Week Four: Day 1 – Connections with Others

In this phase of the course, we’ll be exploring our relationships with others. Spirituality is never a private affair; it always brings us into connection with others. We are called to love by Jesus and to be in relationships of love, to be loving toward others, even toward our enemies. So we want to explore, in growing a Rule of Life, we want to explore what this Rule of Life might have to say to us about being in relationship with others.

We begin perhaps with those whom we find easy to love, with our family members and our friends; and how do we want to nurture those relationships? What can we do to foster intimacy and to grow closer together? What can we do to express our love and to protect our love and to nurture our love in these relationships?

But the Christian message always brings us beyond those who are easy to love and challenges us to love God in the stranger, to find Christ in the stranger, in the outcast, in the marginalized, in the poor, in the oppressed. So how will my Rule of Life help me to reach out beyond just the circle of those whom I find easy to love and touch the lives of others? And even our enemies, how am I called to relate to my enemies and how am I called to be in relationship with them, to pray for them, to love them? What does that mean for me and how will I put that into practice, as it were, in my life? Spirituality is always very practical. It has to do with how our faith impacts how we live from day-to-day and how we interact with people.

So that’s what we are going to be exploring this week. There will be a series of questions that will help us to look at our relationships – our healthy relationships and our broken relationships – to see what we might do to better carry out Jesus’ command to be people of love.

– Br. David Vryhof

Question to Journal
Who are the “others” in your life with whom you are called to be in relationship?

This Week’s Podcast Episode 

This Week’s Workbook Exercise 

Use the exercise to reflect on your relationships with the people who surround your life. Where are relationships strong and blooming? Where could some ‘fertilizer’ create better ones? Where are relationships weakest?

We are all connected, directly and indirectly, through God’s Creation. What should you include in your Rule of Life to improve your relationship with others?

Use different types or colours of lines (for example: straight for strong & happy / double for very happy / dotted for weak / wavy for tense / broken for broken) to characterise the relationship between you and others. For example your spouse, family, friends, co-workers, difficult people, those in need. Then on each connecting line write your hopes for the relationship.