The Shepherd’s One-Way Relationship
Illustration by Paul Mathers
My family’s relationship with Shayna changed when she got in the car accident. She didn’t want the change, nor did we. But it happened. When she was in the hospital, we could talk to her, hold her hand, kiss her on the forehead. But she could not respond. When she died, our relationship was severed entirely in this life.
We needed her. After we lost her, what should we have expected from God? What did we need from him?
One accusation against classical theism is that it destroys any two-way relationship with God. If God cannot be affected by us—if he does not change internally because of our influence on him—how can we have a relationship with him at all? Surely, he needs us in some way or is swayed by some emotional partiality toward us. If he is absolutely independent of us, then any idea of a relationship with him must be fantasy.
This accusation pushes me to clarify what a relationship is.
Is it true that real relationships are based on need? Did we have a relationship with Shayna because we needed her and she needed us? Is need the foundation for God’s relationship with us?
Relationships engage our emotions in powerful ways. We often think of our relationships as part of us—extensions of our being. The intimacy we feel with others can even deceive us into thinking that our own feelings should define reality for the other person. The other person is so much a part of me—we have so great a need for each other—that what I feel should change what he or she feels.
But this is an illusion. As any counselor can attest, one of the first things a family in crisis has to do is build stronger distinctions between the individuals. I am my own person. You are you. The more these boundaries of identity are blurred, the worse manipulative behavior will become.
Sometimes, this illusion is comical. A man can be so infatuated with a woman that he believes her to be hopelessly in love with him. But she is just being friendly. He can’t control her feelings, no matter how strong his own might be. Objectively, the relationship he has with her is not the one he imagines.
Sometimes the illusion is dangerous. An abusive husband might be so obsessed with his wife that he cannot accept a divorce when she files for it. Part of the objective world he inhabits has changed: she is going to be his ex-wife. To regain control, he stalks or threatens her, hoping to coerce her back into the marriage. His attempts to control reality can lead to physical or emotional violence.
Comical or dangerous, the illusion of blurred identities reveals something important about relationships.
A relationship is an objective reality. It is part of the world outside of us with its own kind of being. It does not conform to our subjective fantasies. That is why the death of a loved one is such a crippling blow to our inner lives. The intimacy we feel has been severed and there is nothing we can do to bring it back.
Only an unhealthy person tries to force a relationship to be something that it is not. He or she fights against the reality of who the other person is, what the other feels, what kind of future the other seeks. Sometimes people fight for a connection with a loved one who has died by praying to them, acting as if they are still present, or blaming others for the loss.
In a healthy relationship, by contrast, two people recognize that they are separate from each other. There are clear boundaries of identity. They each have their own being. They do not want to absorb, take over, or coerce the other person. Two healthy people are able to accept surprises, incompatibilities, and disagreements—even serious ones—because they are confident that their relationship will not suffer. When someone dies in a healthy relationship, the living person accepts the reality of loss even in grief. Their identities were not blurred in the first place.
When we lost Shayna, we grieved because we needed her. Our need was deep, and many people felt their own need for her in their own ways. But no matter how deep that need remains, our feelings do not change reality. She was her own person, and she is objectively lost to us. Our relationship with her must have been grounded in something besides need—something better and more secure.
Back to our question about God.
In our grief, we need him. We need our relationship with him to be life-giving, comforting, and healing.
After having pondered what a relationship is, the question is a little sharper: Will our relationship with God meet our needs if God needs us too? What if he is internally dependent on us? What if he is less himself without us, pursuing us and clinging to us because he must have us for his own fulfillment? Would this be a life-giving, comforting, and healing relationship?
The teaching that God needs us pushes us into views of spiritual relationship that are, frankly, sick. This teaching says that our feelings define his reality. His identity is blurred into our own. In human relationships, we do not take these as signs of health. They would not be signs of a healthy relationship with God either.
In my own grieving, I am releasing illusions and gripping reality. In my need for God, I am finding rest in the shelter of his one-way giving. His grace is flowing to me every moment. In that stream of God’s goodness, I am at peace. I know that he doesn’t give doses of his grace to me in order to get something back from me. He is not manipulating me. He is utterly different in his identity, the one person in my existence whose giving is pure giving, not self-interested or conditional. His goodness comes from who he is, not who I am.
What should I expect from God after a devastating loss? I should expect a relationship as lopsided as a sheep with a shepherd. The shepherd makes me lie down in green pastures and leads me beside still waters. He restores my soul and leads me in the paths of righteousness for the sake of his own name. That name is Yahweh. He is the I AM.
Paul Mathers is our illustrator in this series. Head over to Paul’s Instagram profile to see more of his work!