“I still remember the 5-pepper chicken,” she exclaimed last week. I was startled that my former graduate school roommate could recall what we ate for dinner decades ago. But immediately, I too recalled the laughter and face-to-face conversations with faculty and students around our wooden table in our tiny apartment. How is it that a memory of a shared dinner party lingers with us and brings us lasting joy? Was it really the chicken and peppers? Or was it the conversation and laughter?
Suppose you are walking into the grocery store and someone stops you and asks you to sign a petition. Maybe you sign. Maybe you don’t. But you know that the person simply needs your signature as a means to some other ends. The person smiles and is friendly, but you realize this encounter is transactional. You are treated as an object on the way to some larger goal.
The Jewish philosopher Martin Buber contrasts these two kinds of social interactions. The 5-pepper chicken was an “I-thou” moment. In a relationship where we have an “I-thou” moment, we savor one another’s presence, we listen deeply and tenderly to one another, we laugh or cry, and in the honest revealing of the soul, something holy unfolds. But in the signing of a petition, though a noble exercise, we know we are simply useful to another; we are an object. Buber calls this “I-it” relationship. Too many times in modern life, we feel like we are in “I-It relationships. But we hunger to be truly seen, treasured, loved.
Jesus approached a woman at a well in a story found in John’s gospel. She was startled that Jesus wanted to talk to her, even to ask for a drink of water. She did not feel worthy of his attention or affection. But Jesus has a long, tender conversation with her and offers her more than a drink of water, but something he calls “living water.” In their exchange, you can hear something of the divine quality that may unfold in ordinary human interactions. After Jesus departs, she tells her friends about it, saying, “Come, see a man who told me all I ever did. Can this be the Christ?” (John 4)
Grace and Peace,
Carla
