Transforming Relationships Through Divine Circles of Sufficiency

The natural condition of life for human beings is one of reciprocal rootedness in others. I was reading this weekend in Arthur Brooks' book "From Strength to Strength" that we sometimes think of trees as metaphors of individualism and solitariness, but actually with aspens, for example, they're a part of what's called a stand. [00:01:24]

They are connected organically with other aspens. One of those is so large in Utah, it's more than a hundred acres large and it weighs over 12 million pounds, and yet it is one stand of aspens. They don't stand alone. And then he says he's thinking maybe you should use the metaphor of redwoods. [00:01:42]

But it turns out that a redwood, while it's separate when it's little, as it begins to grow, its roots intertwine with others and eventually join together so that the nourishment is connected. What they have, they have in common, these giant trees. And we are that way. [00:02:08]

What Dallas calls reciprocal rootedness is this deep spiritual reality that I draw life, energy, emotional health from relationships of love with other people. As firmness of footing is a condition of walking and secure movement, so assurance of others being for us—that's reciprocal rootedness—is a condition of stable, healthy living. [00:02:21]

There are many ways this can be present in individual cases, but it must be there. If it is not, we are but walking wounded, our life more or less shambles until we die. When you think about being for somebody, think of willing their good or wanting what is best for them. [00:02:50]

Or seeking to delight in them or maybe even being willing to sacrifice for them. We all have a very deep sense of when someone else is for me or is not for me or even against me. When the required type of fullness is adequately present, human circles of sufficiency emerge. [00:03:09]

The most fundamental form is that of a mother and child, and then perhaps mother, child, and father. Just Molly and me and baby makes three, goes the old song. Then there are young lovers reciprocally absorbed as well as mature mates. Of course, numerous forms of human association can take on some degree of the sufficiency. [00:03:33]

Always with a distinctive character arising out of the precise nature of the relationships involved—friends, co-workers, teammates, and so on. These circles of sufficiency, natural and essential to the human condition and so profoundly beautiful to behold, are always illusory at the merely human level. [00:03:51]

And even the illusion is terribly fragile. To assure an anxious child, we may say everything is okay now, and perhaps it is least true in those very situations where we feel the need to say it. Everything is never okay. Every human circle presupposes for its really being okay a larger context or circle that supports it. [00:04:19]

The mother and child, for example, presuppose the larger family that cares for and sustains them, making it possible for them to be absorbed in one another as they need to be, ignoring all else. These larger circles also depend on yet larger circles, which, while ever less intimate, are still crucial to making the inner circles possible. [00:04:41]

Ultimately, every human circle is doomed to disillusion if not caught up in the life of the only genuine self-sufficient circle of sufficiency, that of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. For that circle is the only one that is truly and totally self-sufficient, and all the broken circles must ultimately find their healing there, if anywhere. [00:05:32]

Our lives are dependent on our being reciprocally rooted in one another, finding people who by grace are for us, and we create little circles of sufficiency. And although we're often tempted by idols like success or money, those are the circles that give us life. [00:06:02]