Phase 4: My Relationship with others.
Video 1:
Who are the “others” in your life with whom you are called to be in relationship?
Who are the “others” in your life with whom you are called to be in relationship?
Transcript of Video:
In this phase of the course, we’ll be exploring our relationships with others. Spirituality is never a private affair; it always brings us into connection with others. We are called to love by Jesus and to be in relationships of love, to be loving toward others, even toward our enemies. So we want to explore, in growing a Rule of Life, we want to explore what this Rule of Life might have to say to us about being in relationship with others.
We begin perhaps with those whom we find easy to love, with our family members and our friends; and how do we want to nurture those relationships? What can we do to foster intimacy and to grow closer together? What can we do to express our love and to protect our love and to nurture our love in these relationships?
But the Christian message always brings us beyond those who are easy to love and challenges us to love God in the stranger, to find Christ in the stranger, in the outcast, in the marginalized, in the poor, in the oppressed. So how will my Rule of Life help me to reach out beyond just the circle of those whom I find easy to love and touch the lives of others? And even our enemies, how am I called to relate to my enemies and how am I called to be in relationship with them, to pray for them, to love them? What does that mean for me and how will I put that into practice, as it were, in my life? Spirituality is always very practical. It has to do with how our faith impacts how we live from day-to-day and how we interact with people.
So that’s what we are going to be exploring this week. There will be a series of questions that will help us to look at our relationships – our healthy relationships and our broken relationships – to see what we might do to better carry out Jesus’ command to be people of love.
– Br. David Vryhof
In this phase of the course, we’ll be exploring our relationships with others. Spirituality is never a private affair; it always brings us into connection with others. We are called to love by Jesus and to be in relationships of love, to be loving toward others, even toward our enemies. So we want to explore, in growing a Rule of Life, we want to explore what this Rule of Life might have to say to us about being in relationship with others.
We begin perhaps with those whom we find easy to love, with our family members and our friends; and how do we want to nurture those relationships? What can we do to foster intimacy and to grow closer together? What can we do to express our love and to protect our love and to nurture our love in these relationships?
But the Christian message always brings us beyond those who are easy to love and challenges us to love God in the stranger, to find Christ in the stranger, in the outcast, in the marginalized, in the poor, in the oppressed. So how will my Rule of Life help me to reach out beyond just the circle of those whom I find easy to love and touch the lives of others? And even our enemies, how am I called to relate to my enemies and how am I called to be in relationship with them, to pray for them, to love them? What does that mean for me and how will I put that into practice, as it were, in my life? Spirituality is always very practical. It has to do with how our faith impacts how we live from day-to-day and how we interact with people.
So that’s what we are going to be exploring this week. There will be a series of questions that will help us to look at our relationships – our healthy relationships and our broken relationships – to see what we might do to better carry out Jesus’ command to be people of love.
– Br. David Vryhof
Video 2:
Who has loved you unconditionally, and how did that love make you feel?
Transcript of Video:
I am often painfully aware of how difficult I can be to live with. I think it is really true in my case, I’m my own worst enemy and that can come out in all kinds of ways. One of the reasons I am here, and one of the reasons that I continue to remain here, is because this is one of the few places in my life that has both been able to, in a sense, contain me but also allow me to be myself, and to know that when I make mistakes, and I make many mistakes in the course of the day, I can almost inevitably call in expectation that my brothers will forgive me. That has been my experience over and over again. And I am not talking about a kind of cheap love either, because one of the hard lessons I’ve learned here is that there are consequences to behaviors and part of their forgiveness is knowing that and acknowledging that.
– Br. Robert L’Esperance
Video 3:
What relationships in your life need mending or strengthening?
Transcript of Video:
So for a very long time I was quite conflict adverse and felt that every conflict I had in relationships meant the end of that relationship. And some of that was just from my own experience and maybe also my own shortcomings of, “Oh, you want to fight with me,” like, “well, I have no use for you then,” which obviously isn’t a very mature or spiritual response to a situation. But as I have grown and gone through more experiences of broken relationships and experiencing reconciliation I actually find that the people that I often have the greatest conflicts with, the people that I am able to fight with, argue with, to disagree with strongly, and then reconcile with, it reinforces my sense of goodness in the world, my sense of trust and my freedom to be myself and to say that it’s okay to disagree and to fight and that doesn’t have to mean the end of a relationship.
– Br John Braught
So for a very long time I was quite conflict adverse and felt that every conflict I had in relationships meant the end of that relationship. And some of that was just from my own experience and maybe also my own shortcomings of, “Oh, you want to fight with me,” like, “well, I have no use for you then,” which obviously isn’t a very mature or spiritual response to a situation. But as I have grown and gone through more experiences of broken relationships and experiencing reconciliation I actually find that the people that I often have the greatest conflicts with, the people that I am able to fight with, argue with, to disagree with strongly, and then reconcile with, it reinforces my sense of goodness in the world, my sense of trust and my freedom to be myself and to say that it’s okay to disagree and to fight and that doesn’t have to mean the end of a relationship.
– Br John Braught
Video 4:
What practices help you to thrive in your relationships with others?
Transcript of Video:
One of the things that I’ve found helpful for me is that I feel like for some reason I have a remarkable tendency to forget what is actually nourishing. And I would say even if you don’t have a reason for why something feels good or why it is nourishing for your soul, it doesn’t matter. I remember there is a great poem from Aquinas, it’s great. He says – I’m going to paraphrase it – he asked a plant, you know, he said to the plant, “What does light talk about?” And the plant says, “I don’t know but it helps me grow.” And so I think in a lot of ways without asking a lot of questions like what is this practice or this hobby or why does it work for me, why does it nourish me spiritually, why does it make me feel closer to God, to myself, to other people? I think without needing to know we should write a little note on our hand or something that says, “What worked yesterday? What worked last week?” Think of something that was nourishing at some point in the past and just do it again … just do it again. I would include that.
– Br. Nicholas Bartoli
One of the things that I’ve found helpful for me is that I feel like for some reason I have a remarkable tendency to forget what is actually nourishing. And I would say even if you don’t have a reason for why something feels good or why it is nourishing for your soul, it doesn’t matter. I remember there is a great poem from Aquinas, it’s great. He says – I’m going to paraphrase it – he asked a plant, you know, he said to the plant, “What does light talk about?” And the plant says, “I don’t know but it helps me grow.” And so I think in a lot of ways without asking a lot of questions like what is this practice or this hobby or why does it work for me, why does it nourish me spiritually, why does it make me feel closer to God, to myself, to other people? I think without needing to know we should write a little note on our hand or something that says, “What worked yesterday? What worked last week?” Think of something that was nourishing at some point in the past and just do it again … just do it again. I would include that.
– Br. Nicholas Bartoli
Video 5:
To what will you say ‘no’ in order to say ‘yes’ to what is most important?
Transcript of Video:
There are so many good opportunities and yet I find the hardest thing is to say no and yet it’s also, I find, the healthy thing I am often called to. We have the delight of welcome guests into our home most days of the week – and yet we also have a Sabbath in which we don’t. We welcome guests and give them many opportunities – and yet we also define spaces where they cannot come. We give them many things – and yet we also find there are things we cannot give. People come needy and wanting things – and it’s hard to remember I have to say, “No,” that there are limits.
The same is true not necessarily with guests but also just my own experience of… well, most humanly, that I need sleep. That I have to stop. There is always more work to be done. I can make my body function on less sleep, but if I do it over and over again, everything suffers. So the boundary of actually going to bed on time or getting back on schedule when I have been off it is an ongoing lesson and challenge and yet it’s that choosing to stop, what must I say no to, that is actually the freeing “yes.” And I find that’s what I struggle with and that’s what people I listen to struggle with. What must I say “no” to so that I can actually be the most healthy?
– Br. Luke Ditewig
There are so many good opportunities and yet I find the hardest thing is to say no and yet it’s also, I find, the healthy thing I am often called to. We have the delight of welcome guests into our home most days of the week – and yet we also have a Sabbath in which we don’t. We welcome guests and give them many opportunities – and yet we also define spaces where they cannot come. We give them many things – and yet we also find there are things we cannot give. People come needy and wanting things – and it’s hard to remember I have to say, “No,” that there are limits.
The same is true not necessarily with guests but also just my own experience of… well, most humanly, that I need sleep. That I have to stop. There is always more work to be done. I can make my body function on less sleep, but if I do it over and over again, everything suffers. So the boundary of actually going to bed on time or getting back on schedule when I have been off it is an ongoing lesson and challenge and yet it’s that choosing to stop, what must I say no to, that is actually the freeing “yes.” And I find that’s what I struggle with and that’s what people I listen to struggle with. What must I say “no” to so that I can actually be the most healthy?
– Br. Luke Ditewig
Video 6:
Growing a Rule of Life: How can you grow in the ways you give and receive love?
Transcript of Video:
As we look for ways that we can love more, love more deeply, all those with whom we share our life, there are certain practices that might help us to distinguish between love and attachment. If we think about the way that the Johannine writings and scriptures speak about love, you know, we think “God is love,” “we love because God first loved us,” and “as Christ has loved us, so we should love one another.” So I think first a Rule of Life, our spiritual practices, the whole rule itself should help us to remain centered in that primary fact that we are loved by God and that all of the love that we give or receive is just God’s love. It’s not our possession, it’s not our product. If we are attempting to, I think, to manufacture it in our own strength as something that is just ours of this little limited quantity that we can give or receive, it is easy for our love to become attachment, which essentially is love without freedom, which is impossible. So when we are attached there is this sense that there’s something blocking that primacy of God’s love, of which all human love is just a reflection, a conduit.
So one thing we might do is just simply periodically, as part of our Rule of Life, review all of the relationships in our life. The relationships in which we are conscious of cultivating love with a spouse, a friend, a family member, and just sit down and perhaps review internally how much freedom is there in this relationship. How much am I getting stuck? Might this person or this relationship sometimes become a substitute for the love of God? Or is this relationship like a window through which the love of God is passing to you? So how attached might you be? And is your freedom being limited or is the freedom of the person you are loving, the freedom of your beloved, being limited by your attachment?
– Br. Keith Nelson
As we look for ways that we can love more, love more deeply, all those with whom we share our life, there are certain practices that might help us to distinguish between love and attachment. If we think about the way that the Johannine writings and scriptures speak about love, you know, we think “God is love,” “we love because God first loved us,” and “as Christ has loved us, so we should love one another.” So I think first a Rule of Life, our spiritual practices, the whole rule itself should help us to remain centered in that primary fact that we are loved by God and that all of the love that we give or receive is just God’s love. It’s not our possession, it’s not our product. If we are attempting to, I think, to manufacture it in our own strength as something that is just ours of this little limited quantity that we can give or receive, it is easy for our love to become attachment, which essentially is love without freedom, which is impossible. So when we are attached there is this sense that there’s something blocking that primacy of God’s love, of which all human love is just a reflection, a conduit.
So one thing we might do is just simply periodically, as part of our Rule of Life, review all of the relationships in our life. The relationships in which we are conscious of cultivating love with a spouse, a friend, a family member, and just sit down and perhaps review internally how much freedom is there in this relationship. How much am I getting stuck? Might this person or this relationship sometimes become a substitute for the love of God? Or is this relationship like a window through which the love of God is passing to you? So how attached might you be? And is your freedom being limited or is the freedom of the person you are loving, the freedom of your beloved, being limited by your attachment?
– Br. Keith Nelson
Video 7:
How will you love the people in your life?
Transcript of Video:
So in this phase we have been thinking about our relationships with others and as we grow a Rule of Life how that Rule of Life might help inform and direct our relationships with others. So at the close of this phase here, we want to step back a little bit and look at the web of relationships that make up our lives, to see where relationships are strong and where they might be weak or even damaged or broken. To see what we might do to build relationships, to foster intimacy and to grow together, and what we might do to overcome obstacles in relationships or breakdowns in relationships. Forgiveness is always a central part of the Christian message and the message of reconciliation is the message that we have for the world. So forgiveness and reconciliation will play a big part in this.
So as we reflect on our relationships, as we look at the relationships in our lives and the relationships we want to foster and grow, the end of this phase gives us a chance to review those and to see how we might grow into greater life with those whom we love and those whom we find difficult to love.
– Br. David Vryhof
So in this phase we have been thinking about our relationships with others and as we grow a Rule of Life how that Rule of Life might help inform and direct our relationships with others. So at the close of this phase here, we want to step back a little bit and look at the web of relationships that make up our lives, to see where relationships are strong and where they might be weak or even damaged or broken. To see what we might do to build relationships, to foster intimacy and to grow together, and what we might do to overcome obstacles in relationships or breakdowns in relationships. Forgiveness is always a central part of the Christian message and the message of reconciliation is the message that we have for the world. So forgiveness and reconciliation will play a big part in this.
So as we reflect on our relationships, as we look at the relationships in our lives and the relationships we want to foster and grow, the end of this phase gives us a chance to review those and to see how we might grow into greater life with those whom we love and those whom we find difficult to love.
– Br. David Vryhof
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