Relational by nature

NOT only rational, but also relational. That’s how we are. We actually cannot avoid it. Even between any two inanimate objects, when put together or compared with each other, a certain relation exists.

Except that in our case, our relational character is infused with rationality. Thus, we try to be conscious of all our relations, though that would not be possible, since it is a perpetually growing affair. More, we need to develop and manage those relations properly.

This is where we have to consider more deeply certain duties that we have. We cannot be passive and indifferent to our relationships. Our growth, our maturity and perfection depends on how well we take care of this essential aspect.

We have to actively purify and strengthen them, enhance and defend them. We just cannot allow them to drift in any direction, blindly obeying the forces and impulses of the flesh and the world. They have to be directed.

We have to understand we are made to enter into relations with others. Having relations is not a marginal or optional aspect of our life. It is essential to us. Even in our conception and birth, we need parents, we need a family, then a community, and all sorts of persons, both individually or collectively considered.

It is said that during the creation of man, God first made Adam. And though he already had relation with everything else in Paradise, God later thought Adam needed someone else “like him.” And so Eve came along.

The story tells us the kind of relationships we have. We have relations not only with objects, plant and animals, but also with other people, and ultimately, as well as primarily and constantly, with God.

In fact, the very basis of this relational character of our life is God himself. Though one, he is three persons. That’s because as God, he is never alone, nor idle and cold.

Within himself and with the rest of creation, his eternal being and activity produce the three subsistent persons who are in perpetual relation with one another, precisely because of the eternal activity of knowing and loving within him and with the world.

Of course, this is just a poor philosophical attempt to explain or describe the most central mystery of the Christian faith, the Most Blessed Trinity. But the whole doctrine is based on Christ’s revelation about him being the Son, who has a Father, and about the Holy Spirit who is sent to us by the Father and the Son.

This Trinitarian nature and life of God is the ultimate basis, pattern and goal of the relational character of our life. Thus, in the Catechism we are told: “The communion of the Holy Trinity is the source and criterion of truth in every relationship.” (2845)

And it adds something worth noting. “It (our every relationship) is lived out in prayer, above all in the Eucharist.”

That latter statement is crucial, because many times we do not know how to carry out our relations with God and with others in concrete terms. But we can always pray, we can also go to the sacraments, especially the Eucharist.

With these, we are at least keeping our relations alive and strong, and conforming them to the relational character of the Trinitarian life of God. We open ourselves and make ourselves more sensitive to the requirements of our relationships.

With this awareness of what are involved in the relational character of our life, we would know how to act and behave. We, for example, would realize that we should always expand our circle of relations, of course subject to our human conditions and constraints. But we should always have a universal outlook.

Another implication is that we should always ground and orient all our human relations toward God. Outside of that orbit, when we are just relating among ourselves in accordance to our personal and private designs, we would be courting danger.

This, I think, is no small reminder, since the current mentality of people all over the world is that while it’s true that ideally all our relations should be based on God, there can be occasions, and it also can be the right of men, to start and develop a relation without God.

We have to correct this attitude. We have to make everyone aware of the importance of this aspect of our life, and also of the practical consequences it involves.