Martin Buber’s book I and Thou introduced an approach to truth different from the scientific approach to truth. No matter how accomplished we may be with the scientific method, living closely with another person is a whole new game of ignorance and of learning. This also applies to the contemplative approach to truth. No matter how accomplished we may be with exploring our inner space, living closely with another person is a whole new game of ignorance and of learning.

Imagine yourself an accomplished high school science student moving into the wonder of dating, of initiating for the first time a serious interpersonal relationship in addition to your family of origin. Your science excellences do not help you discern the challenges present in your consciousness meeting with the consciousness of another person and continuing in this tangle of relations between him or her and me.

Scientific research is about knowing the objective world. We can call science the I-it approach to truth in contrast to Buber’s I-Thou approach to truth. Another human being cannot be appropriately or fully related to as an “it”—a status friendship, a sexual conquest, or a cog in the machinery of some project of my devising. Another person is another consciousness, like myself. To relate to the encountered reality of another person as I relate to the encountered reality of an “it” is to suppress a full experience of that person and of myself.

The I-Thou approach to truth also differs from inquiry into my own being. My inquiry into the contents of my own consciousness may help me relate to others, and others may help me become more aware of the contents of my own consciousness. But the I-Thou relation itself is not simply personal inquiry. Another person is another consciousness, not my consciousness. However mature we may be in the practice of meditation or in some other method of contemplative inquiry, we enter a different world of truth when we are engaged in a realistic interpersonal relationship with another person, or group of persons.

So, what is it about an interpersonal relationship that brings us into such a different universe of truth than the universes of truth we explore with our scientific quests or our contemplative inquiries? A few times I have met a stranger whose eyes met my eyes in a way that I knew that this other human being saw me, perhaps as clearly as some of my long-time friends. Such meetings are not about physical admiration or intellectual stimulation, or romantic possibilities. Such moments have to do with my conscious person noticing another conscious person who is noticing me.

We humans are an extremely capable social species. Most of what we know has come to us through contact with other humans. A child raised by wolves or in some other way separated from other humans in early life can miss out on extremely crucial aspects of human development. We are seldom fully aware of how deep a role has been played in our development by being with other humans—honest talk, dancing, physical play, singing, creating music, touching, hugging, and so very much more.

The “I-Thou” approach to truth can also be distinguished from a fourth approach to truth that I will call the “We-They” approach to truth. This fourth approach to truth has to do with politics; with sustaining, repairing, and replacing economic systems; and with preserving and enriching the systems of knowledge, life styles, and the media of art, language, mathematics, and religious formation. I will discuss freedom in relation to these social commonality features of our lives in other essays. In this essay I will focus on how freedom interfaces with the interpersonal relations of the I-Thou.

Freedom and the Interpersonal

Freedom may be even more obviously present in interpersonal relations than in scientific research and contemplative inquiry. In our interpersonal relations we are constantly responding to the ongoing experiences of taking in these other persons. We are experiencing the need for raw creativity in each response. Habitual actions or rote words simply will not do for the pursuing of a realistic personal relationship.

Choice, freedom, invention, initiative, resonance, wildness, are words that describe an interpersonal relationship. If I reduce the full wonder of an interpersonal relationship into an object of empirical science, I have lost the full reality of what is taking place.

Similarly, if I reduce the full wonder of an interpersonal experience to being helped by another with my interior life, or with my helping another with their interior life, I have again lost the full reality of what is taking place. It is not that our interior lives are missing or do not add to an interpersonal experience, but an interpersonal relation is something more than an enhancement of our contemplative experiences. An interpersonal relationship is an on-going whole-body, whole-mind, whole-consciousness, whole being process that calls forth a challenge to our raw freedom that we may not notice so vividly in our scientific or contemplative quests for truth.

Response-ability for the Inter-personal

So we find ourselves engaged in a responsibility for our personal relations with other humans. We can enhance our wisdom for doing this by taking advantage of the many great books on interpersonal relations. But simply reading these resources is not good enough. We have to apply our interpersonal thoughtfulness to actual interpersonal relationships. Learning to experience our interpersonal freedom comes into play when we are actually living together with someone, working together with someone, spending time together with other human beings who are spending time with us.

There exist in our culture many therapies, workshops, and retreats that include interpersonal learning for people who want to learn these skills. It may be a responsible use of our freedom to get our body to one of these events. If you and one of your interpersonal peers are struggling with the processes of your relationship, it may be a responsible use of your freedom to get the two of you to one of these helpful events. The time and money to do this kind of interpersonal work can be well spent if the wisdom learned is actually worked into our ongoing living.

And when two or more of us are attempting to live together, we will need to set aside daily and weekly times together that are specifically directed toward our interpersonal practices. We may also find helpful a committed membership in a weekly meeting religious practice that takes interpersonal realities seriously.

A Weekly Meeting Christian Circle

Excellent theological study alone will not spawn a vital movement of Christian renewal. Nor will the addition of relevant social activism be enough. A necessary third of this particular trinity of practices is a weekly meeting circle that knows how to practice the I-Thou dynamics of interpersonal relations with a profound level of consciousness.

The sociological fabrics of such a circle consist of having no one leader, priest, guru, or any other such “holy one” in charge of the group. No one personality needs to dominate this practice. Everyone sits in a circle, and symbols of human authenticity are placed in the center of the circle. The only leader is the Christ exemplar (or whatever other model of true humanness holds for this group the essence of being human in this particular religious practice). Perhaps a coffee table has on it three candles that hold the symbolism of the Christ presence. However symbolized, our leader symbolically “sits” in the center of the circle, and every person in the group can reach into that center and embody for a moment or a period of time the overt leadership of the group.

However experienced in deep awareness any one person may be, that person’s leadership capacity is limited, and is balanced with the leadership of others. Every personality quality has limitations as well as gifts. Every self-image is an approximation of our real humanity. All states of being are passing realities. The permanent essential humanness that is potential within each human being sits in the center of the circle as our only complete leader. This complete ending of hierarchical relations, does not make everyone in a group equal in any specific way. We are just equal before God. And each person becomes more aware that each of us who is dedicated to a Christian life is continually faced with this possibility of reaching into that center of the meeting for our moments of approximate Christ leadership.

In this symbolism, I see a primary vision of the future practice of Christianity. I view all those who choose to join a weekly-meeting circle of freedom-loving Christian practices as thereby being washed with a new sort of baptism and being ordained to a new sort of priesthood. We become pastors to one another. We become a co-pastorate to the community or the bioregion where we live, and to the planet on which we dwell. Such an interpersonal intimacy of Christian “life together” is step one toward a viable and vital contemporary Christian practice of renewed religion.

The details of what any group of us do together in our Co-paster Circle can be important as an illustration, but these details should not become a prescribed pattern for all Circles. The patterns for each Circle are only correct when they are decided through a true consensus of those Circle members. And each Circle needs to design some stabilities—stabilities that nevertheless come up for review on a regular basis, perhaps quarterly.

In the circle to which I belong, we open the meeting by lighting three candles and singing a triune song to a secular tune. We end the meeting singing the same song. while extinguishing the three candles. This ritual has worked well for us. We have kept this bit of stability for many years.

The overall drama of the evening is flexible, and evaluated each quarter, but a broad pattern persists: confession, celebration, and dedication are ritual activities that are done in that order. This order of nurture is also has an “inner flow” of conscious states described by these words: humility, gratitude, and compassion.

The first hour of our two-hour meeting is devoted to various exercises that provide content to the above ritual framework. These ritual components include singing, dancing, confession, absolution, celebration, and a personally grounding conversation on a small portion of poetry or scripture.

The second hour of our two-hour meeting is devoted to the study of a small portion of well-suited written material. We intend to become good students and teachers of one another, using methods that help each other become personally thoughtful about some of the best written resources that are accessible to non-specialists. Study of written material is our default pattern. Occasionally we see a video and hold a spirit discussion of it. Or we may conduct a workshop, hold a celebration, or do an evaluation of the quarter. If a video is the assignment of the evening, the screen sits in the circle with us. A guest from anywhere on the planet might visit us on that screen. Perhaps a film drama visits us. Perhaps a white board sits in the circle with us, and on that white board is a chart of the material we are studying or perhaps the brainstorming of some workshop.

The word “study” has a wide spectrum of meanings, but in our circle we require of each of us to be a good study facilitator who makes our study a spirit-deepening event or an ethical prioritizing event for the living of our specific lives. Good group processes are as important as good written content that is carefully selected for this purpose.

The details of this CoPastor Circle practice matter, but they do not matter ultimately. What matters ultimately is the quality of the interpersonal contact sought in each of these specific activities of these two-hour weekly meetings. This quality has to do with accessing our profound reality—our essential reality that is never absent, though we can be absent from our essential reality. Our aim for having a meeting at all is to occasion openings within our lives toward a return from our ditches of estrangement to our essential reality, and to learn how to live such realism in the temporal flow our lives.

The specific events of return to realism will differ for each person and will differ for the group each week of this practice. What endures is the basic aim of continuing openings within each of us to the call to becoming a Christian priesthood—assisting one another toward a deep realism. By choosing to attend this Circle, we are each allowing the ongoing process of becoming Christ-quality priests or pastors for one another and for our local community. We trust in our forgiveness and in the reality of our fresh starts upon this ever-opening journey into profound consciousness.

Conclusion

This description of the realism and freedom of these interpersonal meetings is only a sketch of this deep topic, but the freedom spoken about in this essay is understood to be an essential part of this interpersonal style of Christianity. Freedom means starting where we are in allowing that ever-deeper movement into where we Eternally are in order to be more creatively real where we temporally are.

These values can also apply to other-than-Christian religious practices.