As I stood in a dark bar in Kirkland, Washington...extremely glad for the law that keeps people from smoking in such establishments...listening to a handful of local bands, waiting for my friend Len and his band, The Crying Spell, to take the stage, I found myself discussing hyper-relationality. What is hyper-relationality? Simply put, it is the relational aspect of everything that we do. Everything has four relational aspects - to God, to self, to others, and to nature. Everything is connected.
How connected? Well, let's take a walk through the connections here. The producer for The Crying Spell's album is Kelly Gray. Kelly is most commonly associated with the Seattle rock band "Queensryche". However, an older lady in our church knows the "boys" in Queensryche because they went to high school with her son, and she used to feed them baloney sandwiches in her kitchen in Bellevue. Connected.
Scot McKnight in his book "A Community Called Atonement" uses the term "Perichoresis" in reference to the Trinity....Father, Son, Holy Spirit...where Perichoresis is this hyper-relationality amongst the elements of a triune God. He goes on to explain how our hyper-relationality with God, self, others and nature is as equally perichoretical as the Trinity. God calls us into hyper-relationality.
Think about that.
What you do affects your relationship with others. When you buy your groceries, you give money (or perhaps a debit/credit card) in exchange for the goods. That money goes to pay the salary of the checker....you are now relationally connected. That money goes to pay the operational aspects of the store....you are now hyper-relationally connected. You now have food that will, hopefully, sustain you and increase/improve your health...you are now hyper-relationality connected. The money going into the pockets of the checker, or the store, or the other salaried employees may make it into the coffers of a church somewhere....you are hyper-relationally connected.
When you throw away a plastic bottle...no, I'm not getting all environmental on you..but I am....and it doesn't decompose, ever, you are hyper-relationally connected to nature. When the chemicals leech into the water supply, and "poisons" the aquifer, even a trace amount, you are hyper-relationaly connected to all who drink that water, including yourself.
We may say, "What I do only affects myself, or those I am in immediate contact with." We're wrong. We are all connected.
Hyper-relationality.
What do you think?
2 comments:
Wow, I've often mused on perichoresis without knowing what it was. For a while now, I've marveled at the richness of the Trinity doctrine precisely because it allows for a variety of relationships. A father who enjoys a close relationship with his son will grow closer to a God he believes is a loving father; a man who felt unloved by his father will grow closer to a God he believes is incarnated in a brother-like Jesus figure.
Thanks for the insight.
Just John, have you read Henri Nouwen's "The Return of the Prodigal"? It's an exegesis on Luke 15, specifically on the horribly misnamed parable "The Prodigal Son".
Nouwen touches on this hyper-relationality as he compares our own spiritual journey to that of every character in the parable. It's awesome. We start out as the son...and return. We reach a point of discontentment that other appear to be receiving grace, but don't deserve it, yet we are doing all we can to live/thrive/survive...like the older brother. We then reach a point where we are the father guiding our children into the truth that we have experienced.
It's all three of those experiences in hyper-relationality that give us wisdom.
Thanks for stopping by! Hope you'll stay!
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