Relationship

Relationship

Complexity of Intimacy

To love is hard work! In our society, love is sung, written, and spoken about as a beautiful ideal we all desire. But while Madonna sings her love songs and one movie after the other allows us to witness the most intimate ways of love-making, the day-to-day reality is that most friendships do not last long, that many lovers can’t hold on to each other, that countless marriages go sour or break up, and that numerous communities go from crisis to crisis.

There is an immense fragmentation in human relationships.

While the desire for love has seldom been so directly expressed, love in its daily appearance has seldom looked so broken. While in our intensely competitive society the hunger and thirst of friendship, intimacy, union, and communion are immense, it never has been so difficult to satisfy this hunger and quench this thirst.

The world that is central in it all is “relationship.” We desire to break out of our isolation and loneliness and enter into a relationship that offers us a sense of home, an experience of belonging, a feeling of safety, and a sense of being well connected.

But everytime we explore such a relationship, we discover quickly the difficulty of being close to anybody and the complexity of intimacy between people.

When we are lonely and look for someone to take our loneliness away, we are quickly disillusioned. The other, who for a while may have offered us an experience of wholeness and inner peace, soon proves incapable of giving us lasting happiness and instead of taking away our loneliness only reveals to us its depth. The stronger our expectation that another human being will fulfill our deepest desire, the greater the pain is when we are confronted with the limitations of human relationships.

And our need for intimacy easily turns into a demand. But as soon as we start demanding love from another person, love turns into violence, caressing becomes hitting, kissing becomes biting, looking tenderly becomes looking suspiciously, hearing becomes overhearing, and sexual intercourse becomes rape.

Seeing the intense need for love and the frightening explosion of violence so closely connected in our society, we are face with the crucial question: What is the hard work of love?

To Be Called Together

What does it mean to love one another person? Mutual affection, intellectual compatibility, sexual attraction, shared ideals, a common financial, cultural, and religious background, all of these can be important factors for a good relationship, but they do not guarantee love.

I once met a young man and woman who wanted to get married. Both were very good looking, very intelligent, very similar in family background, and very much in love with each other. They had spent many hours with qualified psychotherapists to explore their psychological pasts and to face directly their emotional strengths and weaknesses. In every respect they seemed well prepared to get married and have a happy life together.

Still, the question remains:

will these two people be able to love each other well, not just for a while or a few years, but for a lifetime?

For me, who was asked to accompany these two people, this was not as obvious as it was to them. They had been facing each other for a long time and became secure in their feelings of love for each other,

but would they be able to face together a world in which there is so little support for a lasting relationship?

Where would the strength come from to remain faithful to one another in times of conflict, economic pressure, deep grief, illness, and necessary separations? What would it mean for this man and this woman to love one another as husband and wife until death?

The more I reflected on this, the more I felt that marriage is foremost a vocation. Two people are called together to fulfill the mission that God has given them. Marriage is a spiritual reality. That is to say, a man and a woman come together for life, not just because they experience deep love for each other, but because they believe that God loves each of them with an infinite love and has called them to each other to be living witnesses of that love.

To love is to embody God’s intimate love in a faithful communion with another human being.

Living Witness of God’s Love

All human relationships, be they between parents and children, husbands and wives, lovers and friends, or between members of a community, are meant to be signs of God’s love for humanity as a whole and each person in particular. This is very uncommon viewpoint, but it is te viewpoint of Jesus. Jesus says: “

You must love one another just as I have loved you. It is by your love for one another that everyone will recognize you as my disciples” (John 13, 34-35).

And how does Jesus love you? He says:

“I have loved you, just as the Father has loved me” (John 15, 9).

Jesus’ love for us is the full expression of God’s love for us, because Jesus and the Father are one. “What I say to you,” Jesus says,

“I do not speak of my own accord: it is the Father, living in me, who is doing his works. You must believe me when I say that I am in the FAtehr and the Father is in me” (John 14, 10 – 11).

These words may at first sound very
unreal and mystifying, but they have a direct and radical implication for how we live our relationships on a day-to-day business.

Jesus reveals to us that we are called by God to be living witnesses of God’s love. We become such witnesses by following Jesus and loving one another as he loves us. What does this say about marriage, friendship, and community? It says that the source of the love that sustains these relationships is not the partners themselves but God who calls the partners together.

Loving one another is not clinging to one another so as to be safe in a hostile world, but living together in such a way that everyone will recognize us as people who make God’s love visible to the world.

Not only does all fatherhood and motherhood come from God, but also all friendship, partnership in marriage, and true intimacy and community. When we live as if human relationships are “human-made” and therefore subject to the shifting and changing of human regulations and customs, we cannot expect anything but the immense fragmentation and alienation that characterize our society. But when we claim and constantly reclaim God as the source of all love, we will discover love as God’s gift to God’s people.

Revealing God’s Faithfulness

To be truthful all human relationships must find their source in God and witness to God’s love.

One of the most important qualities of God’s love is faithfulness.

God is a faithful God, a God who fulfills the divine promise and will never let us down. God shows this faithfulness to Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Rachel. God shows this faithfulness to Moses and Aaron and to the people as they move from Egypt to the promised land. But God’s faithfulness goes beyond that. God wants not only to be a God for us, but also a God with us. That happens in Jesus, the Emmanuel who walks with us, talks with us, and dies with us. In sending Jesus to us, God wants to convince us of the unshakeable fidelity of the divine love. Still there is more. When Jesus leaves He says to us,

“I will not leave you alone, but will send you the Holy Spirit.”

The Spirit of Jesus is God’s within us. Here the fullness of God’s faithfulness is revealed. Through Jesus, God gives us the divine Sprit so that we can live a God-like life. The Spirit is the breath of God. It is the intimacy between Jesus and his Father. It is the divine communion. It is God’s love active within us.

This divine faithfulness is the core of our witness. By our words, but mot of all by our lives, we are to reveal God’s faithfulness to the world.

The world is not interested in faithfulness, because faithfulness does not help in the acquisition of success, popularity, and power.

But when Jesus calls us to love one another as he has loved us, he calls us to faithful relationships, not based on the pragmatic concerns of the world, but on the knowledge of God’s everlasting love.

Faithfulness, obviously, does not mean sticking it out together to the bitter end. That is no reflection of God’s love. Faithfulness means that every decision we make in our lives together is guided by the deep awareness that we are called to be living signs of God’s faithful presence among us. And this requires an attentiveness to one another that goes far beyond any formal obligation.

Living Disciples Together

Marriage is one way to be a living witness of God’s faithful love. Once a man and a woman decide to live their married life in this way, their relationship takes on a radically new meaning. Their love for each other, whatever its emotional content, becomes an expression of their discipleship of Jesus; therefore, their main concern is to live that discipleship as a couple.

For many people discipleship is an individual or even private affair. They say: “Religion is my own business. I don’t want to be bothered by others in the practice of my religion, and I won’t bother anyone else in theirs.” This attitude even enters into the intimacy of marriage. A man says: “My wife’s religion is her private affair.” A woman says: “I leave my husband completely free when it comes to his religion.” But his is not living discipleship together.

Marriage looked upon from above is God creating a new communion between two people, so that through that visible and tangible communion a new sign will be present in the world to point people toward God’s love.

When two people commit themselves to live their lives together, a new reality comes into existence. “They become one flesh,” Jesus says. That means that their unity creates a new sacred place. Many relationships are like interlocking fingers. Two people cling to each other as two hands interlocked in fear. They connect because they cannot survive individually. But as they interlock they also realize that they cannot take away each other’s loneliness. And it is then that friction arises and tension increases. Often a breakup is the final result.

But God calls man and woman into a different relationship.

It is a relationship that looks like two hands that fold in an act of prayer. This fingertips touch, but the hands can create a space, like a little tent. Such a space is the space created by love, not by fear.

Marriage is creating a new, open space where God’s love can be revealed to the “stranger”: the child, the friend, the visitor.

This marriage becomes a witness to God’s desire to be among us as a faithful friend.

Choosing Our Friends

The spiritual life is one of constant choices. One of the most important choices is the choice of the people with whom we develop close intimate relationships. We have only a limited amount of time in our lives. With whom do we spend it and how? That’s probably one of the most decisive questions of our lives. It is not without reason that parents are very concerned about who their children bring home as playmates, friends, or lovers. They know that much of their children’s happiness will depend on those they choose to be close to.

To whom do we go for advice? With whom do we spend our free evenings? With whom are we going on vacation? Sometimes we speak or act as if we have little choice in the matter. Sometimes we act as though we will be lucky if there is anyone who wants to be our friend. But that is a very passive and even fatalistic attitude. If we truly believe that God loves us with an unlimited, unconditional love, then we can trust that there are women and men in this world who are eager to show us that love. But we cannot wait passively until someone shows up to offer us friendship. As people who trust in God’s love,

we must have the courage and the confidence to say to someone through whom God’s love becomes visible to us: “I would like to get to know you, I would like to spend time with you. I would like to develop a friendship with you. What about you?”

There will be no’s, there will be the pain of rejection. But when we determine to avoid all no’s and all rejections, we will never create the milieu where we can grow stronger and deepen in love. God became human for us to make divine love tangible. That is what incarnation is all about. That incarnation not only happened log ago, but it continues to happen for those who trust that God will give us the friends we need. But the choice is yours!

Sumber dokumentasi:

Henry J.M. Nouwen, Here and Now; Living in the Spirit (New York: Crossroad, 1997), 123 – 132.

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