an individual, within his own person, as well as a species. He evolves from his animal nature into his spiritual nature when he moves from instinctual responses to responses of the heart, or compassion. This is his personal journey into the invisible world of spirit or divine energy. He can experience this consciously and can respond to life with this energy that flows through him from the invisible world if he chooses. We call this love.
All of this is grounded in the divine longing, the divine discontent that initiated life and the evolutionary movement of all life forms. This reaching out of spirit for matter, this reaching back of matter for spirit – this reaching is the primary movement of life in the universe. It is the ground for and the theater of all relationships. In this sense, all experiences of relationship are sacred.
Relationships, then, are very complex, confusing, and completely common expressions of every aspect of all life forms. It takes a lifetime to understand them. It takes a great heart to achieve the full range of divine energy offered in them. And it proves, over and over again, to be the one thing that gives meaning and aliveness to what would otherwise be the evolution of mere protoplasm.