Resting Within Relationship

The Ancient Wisdom of Mutual Indwelling

When I think of my father, who suffers from dementia, it becomes clear what I have chased after my whole life. I once wrote these words: "I, who always begged for my father's approval. The boasting I did to my father whenever I achieved something new. And my father, who rejoiced every time." Looking back, behind every one of my achievements there was always someone who would see it and rejoice for me. But what happens when that someone disappears? The sickness of the person who cannot rest comes from precisely here.

In exchange for becoming our own masters, crying "I can do it," we also lost the one who once approved of us. When you think about it, satisfaction is essentially approval, and approval must always come from outside. A prize you give yourself is no prize at all. To praise myself is not approval but a hollow echo. Here lies the tragedy of swelling. Trapped in the attempt—impossible in principle—of trying to approve of oneself, one can never reach "enough," no matter how much one achieves. And so healing begins with stepping outside oneself. Finding a tree to lean on, finding someone to breathe with.

The philosopher Martin Buber distinguished two kinds of relationship: I-It and I-Thou. In I-It, the other is an object to be used and analyzed. In I-Thou, the other is a being who stands before you in full presence. Buber said that in the encounter of I and Thou, a space opens between the two. It is the "between" (das Zwischen). And it is only within that between, he said, that "I" and "Thou" are born as living beings. I do not exist before relationship. I am born within relationship.

The body, too, knows this truth. Within our bodies there is a hormone that might well be called the molecule of relationship. It is oxytocin. When we meet another's eyes, embrace, and trust, oxytocin rises. In 2005 a study showed that people who inhaled oxytocin through the nose came to trust a stranger more readily (Kosfeld et al., 2005). When oxytocin is high, we read another's heart better, collapse less easily under stress, and even our wounds heal faster. Conversely, when oxytocin is low, the risk of depression, inflammation, and pain rises. To say that relationship creates health is not a metaphor but a chemistry flowing within our bodies.

Theology calls this ancient wisdom mutual indwelling (perichoresis). To dwell within one another. The three persons of the Trinity do not approve of themselves. They approve of one another, dwelling within one another and resting. The Father within the Son, the Son within the Father. God does not rest alone but rests within relationship.

This insight of ancient theology I met again, in the language of social science, in a dialogue with the educationist Professor Lee Seong-hoe. Professor Lee says that "we" is not the simple sum of I and Thou. It is not one plus one; something greater emerges—a third reality, an "us-between." Whereas Western social science has long clung to "the action of the individual," he studies that "between" itself as a single living entity. The "our" in the Korean way of saying "our house" or "our wife" is, in fact, the oldest and most refined science of relationship.

In a dialogue with the theologian Pastor Maria, the same truth came in a warmer image. Pastor Maria told me that one day, watching her aging mother from behind, this thought came to her: "If only Mother had a mother too. A mother to care for her." Mutual indwelling, she said, is precisely that heart. The sky becomes sky for the earth, and then, becoming the earth's earth, descends to a lower place, so that each becomes a hill for the other to lean on. When the heart that wishes "may you have a hill to lean on" turns ceaselessly toward one another, relationship becomes a dance that never stops. Because each gives itself away and lifts the other above itself, that circle never runs dry.

安息 is, in the end, rest within relationship.

In this mutual indwelling, two faces exist as one. To dwell deeply within one another (union), yet each remains fully itself (distinction). It is neither a fusion that melts into one nor an isolation that turns its back. Like the cell membrane we saw earlier, the living boundary that both divides and joins here stands between person and person. Come to think of it, the relationship we saw in Chapter Four—between me and the microbes in my gut, feeding and guarding one another—was the smallest bodily edition of this very mutual indwelling. To rest within relationship is, before it is theology, biology. The world-tree we met in Chapter Ten is this ultimate tree. The tree we finally lean on to rest is not a solitary pillar but a relationship of beings standing together, dwelling within one another. We become trees for one another. And when we become each other's trees in this way, each of us becomes a world-tree. An axis on which someone can lean and rest.

Now we can answer the question left unanswered in Chapter Seven. Antonovsky's sense of coherence is not made within the individual. It is born from the relationship that supports me, the person who approves of me unconditionally, the between where we breathe together. Just as the vagus nerve we saw in Chapter Eight switches on only before a safe relationship. Health is not the strength to stand alone. Health is an event born at the boundary called relationship.

References

Martin Buber, I and Thou · Kosfeld et al. (2005, Nature, oxytocin & trust) · dialogue with Professor Lee Seong-hoe & Pastor Maria