Are you?

We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

To become Christlike, to approach life as Christ did, become as God intended when He created us, we must emerge from this cocoon called human life and live life as a child of God, as a spiritual being living a human existence. There is responsibility for reconciliation here. What does this look like? What does it mean?

Before the answer comes, on some level first by mind, then by heart, God brings us to a place where we see another human as He sees them. If we fail to see the person beside us—the homeless person ignored, the store clerk indifferent to our presence, the server we wish not to tip, the person we are in conflict with—as God sees them, see God in the encounter, even see God in them, you are far from God. If God is in you, you are incapable of seeing another person as a thing like a desk or chair or a means, for means always objectifies a person.

When we see God in relationships, we glimpse eternity, we realize in some form we are already living in eternity. And doesn’t this change the whole of our being, the whole of our Christian life? Christians become, are becoming, moving from being fed to feeding, from remaining in conflict with someone to making peace, from being right to granting mercy, from desiring loftiness to washing feet, if love lives within, as God intends.

Martin Buber expresses it this way: In the eyes of him who takes a stand in love, and gazes out of it, men are cut free from their entanglement in bustling activity. What Buber means as bustling activity is what Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg refers to as living horizontally, someone living in the world without ever looking up toward heaven, failing to engage his life in what he would gain or give if he were in relationship with God. There are some who live in the world without God. There are some who live looking entirely toward heaven and never bring their relationship with God into the world.

Buber tells us love is our responsibility to see God in relationship. He says, In this lies the likeness—impossible in any feeling whatsoever—of all who love, from the smallest to the greatest and from the blessedly protected man, whose life is rounded in that of a loved being, to him who is all his life nailed to the cross of the world, and who ventures to bring himself to the dreadful point—to love all men.

Failing to jettison the bent toward remaining in conflict with another, classifying the person beside you, raising the barrier of being right, omits God, lowers Him into a room of objects.

The answer lies in the question, “Are you a spiritual being living a worldly existence?” If you are, all relationships enter the realm of the heavenly. If not, all oppose God.