This 1973 talk reviewed what the Lord was teaching the community about Christian personal relationships. Paul DeCelles noted that our highly technological society isn’t necessarily good for developing personal relationships and he described some ways social relationships have broken down. He then described relationships centered in Jesus and built around him.
Transcript
This document is a direct transcript of an audio recording, and may contain transcription errors and other minor edits for the sake of clarity
MAN’S VOICE: Number 14 in the Community Formation Series
PAUL: Tonight we start another set of talks. So we’re past that first bunch of talks and in general, we’re going to go on to some details on making agreements, and the nature of covenants, and Christian personal relationships, and kind of a state of the world today, and some of the things that the Lord has taught us as we’ve been living our lives together over these couple years.
There won’t be exactly the same kind of focus on kind of—what I called once before kind of a Christian—what was it—Christian therapy. Yeah. It now is going to be more focused on living life in the community as such. So tonight anyway, I want to talk about Christian personal relationships in general today. Kind of just in order to get a picture, to present a picture, of the way the world is and what some of—what the way out is, the way out of the trap.
When the—a lot of what we’ve learned has come out of an unusual situation in the charismatic renewal. We’ve learned a lot from the Cursillo movement. The Cursillo movement—I just want to start in with this a little bit—I won’t talk very long about it—the Cursillo movement is something which started in Spain, almost 30 years ago now. And when it came over to America, it came by way of Mexico, actually, and then was brought into the United States in a very backdoor kind of way.
And a lot of the things that we learned in the Cursillo movement were things that had to do with making commitments, and things that had to do with openly loving one another with brotherly affection. But more than anything else, what the Cursillo presented was a picture of the way it could be if brothers and sisters would live together the right kind of way.
And I think it’s a little helpful to understand that a lot of what the Lord has been teaching us now is a continuation of what the Lord had started explaining to us many years ago, actually, about the—about some of the problems that are characteristic of modern society.
That is, what the Cursillo confronted in Spain . . . Contrary to what a lot of people think, in Spain is, in some of the cities, a very advanced society. There’s hardly any difference between Spain—for example, Madrid in Spain, and say, Chicago. They’re very similar type cities. The—that’s not very flattering to Madrid, maybe, but it’s a little, maybe a little nicer than that, but it’s . . . But as far as a kind of society that they live in Spain, in those cities, it’s a highly technological and technocratic society.
It’s something—society, and especially now I want to talk about America, that is: where modern society is based on our capacity to get products out very quickly and to increase the level of the—level of living, the standard of living.
Now the things that are useful for improving the standard of living are not necessarily, and frequently are not at all, the things that are good for developing family relationships, for example, or developing any kind of community relationships.
What they’re—the kind of methods that are used, for example, are very functional methods. They’re designed—like if you want to get out cars, then one way to do it is to—this is the way it used to be done a long time ago—was to have some people doing a very specialized work here and farther down the line somebody else doing another specialized work—and so on, each one not able to do anybody else’s job, just their own job and not able to particularly—to share with anybody along the line. They would stand there all day long. This is a—and they wouldn’t, they simply wouldn’t have much of their lives to share at all. But at the end of the line, without any one particular person doing very much to shape the car, the—a car would emerge. And it would kind of be a miracle of efficiency and specialization. Like one guy would be there all day putting in the fourth bolt on the second fender or something like that. And that’s what he would do all day. [Inaudible.] Some of these things are were made, lampooned, by Charlie Chaplin, for example—some of these famous movies, which you may have seen.
Anyway, the point is that in that kind of a society which is increasingly technical and technological, there are things that are developed which war against, militate against, personal relationships among people.
Things are set up in such a way that there’s a tendency to get more and more impersonal in relationships, and—because the personal characteristics of relationships begin to interfere with the efficiency of the business.
One of the things that—one of the reasons why this happens and one of the—and this thing, this whole approach has led to a tremendously rapid change in society as the—you know, like the production lines were improved upon with a lot of automation and so on. And we get a whole new bunch of products. Instead of having one kind of product, you can have maybe 15 products of essentially the same type, but with a completely different interior just by putting in a different template of some sort, say some place along the automation line. That is, my point is, that you, with a very small amount of effort, you can multiply and diversify and get an enormous variety of products out.
And a lot of these products have led to even further change. It just gets faster and faster. So that, it’s characteristic of the world today that most people don’t know how to fix anything in their house when it breaks down because everything is too complicated, like the TV set. And nobody knows—the most you can do if you’re lucky is change the tubes. Or, if you’re really—if you’re really good with your hands, you might be able to fix the garbage disposal, but there’s no chance of fixing the dishwasher because you can’t even figure out how to get it out of the wall. And you don’t know how to take the oven apart, and so on, and all these different things, which has lent itself to, more and more, a kind of an alienation of the person from his surroundings. That is, it’s sort of like a person isn’t at home in his own home because he doesn’t know how it works even. He’s not—he can’t really get with what’s going on there. He can live off of the bounty that’s there. He can function maybe a lot more efficiently and he has meals faster, he can get out of the house more often and things like that. But he doesn’t feel like he has any rapport with what—with the things in the house.
And the same kind of thing permeates the personal relationships with the other members of the family and the rest of society. In fact, there’s been a real breakdown in this, [Paul clears his throat] in social relationships. It’s just like most of us, I’m sure, don’t know our next door neighbors, or at least one of our next door neighbors very well.
In our, for example, in our particular household, we don’t know the people across the street. We know the names of a couple of the families but one of them is a dentist and every now and then, twice a year maybe, we see him. But we don’t—we can’t know him because again, the street is too busy, for example, and the kids can’t play across the street, all kinds of things like that.
And I’m not trying to paint a picture of modern society as being just an evil sort of thing. I’m just saying that it’s a fact of life that the technology that we live with today is a lot more sophisticated than we are. And a lot of this sophistication is such that it makes it more and more difficult for us to know people and to relate to them in the right kind of way.
As a result of this, we have a kind of a bodiless society. We have a lot of individual people. And a lot of the literature that has come out that try to help people to identify, you know, to find out what their value is, and things like that, simply tries to reinforce the facts of life. It tries to play on the facts that we are all isolated individuals like this. And what we need to do is to become more individual. We’ve got to become stronger people so we can put up with this alienation, this fast pace. The fact that we don’t know friends—we can’t keep them for very long because we’re being transferred all the time and things like that.
So we have an amorphous society. That’s the kind of society which doesn’t have much structure to it anymore.
It’s a loose body, and it’s a loose body without many common goals or a common sense of values. About the only time you can see people really in agreement is at a basketball game or at a football game, when they’re all totally focused on that action out there, then they can all unite. But outside of that, they can’t. They don’t seem to be able to unite on anything . . . or very rarely.
And at the same time, we have this amorphous structure. We have—it comes with a lack of commitment, or a lack of stability. Now, one place where that’s not exactly the case is a family. And as society becomes more and more complex, like I’ve been trying to describe a little bit of, people have tended to turn more to their families and say that, “Well, what I’ve got to have, I’ve got to get in my family.” And part of the trouble is that families never have been capable of supplying everything that the person needs. And we’ve overloaded our family relationships quite a bit, like we’ve talked about before. But besides that, there’s no way to keep modern technology out of our families either, because, for example, when the children go to school, or when we go to work, we’re already embedded in this—in this technological society, which is taking its toll on the family relationships as well—like traveling salesmen have to be gone all the time.
People, in any kind of a—in most kinds of executive positions have to do a great deal of traveling; they’re gone a lot. And there is the problem of, say, somebody who has to do a very mundane job at work all day long, the same kind of thing, coming home, being tired, exhausted, and without a sense of having accomplished anything and then that kind of sense of frustration begins to permeate the whole family.
Now this—all this change and this rapidity of change and this breakdown of the social fabric of former times, has had effects on people like this. It causes people to begin to try to base their relationships with each other on feelings. It tends to make—now this is, it’s not complicated particularly, but the thing is that, if you don’t see much value in what you’re doing—like if you don’t have a hold of any kind of a picture of, like, “I’m really accomplishing something here”—then you begin to look around elsewhere for your values, and especially if you’re turned away from God in some way. Like, modern society certainly has—the technological society has no place in it for God whatsoever. I mean God doesn’t fit into the plans of General Motors, for example, or Bendix or whatever. It just doesn’t have any role, and God doesn’t play any role in the deliberations, has nothing to do with it.
And so, what we wind—what we wound up—pardon me—what we wind up with is a certain lack of a sense of personal worth and a certain sense of value. And so when people begin to relate to each other, they try to find out what their value is by feeling love and seeking approval. I don’t know if that’s very clear. That is, I begin to understand that I’m of worth when I know that you care about me with deep feeling. Or I seek a lot of my sense of self-worth by seeking approval from you, like I’ll hold certain opinions and I’ll kind of—when I bring them forward—I’ll kind of, bring them forward in such a way as to check to see if you approve of this. And a lot of us function very much so, on personal approval, looking for approval from people.
This basing relationships on feelings leads to moodiness and depression. Because when people don’t feel real close to us, or when we don’t feel real close to other people, all that’s left to us is a certain sense of alienation and a lack of worth, and depression, and moodiness.
And so we go through these highs and lows, and it kind of shakes, shakes us, you know, like it rattles our teeth sometimes. Our moods change so fast, you know, depending on who’s looking at us the right way. There was a fellow—I’ll have to tell you that . . . . All right, well, I’ll tell you briefly. I had one friend who was so focused on this need to feel loved by others, the feeling that he had to have, that when somebody would walk down the hall at work and not look at him and say, “Hello,” he would—he came into my office one time and said, “You know, that blankety-blank is trying to kill me. He’s trying to deny my existence, you know.” I thought, “Gee, Rudy, you know, that’s really—that’s not right.” But for him, if you just didn’t even—if you made the mistake of not paying attention to him, or giving him that sign of affection which he needed, it would send him into a tremendous decline.
It also leads—this present situation led to a lot of insecurity and loneliness and isolation, and a lack of certainty and stability in our relationships and in our general situation.
Now, this last thing, this lack of certainty or stability, you know, like things like we really believed, say that something was true, and somebody’s come along and improved on that truth, expanded it a little bit. This has happened a lot, for example, in science. People would really believe something, and then five years later somebody else would come along and say, “Well, what you believed was true, really isn’t the whole truth, you know, it’s got to be expanded.” And some people would say, “Well, there’s no such thing as truth” and “You just can’t put your stock in anything.”
And that goes for normal kinds of situations, besides science. There’s a—for example: “The church is changing so much. And while, we know, we always believed that it was absolutely essential, say among Catholics, that you not eat meat on Friday and now all of a sudden everybody can eat meat on Friday. You know, isn’t anything stable? Can’t you count on anything?” That kind of thing. As things change, it introduces so much uncertainty in people’s lives.
And what happens is that a lot of people begin to fear that they’re being sold down the river, and consequently, they don’t want to make many more commitments anymore. Because every time they commit themselves to something, the basis of the commitment seems to shift and change, and they wind up with an empty bag. So that there begins to develop a certain sense of a fear of commitment, and there’s a fear of order, and a fear of authority that has come in the wake of this. There’s a lack—a sense of a lack of affection and a lack of support. And so as nowadays, recently, well, few years back, I guess, I read some psychiatrists’ study of a typical citizen in New York. And the claim was that that nine out of ten of the citizens on the streets of New York are neurotic, in need of, in serious need of some kind of psychiatric care.
I would guess that it’s to some degree—I mean, if you want to go that route and want to talk that kind of language, then it may be closer to 98% of the people who need help. And the reason for it, I mean it’s kind of normal for people to be neurotic. I mean, it’s like almost all of us have some kind of—of what psychiatrists would call neurosis, what other people would tend to call just simple . . . lack of sense of worth, or lack of, commitment and stability, and a lack of meaningful service . . . and the lack of responsibility.
At any rate, today, the relationships that people have, they look for—how do you get out of this kind of problem that I’m describing? How do you go about getting into a relationship that’s based on feelings? Well, you find a girlfriend, or you find a guy, you know, if you’re in that age group. That you’ve got to get into some kind of an intense personal one-to-one relationship that is based on—or else you find some kind of a group of friends who have common interests so that when you get together with them, you can just share so freely and you have so much to share, the same kinds of interests, the same sorts of things.
And some of the people who are your friends, you will be really particularly good friends with. You’ll develop a very high degree of friendship based on feeling or desire to be together, or attraction.
Now the relationships that modern man seeks to have are—sometimes they’re private, exclusive and possessive. It’s that you are my friend, and if I see you, kind of, all of a sudden becoming very, very close with somebody else, I get to feel a little uneasy.
And that’s fairly typical. Like, “I don’t understand what’s happening to my friend. I don’t spend as much time with him. He doesn’t, he doesn’t ask me to go drink coffee with him in the afternoons anymore.” You know like, say, I’m at work, you know, like you come down the hall, “He didn’t stop to ask me,” and things like that. And I begin to feel a little bit like, “Well, you know, I’m losing something here and that’s not right. He’s my friend,” sort of thing. Now, that sounds kind of petty, but I am describing a situation that I’ve certainly gone through, and I bet that most of us here have done the same kind of thing where we begin to see our friends sort of open up to other people and we feel like we’re being left out and hurt, like something’s decaying in our relationship.
Most of these relationships are based on mutual attraction or based on desire. The first kind is what we’ve been calling friendship love and the second, based on erotic attraction anyway, is erotic love.
I don’t—I guess I’m—maybe I’ve painted enough of the picture of how it works. But part of the trouble is that we as Christians regularly have been taught, and understand ourselves, that the right way to—that this is the right way to approach things, and that this is—this is the way we understand the Bible to talk.
When the Bible—in the Bible it says something about “love your neighbor.” We think that means to emote and to have these deep feelings for your neighbor. And that’s not what the Bible means, normally, when it uses the word love. It doesn’t refer particularly to your feelings as such. It refers rather to a certain network of relationships, of mutual relationships, which are of such a character that God, first of all, commanded them, and that they are of such a kind, that they actually cause the body of Christ to be upbuilt. We’ll come back to that some more.
At any rate, my point is that, that in normal Christian writing, you see the same kind of approach: that what we need is the deeper—like encounter groups and so on. And a lot of the—in fact—more recently, some of the movements that have been so successful in the beginning have turned away from their original inspiration and have become more along—you know, developed along the lines of kind of Christian sensitivity or some kind of erotic or friendship love. [Paul sniffs.]
So what’s the alternative to all—to this approach? And the alternative is: Jesus. He’s the alternative. And the thing is that it’s the person Jesus who is the alternative and the solution to all these problems. It’s not a new system; it’s a person who gives his Spirit in such a way that the law, the way we should relate to one another according to God’s commandment, is written on our hearts. And the person of Jesus, living in our lives, at the center of our lives, begins to be the one who calls us together as his brothers and sisters.
And he begins to be the glue and the cement that cause the very character of, and the way we should be relating to him becomes the very essence of, the way we should be relating to one another. And the way that he relates to us is the way that he’s trying to teach us to relate to one another.
It’s . . . not a plan. He’s not a plan [sic] with a master plan. He’s not a simple Decalogue. He’s not a law. He’s a person, who comes in and by loving us changes us. And by then living with us and as we live with him and trying to get along with him okay, we begin to change too. And all of a sudden we begin to relate to each other, all those of us who are trying to live with Jesus at the center of our lives, [we] find ourselves relating to each other in a different way. And it’s a way which is not based on getting a product out. It’s a way that’s based on being brothers and sisters in Christ. It’s an entirely different focus. I’m not trying to say that technology is all bad, it’s just that a lot of it is of such a character that it has cut across this brother-sister relationship so that we are no longer a family together in Christ, under one God, our Father.
And what we need to do is, first of all, turn to him. Because when we do turn to him, he works miracles in our lives. And that’s different from anything that can be accomplished by a master plan. His Spirit renews us and makes us new people so that the problems that we have, the Lord heals, miraculously in us.
And the relationships that we have—a lot of the problems that we have, as we’ve talked about before, have to do with the failure of us to relate to one another properly. And when the Lord begins to heal those relationships, we find the things that are wrong with us beginning to dry up and heal within us.
So there are some characteristics of this. First of all, it’s—these are relationships in Jesus . . . that he wants us to learn. There are lots of things that He wants to teach us about the way to relate.
One of the things is that the—that relationship with Jesus is relationship-centered. I don’t know if that’s very clear. That is, it’s focused on the fact that we have a relationship with him rather than on what we can get out of it, what the product is. It’s the fact that we know him and love him and serve him that’s important. It’s not what comes out of it, particularly.
For example, you could say of your—of those of you—of us who are married can say, well, sort of—when we think about our marriage—marriages, we don’t think of it in terms of the number of children that we’ve had, or . . . the amount of money that we’ve all made and that the children are bringing in and the kind—we don’t stack it up that way.
But we think of our marriage as a constantly renewing thing. And it’s an ongoing personal relationship between two people. And when we evaluate the marriage, we talk about it now in terms of our relationships together—the two people, say. And it’s that way—it’s—that kind of a relationship is relationship-centered as opposed to product-centered. And that means—relationship-centered means that it should be based on making—on commitments, on making agreements and keeping them. It’s on getting the relationship straightened out, not based on feelings.
What our Lord wants is a system of love. He wants a new kind of society that’s based on the interrelationships of love. Not the feeling kind of love, but the kind of love of—the kind of thing which is each person having care and concern, taking care of, and being concerned for, each of his brothers and sisters in Christ according to the responsibilities that he has.
Well, I think I should quit. There are some more things that we could say but . . . I’ll just say a couple more words and then I’ll quit.
And one of them is that this—this relationship with our Lord is an open relationship. And our relationships with our brothers and sisters in Christ is open. It’s not in the darkness. That is to say, there’s no reason for secrecy. One can live openly in a Christian way.
It’s inclusive, as opposed to exclusive. It’s like a relationship between any two of us, is one that should be open to—and when we see the other partner in the relationship, loving other people better, our hearts should be delighted in that fact, because the relationship should foster that sense of growth and love in each person. That doesn’t mean that, for example, women should be particularly happy when—if they were to see that their husbands were falling erotically in love with another woman. That wouldn’t be right. But that would be the wrong kind of relationship for that man to be getting into. And rather—see—when the spouse sees the other person, the other spouse, opening up to new kinds of relationships based right in Christ, then each person can take delight in that and as you see the whole thing building up more and more in love.
And it should be an expressed relationship. It should be affectionate and respectful. It should be—some place in Scripture it talks about (in Romans 12, I think it is, or 11)—that talks about how we should esteem one another. We should show each other honor: really, you know, really, not flattery, not empty flattery, but encouragement, lifting up, you know. “I really respect you and I really love you,” that kind of thing. The way we use that word, usually.
And the last thing is that Jesus will teach us how to do this. We can count on him to do that. And that’s—as always, love is a gift which the Lord pours out into our hearts by the Holy Spirit. And we can count on him to do that, as we turn to the Lord and make him the center of our lives.
So what I’m trying to present here is a different vision of the way society can be. I’m trying to get, on the one hand, the way the world is and what it, what it really is at root today, in the modern technology, as opposed to what the Lord wants by way of a family with God our Father, with Jesus being our brother, and with the Holy Spirit being in our hearts, and with each one of us being brother and sister to each other. It’s a completely different kind of a picture.
The one kind of picture is designed by the world to accomplish the goals, especially of rich men. Right? I mean, that’s what technology is for, primarily. And the other thing is designed by God to make each one of us have the adequate care and concern that we need in order to give—to be happy, and to give all of our praise and glory to God.
So one of them is centered on us, in little people. The other thing is centered on big people and uses little people. But right now we should break and I suggest that we share ways in which you have seen the Lord teach you new ways to relate to others since becoming a part of the community. Why don’t we . . .
[Recording ends here.]
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