Bonus Post #3 – It’s All About Relationships (5-Part Mini-Series)

PART 3 – Create Authentic Community 

How do you create a sense of community––healthy, authentic, and quality close personal relationships?

My research and experience suggest that these four qualities are central to experiencing meaningful, satisfying, and fulfilling personal relationships: openness, acceptance, growth, and warmth. Let’s look at these four qualities more closely. 

Openness in communication means sharing honestly, risking being misunderstood or not taken seriously, and asserting rather than avoiding or being aggressive in how we express our thoughts and feelings. 

Acceptance of one another’s thoughts and feelings happens through perceptive listening, trusting one another to work out relational quandaries, and empathizing with one another.

Moreover, rather than deny or become defensive about occasional awkwardness in our evolving relationships, we find ways to grow our relationship by being supportive, empowering, and imaginative. 

And we find ways to generate warmth and affection through genuine care, authentic connection, and mutuality without crossing boundaries of professional propriety or personal intimacy.

These are the keys to creating authentic community, to relational health and satisfaction––to the magic called Real!

I’ve found that participating in a personal sharing group is the single most important experience in my life over the last fifty years. And regular participation in professional support groups has added vital, integrating impact on my career over this same time span. This is where I most experience authentic community! 

How so? 

Because there’s been an openness to talk about the more important things in our lives. Sufficient freedom to be ourselves, without judgment from others, is present because we share our hopes and dreams, failures and feelings, ideas and suggestions. And from such openness and acceptance, including prayer for one another, we experience a powerful kind of bonding or warmth that brings growth and change––a feeling of being rejuvenated, of receiving new strength and Life! In fact, we experience authentic community and the magic of becoming Real.                                                                                                        

Most humans yearn for authentic community––quality personal relationships characterized by openness, acceptance, warmth, and growth. It may surprise you to learn, though, that an expert on our contemporary experience of community, psychiatrist M. Scott Peck, suggests that it is exceedingly rare. What do you think? What’s your experience of true, authentic community?

 

We’ll explore Peck’s reflections from his book, The Different Drum: Community-Making and Peace, in next month’s Bonus Post, PART 4 – The Challenge of Community. (Originally 533 words)

 

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Bonus Post #2 – It’s All About Relationships (5-Part Mini-Series)

PART 2 – The Magic Called Real

How do we create healthy ways of relating to one another?

In last month’s Bonus Post I noted that I am most alive, most human, when I meet another person at the real, genuine, authentic gut-level. This month we’ll explore just what this magic called real is all about.

One of my favorite children’s stories captures this quality of realness. The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams is a children’s fairytale about what it means to be “real.”

In the story a little Velveteen Rabbit is loved by a small boy. It was once new and shiny. It lived in the nursery and talked to the other toys. The mechanical toys felt superior and pretended they were real because they had springs and could move. The Rabbit felt very insignificant and commonplace by comparison, and the only toy that was kind to him was the Skin Horse.

One day the Velveteen Rabbit had this conversation with the Skin Horse, the oldest and wisest toy:

“What Is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?"

“Real isn’t how you’re made,” said the Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.[1]

As the conversation continues between the Rabbit and the Skin Horse we learn that becoming real sometimes means being hurt, takes a long time, and once you are real you can’t become unreal again––it lasts forever.

The Velveteen Rabbit is eventually loved by the boy so hard that it didn’t seem to notice its beautiful velveteen fur getting shabbier and shabbier, its tail becoming unsewn, and the pink rubbed off its nose by the boy’s kisses. And one day when the boy cries out to Nana for his Rabbit at bedtime, Nana grumbles:

            “You must have your old Bunny?” she said. “Fancy all that fuss for a toy!”

            The boy sat up in bed and stretched out his hands.

            “Give me my Bunny!” he said. “You mustn’t say that. He isn’t a toy. He’s REAL!”

When the little Rabbit heard that he was happy, for he knew that what the Skin Horse had said was true at last. The nursery magic had happened to him, and he was a toy no longer. He was Real. The Boy himself had said it.[2]

So, by the end of the story the Velveteen Rabbit becomes real, too:

“You were Real to the boy,” the Fairy said, “because he loved you. Now you shall be Real to everyone.”[3]    

But we’re left with an especially important question, aren’t we? How does the magic called Real take place in our lives? What does our love for one another look like in real life? In short, how do we experience meaningful, satisfying, fulfilling close personal relationships? See what answers you come up with as you reflect on this question over the course of the next month.

(520 words)

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[1] Margery Williams, The Velveteen Rabbit (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2011), 5.

[2] Ibid., 13.

[3] Ibid., 31.

Bonus Post #1 – It’s All About Relationships (5-Part Mini-Series)

PART 1 – Introduction

I recall an early insight in my graduate studies in interpersonal and small group communication from a textbook by John Stewart and Gary D’Angelo, Together: Communicating Interpersonally. They say, “the quality of our interpersonal relationships determines who we are becoming as persons. Although our individuality is tremendously important, we don’t become fully human all by ourselves; our humanity develops in relationships with others.”[1]

Jesuit psychologist John Powell puts it this way: “What I am, at any given moment in the process of my becoming a person, will be determined by my relationships with those who love me or refuse to love me, with those I love or refuse to love.”[2] It reminds me of the African tribal philosophy of ubuntu: I am, because we are.

Moreover, as Roman philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca observes, “One of the most beautiful qualities of true friendship is to understand and to be understood.” In fact, the communication process involves more than either a one-way speaker-centered bow-and-arrow type action of shooting our ideas to another person, or a two-way message-centered ping-pong type interaction of batting our ideas back and forth. Rather, it pays to approach communication as a dynamic, meaning-centered transaction in which a relationship emerges between people.

Here is how Mennonite theologian and counselor David Augsburger puts it: “’Experiencing the other side’ is, in Martin Buber’s words, ‘the heart of dialogue.’ Feeling any experience from the side of the other person as well as from one’s own side can make the experience twice as rich. Seeing any event through the other’s eyes in addition to one’s own makes the scene truly three-dimensional.”[3] 

Augsburger continues:

The art of dialogue is openness to the other side, a willingness to enter the other’s turf and to explore it until it is familiar territory. The heart of dialogue is coming to value a place near the center, on the boundary, where the other person’s perspective is valued alongside my own. At this point of meeting, I become as concerned for the clarity of the other’s stance as for my own; as willing to contribute an argumentative point to the other side as to assert one on my own; as committed to supporting the other’s right to be at his or her position as I am to claim my own.[4]

I find that I am most alive, most human, when I meet another person at the real, genuine, authentic gut-level wherein a deep, intimate relationship is created between us. Reaching beyond phoniness or superficiality, this kind of relationship is deeper than that of acquaintances or even friends. It is marked by the quality of sharing that good friends with a close personal relationship enjoy––love for one another. We’re made for relationships with one another. In fact, it’s all about relationships!

So, how do we create healthy ways of relating with one another? Think about this question over the next month, and see what answers percolate for you? We’ll explore this question in next month’s Bonus Post, PART 2 – The Magic Called Real. 

[504 Words]

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[1] Stewart and D’Angelo, Together: Communicating Interpersonally (Menlo Park, CA: Addison-Wesley, 1976), 23.

[2] Powell, Why Am I Afraid to Tell You Who I Am? (Chicago: Argus Communications, 1969), 43

[3] Augsburger, Caring Enough to Hear and Be Heard (Ventura, CA: Regal, 1982), 6.

[4] Augsburger, Caring Enough to Hear and Be Heard, 6–7.