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I T Thou Relationship

Decent Essays

premise that human existence may be characterized by the way in which one engages with all one encounters, including other humans, the world in general, and God (Buber, 1958). A subject-to-subject relation, or the I-Thou relationship, (as opposed to the subject-to-object relation, or the I-It relationship) is the essential experience of reality (Buber, 1958). The I-Thou relationship involves an awareness of unity between subjects. It is an experience of mutuality. Indeed, when a subject either chooses, or is chosen to enter into an I-Thou relation, they are recognizing, or are being recognized for their entire being and are thus being drawn into community. But what exactly is community? In our individualistic society, …show more content…

True community, however, is a rare occurrence which may be more easily defined by looking first at what is not community. In his article What's really killing the church, Samuel Wells (2013) tells the story of an elderly woman choosing to return to the church of her youth after an absence of many decades. When asked what took her away from the church, the woman reveals that a former pastor denied her the right to be married in the church because a work accident had left her without a wedding ring finger (Wells, 2013). It is easy to dismiss this outrageous story as an incident too rare to provide insight. The essence of the event, however, is all too common amongst groups purporting to be communities, such as churches. People are excluded for a myriad of reasons from sexual orientation, to marital status, to doubt. Exclusivity is the enemy of community (Peck,1987). WHAT ARE SPIRIT AND COMMUNITY? 9 Exclusivity can happen in two ways. One can exclude others and one can exclude

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