Resting Within Relationship

Perichoresis, an Ancient Wisdom

When I think of my father with dementia, what I have chased all my life comes into focus. I once wrote this: how I always begged for my father’s approval; how I showed off to him whenever I achieved something new; how he was always delighted, every time. Looking back, behind every achievement of mine there was always someone who would see it and be glad. And what happens when that someone disappears? The illness of the person who cannot rest comes from exactly here.

As the price of shouting “I can” and becoming our own master, we lost the one who recognizes us. Think about it: satisfaction is essentially recognition, and recognition must come from outside. A prize you give yourself is not a prize. Praising myself is not recognition but a hollow echo. Here is the tragedy of swelling: trapped in an attempt that is impossible in principle — recognizing oneself — one never arrives at enough, however much one achieves. So healing begins with going outside oneself: finding a tree to lean on, finding someone to breathe with.

And that is so difficult. This is a story from my student days in Canada. I had recently begun attending dawn prayer, but the church was an hour away by bus and even the first bus could not get me there in time. Still I left home at five and stood at the stop. And watching the cars go by, I thought: if God wants me to go to dawn prayer, one of those cars will pick me up.

No one stopped. All I had to do was raise my hand, but I was embarrassed. What would those people think of me? After standing there about ten minutes, one sentence came into my heart.

Yong-Kwan, if you truly want to come out and pray at dawn, why do you not raise your hand and ask the passing cars for help?— 2016, Facebook

I had been waiting for a miracle — hoping a car would stop of its own accord without my raising a hand, that help would come without my risking embarrassment. I raised my hand. The third car stopped. That person drove me not to the transfer point I had named but all the way to the church. I will never forget that dawn prayer.

If 休 is a person leaning on a tree, then the name of the illness of not being able to lean is those ten minutes. We are often alone not because there is no help but because we cannot raise a hand.

On the other side is the person who recognizes you first and calls out. I first met my junior colleague Ki-Ju in 1990. Then again in 2003 at a Korean grocery in Boston, and again in 2011 at a McDonald’s by the Charles River. Both times he recognized me first and called out: Yong-Kwan hyung. That our family, newly arrived in a strange country and utterly at sea, was able to settle at all was thanks to him and his wife. On the day my front tooth broke in the bicycle accident, it was his wife who opened a clinic that was closed on a Saturday and treated my tooth. The one who raises a hand and the one who calls out first. Relationship is completed by those two motions.

The philosopher Martin Buber distinguished two relations: 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 facing me in full presence. Buber said that in the I-Thou meeting a space opens between the two — the between, das Zwischen. And he said that only in that between are I and Thou born as living beings. I do not exist prior to relationship. I am born within relationship.

The body knows this truth too. There is a hormone in our body that deserves to be called the molecule of relationship: oxytocin. When we meet someone’s eyes, embrace, trust, oxytocin rises. There is a famous experiment from 2005 in which people who inhaled oxytocin nasally entrusted more money to a stranger. For a time this result was widely cited as the basis for the nickname “the trust hormone.”

But this result has not passed subsequent replication well. A critical review in 2015 assembled six studies that failed to replicate it, and a large preregistered replication in 2020 found no effect either. I intend to set this fact down in this book as it stands — all the more because I am someone who has talked about oxytocin for a long time. The more we like a result, the more strictly we must hold only what survives being shaken.

And yet, looking closely at the failed replications, something interesting emerges. In the original experiment the participants had about five minutes to talk with each other after dosing, whereas the replications were mostly run under conditions where the partners never even saw each other’s faces. The 2020 study likewise reported no effect under conditions of minimal human contact. So what the evidence to date points to can be summarized this way: oxytocin delivered by a spray does not make people trust.

Oxytocin cannot substitute for relationship.

For this book’s argument, this is in fact the better result. What makes trust is not a molecule but the between. The body’s chemistry is less the cause that produces relationship than what happens in the body when relationship happens. So to say that relationship makes health is not a metaphor. Only, the subject of that sentence is not a hormone but a person.

Theology calls this ancient wisdom perichoresis — dwelling within one another. The three persons of the Trinity do not recognize themselves. Each recognizes the others, and each rests within the others. The Father in the Son, the Son in the Father. God does not rest alone; God rests within relationship.

I met this old theological insight again in the language of social science, in a conversation with the education scholar Professor Seong-Hoi Lee. Professor Lee says that “we” is not the simple sum of I and you. Not one plus one, but a third reality larger than that — the between-us — that emerges. The Korean “our” in our house, our wife turns out to be the oldest and most exact science of relationship. In a conversation with the theologian Pastor Maria, the same truth came in a warmer image. Watching her aging mother from behind, she said, this thought came: I wish my mother had a mother. A mother to care for my mother. When that heart of becoming a hill for one another to lean on turns ceaselessly toward each other, relationship becomes a dance that does not stop.

安息 is rest within relationship.

This perichoresis holds two faces as one. Each dwells deeply within the others (union), and each remains fully itself (distinction). It is neither a fusion melting into one nor an isolation turned away. Like the cell membrane we saw earlier, the living boundary that divides while joining stands here between person and person. And come to think of it, the relationship we saw in Chapter Four — the gut microbes and I feeding and guarding each other — was the smallest bodily edition of this very perichoresis. To rest within relationship is biology before it is theology. The cosmic tree we met in Chapter Eleven is precisely this ultimate tree. The tree we finally lean on and rest beneath was not a single solitary pillar but a relationship standing together, each dwelling within the other. We become trees for one another. And when we become each other’s tree that way, each of us becomes a cosmic tree — an axis someone can lean on and rest.

One thing must be made clear here. Dwelling within one another is not throwing the door wide open. A living boundary is not one of open or closed but a conditional permeability that sorts, each time, what shall be let in and when. So it is with the cell membrane, and so with the intestinal wall. Between people the name for that sorting is hospitality. Hospitality is not receiving everyone indiscriminately; it is the art of letting the stranger in without erasing my boundary and being swallowed, and without bolting the door. So hospitality always requires a host. A person who has no self cannot welcome a guest.

Now we can answer the question left over from Chapter Eight. Antonovsky’s sense of coherence is not manufactured inside the individual. It is born in the relationship that supports me, in the person who accepts me unconditionally, in the between where we breathe together — just as the vagus nerve we saw in Chapter Nine 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.

Notes for this chapter

Martin Buber, I and Thou · Kosfeld et al. (2005, Nature 435:673–676, oxytocin and trust) and the replication debate — the critical review by Nave, Camerer & McCullough (2015, Perspectives on Psychological Science) and the preregistered replication by Declerck et al. (2020, Nature Human Behaviour) · Conversations with Professor Seong-Hoi Lee and Pastor Maria · Perichoresis — John 14:10–11, the Cappadocian patristic tradition