God Moment - Blake Daniel - 5/15/2020
Several weeks ago I read a tweet from an author named Andy Crouch that really resonated with me. Andy wrote this:
Why are we so tired during quarantine? Because of how much work it is to not live as embodied, relational creatures.
I don’t know about you, but I think this describes how I’ve been feeling lately. As Andy reminds us, we are made for relationships. Even introverts like myself need things to do and other people to do them with in order to flourish. God created us to live both vertically (in communion with him) and horizontally (in communion with others) to experience his shalom. So it’s no wonder that social distancing — while so important right now — makes us feel zapped. We have literally minimized an essential component of what it means to be human beings: our relationships.
In that same tweet, Andy shared a link to this article by Dr. Curt Thompson that takes the idea even deeper. Dr. Thompson makes the connection between our need for relationships and our own physcial bodies. He says:
One of several things that COVID-19 has revealed is that our thinking minds are not able to make up for what our bodies—and our bodies alone—were created for. Our bodies, in fact, are looking for the presence of other bodies, as it were—and they’re not there. But that doesn’t mean that the anticipation mechanism that expects someone to be there in an embodied fashion stops working. Rather, like a cell phone that keeps “looking” for cell service that isn’t there will drain the battery that much quicker, so we are much more tired when our bodies can’t find each other in real time and space.
In other words, we don’t just need each other emotionally; we need each other physically, too. All those handshakes and hugs and pats on the back that we previously took for granted actually do something. Like sunshine on a rosebush, they help make our bodies more fully alive.
In the same way, we don’t just need God emotionally (or spiritually); we need God physically, too. Standing up and sitting down on Sunday mornings, singing on Wednesday nights, opening up our Bibles, breaking the bread, drinking the cup… it all plays a part in our life in Christ.
And all of this connected with a book I’ve been reading called Pauline Dogmatics, written by a former teacher of mine named Douglas Campbell. (Bear with me.) In that book, Dr. Campbell connects this to the doctrine of the Trinity, which reminds us of our God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Campbell says:
[Each] person within the Trinity is constituted by relationships with the other members of the Trinity, from which we learn that to be a person is to be a fundamentally relational being — something created in, by, and for relationships with other people. We live as people by means of other people, and without them we lack full personhood. Never were truer words uttered then when John Donne wrote, “No man is an island.” (p. 50)
I remember in class when Dr. Campbell drew a collection of dots on the whiteboard to illustrate this point. This is how we imagine ourselves, he liked to say: a disconnected set of self-contained individuals, like marbles bouncing off each other! But what if we’re more like stars or flowers, each person in relationship with another, all bearing witness to the great dance of God?
Lo and behold, that very illustration was on the next page of his book:
Dr. Campbell, Dr. Thompson, and Andy Crouch are right. God made us for connection — for embodied relationships. And during this time of social distancing, I lament their absence and long for their return.
