Page 60 - EMCAPP-Journal No. 21

(7) a community where I could truly be myself. accordance with their two-fold a�tude.” (12)
This has caused me to be a conflicted believer.
Afraid to come out into the open space of
complete honesty. Psychologically agorapho-
bic, I think. But I have ventured out into more
overt honesty over the various stages of my
matura�on.
Richard Rohr has wri�en about these ‘Stages in
Life’. He talks about the stage where we create
our ego, and the stage where we begin to ‘un-
create’ our ego. Rohr writes:
Crea�on of the ego is a necessary crea�vity.
However, it is also about the crea�on of a
separa�on. It’s taking myself as central! We
probably need to do this un�l we reach
middle age (which, at 67 I have passed) (8).
But then we need to allow what we’ve crea-
ted to be uncreated. Maybe I was a great
footballer but that’s gone now. Maybe I was
good looking, but that’s gone now too.
When we can say “yes” to that uncrea�on
and s�ll be happy, we’ve done our work. My
true self is in God and not what I’ve created.
My self-created self isn’t really me (9).
Rohr calls this uncrea�ng, “coming home to
myself.” It means being all ‘at home’ with all
God really created me to be. And I think all
God wants me to be is who I really am. (10)
I am just now able to start ‘being me’ me in
terms of communica�on. Recognizing that I am
of intrinsic value rather than instrumental va-
lue. And so I now can begin to communicate
with less fear and greater confidence.
Mar�n Buber (1887 -1965) ‘I-Thou’
It was ironic that Werner men�ons the Jewish
philosopher Mar�n Buber (11). I was recently
teaching a MA module in Ethics and Buber’s ‘I –
Thou’ approach gave us considerable help in
having ethical trac�on. His work on ‘I –thou’
rather than ‘I –it’ rela�onships is an extended
medita�on on what it means to treat others as
another self who is worthy of love and respect.
Our use of language - the way we situate our-
selves in the world – the way we consider
others as ‘I’ ‘Thou’ or ‘I’ ‘It’. Buber’s founda�o-
nal thinking is that we ‘always find ourselves in
rela�on’. “The world is two-fold for a person in
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That is: there are two basic ways of being in the
world:
1. A way that par�cipates, encounters and
acts as a subject.
2. A way that detaches, experiences and ob-
jec�fies the world.
The ‘I-Thou’ rela�onship:
The first rela�onship is the ‘I –Thou’ rela�ons-
hip. It is only by par�cipa�ng in the lives of one
another that people mature morally. (NB:
Ubuntu is an ancient African word meaning
'humanity to others'. It is o�en described as re-
minding us that 'I am what I am because of who
we all are'. We cannot be truly human, fully
moral, in isola�on). Buber notes that we don’t
relate to people as a ‘loose bundle of quali�es’.
We stand in rela�on to other persons, not
other objects.
The ‘I- It rela�onship:
In this approach to communica�on, ironically
the subject is truly alone. They see others as
objects to be experienced and manipulated.
(13) The ‘Self’ is detached from others, it refu-
ses par�cipa�on in the lives of others. This lack
of connec�vity results in the barrenness of mo-
ral solipsism – a world that has just one self-
contained individual (Me, Myself and I). Other
people are reduced simply to an object of one’s
experience without having one’s own individu-
ality as the subject of one’s own experience.
The other person ‘it’ becomes a thing, a com-
modity!
Buber believes that we can also apply these
two kinds of rela�onships to our interac�on
with God. Here, God can be categorized in hu-
man terms. God can related to as an ‘alien’ i.e.
the God of the Philosophers and Deism. This is
not a rela�onship at all, the rela�onship and
communica�on is depersonalized and God is
commodified. There is no genuine two way par-
�cipa�on. Buber suggest, “By its very nature….
‘The eternal You’ cannot ‘become the eternal
‘it’.” God cannot be grasped as a sum of quali-
�es. God and the individual rela�onship to God
cannot be reduced to mere linguis�c catego-
ries.” (14) In God, a person encounters God wi-
thout the media�on of language and its labels.