Communication

The Current of Relationship

by Terry Barlow
09/21/18
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It has been reinforced to me afresh how important it is to keep abreast in relationships. Otherwise there is a drift at work which drives us along toward incommunicativeness. Not that the result is a total lack of communication, but rather a lack of communication of anything substantive, a lack of communication on any other but the most shallow level.  Philosopher Soren Kirkegarde once commented to the effect that the greatest peril of modern times was not the influence of evil so much as the influence of superficiality and triviality.   I have to make a deliberate effort to fight against that drift, almost like pulling the brands out of the fire. It doesn’t happen naturally. Communication is clearly a discipline. There are important things I am informed of daily that my wife needs to know and would be interested and stimulated in knowing, and in the meantime she is regularly coming across information that I need and would be interested and stimulated in knowing. Yet if we don’t come together and make space for the exchange of this information it doesn’t happen and won’t happen. These exchanges make up the stuff or the essence of relationship. It’s a kind of sacred ground in relationship. Yet it is amazing to me how easily omitted or abandoned these exchanges are. It would be worthwhile to make note of them in a tablet of some kind, paper or digital, when they come to mind if the other person is not present or if it is not an opportune time, and then revisit them later, because they have a bonding power in the relationship and thus make the relationship more meaningful and enjoyable. They have everything to do with the overall purpose of the relationship.
If all this is true in regard to our human relationships, and particularly marriages and friendships, how equally true they must be, if not more so, in our relationships with God. We are often withholding communication from God which would prompt responses from God that would greatly enrich and deepen our intimacy. It’s not that we are consciously withholding ourselves from God in this way, it’s that we haven’t set enough of a time and an environment for this enriching encounter to take place. We simply haven’t made provision for it. In such a time and place we find that questions, and insights, and confessions, and longings surface which we did not know we had or were capable of having. It would be akin to the difference between being one of the five virgins who had furnished no oil for their lamps and being among the five who had made this provision. (Matthew 25)  They were all virgins, mind you, so there was a certain level of virtue they had in common, but one group was not capable of the quality of relationship that the other group was prepared for and capable of having.
The first disciples did a lot of “hanging out” with Jesus in their day. A lot of it happened in the Garden of Gethsemane. That is why and where Judas knew to find them and Jesus, because it was their holy habit to hang out there together and also in other places. This was not a structured time necessarily. Some kinds of connecting cannot be structured. There is a lot of spontaneity involved. Such connecting can be facilitated however. The stage can be set, but there is no set script for the players, because the Holy Spirit is the scriptwriter. I keep coming back to this……..