SALVATION AS COMMUNION: Partakers of the Divine Nature

Theology Today, Oct 2004 by Heim, S Mark

Second, we encounter each other as agents. We meet through the exchange of the characteristic products of personality: speech or acts that express ideas, intentions, feelings, experiences. These may be direct, face-to-face exchanges or they may occur through some medium (such as writing or art), so we can have a "personal" relation with someone from another age and place. This is personal encounter. It raises the full range of moral and social questions about human culture: duty, obligation, trust, understanding, love. In these personal encounters, in addition to conflict and divergence, there are moments of coincidence. Your idea agrees with another's idea. Two find they have independently had the same experience. One's intention turns out to be the same as a second's, a sameness by intersection.

In a third dimension of relation we not only encounter and relate to another as a person, but in some measure we share in that person's own life. Empathy and familiarity with the way someone else responds eventually gives rise to a vicarious capacity to experience the same responses in ourselves, a kind of second nature. These empathic responses arise in us not instead of our own reactions, but alongside them, though in some cases the line may blur. A student musician develops technique and interpretation not only from the external instruction of a great teacher, but much more by having caught the physical habits and the responsive feel for the music that animate that teacher. When couples complete each other's sentences, this behavior may reflect only the monotony of having heard the same stories too many times. But when the sentences they complete are new ones, they are demonstrating the extent to which the inner life of one partner has become an active part of the inner life of the other. Relations of love or intimate friendship are ordinarily marked by this empathic quality, which we can call communion.

Intimate contact with another's life shapes our own, so there are feelings and reactions of which we can rightly say both that they are fully our own and that they exist in us only by virtue of our relation with someone else. Parts of another's personality have become second nature for us. I do not so much know what my friend would do in a given situation, as I vicariously simulate in some measure the internal dynamics she might experience as she faces that situation. This can be so even when the process is highly imaginative, when my own "independent" responses would be quite different. Through such a relation to another person, and through such participation in that person's internal life, I find myself changed. This participation becomes part of who I am, without me becoming that person or ceasing to be distinctively myself. The word "communion" is sometimes used for the other two dimensions of human relations-an unconscious "communion" of biology or a "communion" of coinciding wills and thoughts. But I mean it to refer specifically to this third dimension.