relationality

In this episode of “Voices with Vervaeke,” John Vervaeke and Guy Sengstock engage in a discussion about relationality, grief, and the sacred. Highlighting their upcoming Circling into Dialogos workshop, they delve into practices for realizing our interconnected nature, inspired by philosopher James Filler's views on relationality as the essence of being. The duo explores how grief exposes our lives as interwoven relational worlds, leading to a deeper comprehension of non-substantiality and connection. Their transformative workshop aims to cultivate better relationships with self, others, and ultimate reality, addressing the sacred amidst the meaning crisis and moving beyond adversarial thinking. This relational perspective, both transcendent and intimate, offers insights into a more responsive and holistic way of living. Listeners will gain an enriched understanding of how relational thinking can reshape our approach to life's challenges, opening doors to new meanings and deeper connections.

Guy Sengstock, the founder of the Circling method, is a renowned facilitator and innovator in the field of authentic communication and personal development. His method blends philosophical rigor with a deep understanding of relational dynamics, offering transformative experiences that foster genuine connection and self-awareness. 

Glossary of Terms

Relationality: The quality of being relational, emphasizing the importance of relationships in understanding beings and the world.

Heidegger: A German philosopher known for his existential and phenomenological explorations.

Neoplatonism: A philosophical system that posits the existence of an ultimate reality or "One" from which everything emanates.

John Vervaeke

Website: https://johnvervaeke.com/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@johnvervaeke 

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/johnvervaeke  

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Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/VervaekeJohn/

Guy Sengstock

Website: https://circlinginstitute.com/

Email: guysengstock@gmail.com

Join our new Patreon

https://www.patreon.com/johnvervaeke

The Vervaeke Foundation - https://vervaekefoundation.org/

Awaken to Meaning - https://awakentomeaning.com/

Workshop:  Circling & Dialogos: The After Socrates Wisdom Intensive February 10-11, 2024

https://circlinginstitute.mykajabi.com/dialogos-and-circling-registration

Books, Articles, and Publications

• Heidegger, Neoplatonism, and the History of Being: Relation as Ontological Ground - James Filler 

https://www.amazon.com/dp/3031309065

• Relationality as the Ground of Being: The One as Pure Relation in Plotinus - Filler, James (2019). International Journal of the Platonic Tradition

https://brill.com/view/journals/jpt/13/1/article-p1_1.xml

• The Relational Ontology of Anaximander and Heraclitus - Filler, James (2022). Review of Metaphysics

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/872706

• Heidegger, Neoplatonism, and the History of Being: Relation as Ontological Ground - Filler, James (2023). Springer Nature Switzerland.

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-30907-6

• Religion and Nothingness - Keiji Nishitani

https://www.amazon.com/Religion-Nothingness-Nanzan-Studies-Culture/dp/0520049462

• Supernatural Selection: How Religion Evolved - Matt Rossano https://www.amazon.com/Supernatural-Selection-How-Religion-Evolved/dp/0195385810/

• Indeterminacy and Intelligibility - Brian John Martine https://www.amazon.com/Indeterminacy-Intelligibility-SUNY-Systematic-Philosophy/dp/0791411745/

Quotes

"There's a sacred dimension to this that is trying to be born right now, because we need to be born beyond the meaning crisis, and the sacred needs to be born." - John Vervaeke [00:45:26]

"That's what grief is. There's a hole in reality because relationality has been lost." - John Vervaeke [00:47:38]

"The ongoing practice involves continually reaching into, and being reached by this process. This relationality that is also an emptiness is so important. It just seems like it's the most important thing." - Guy Sengstock [00:58:10]

Chapters 

[00:00:00] - Introduction to Guy Sengstock and the upcoming workshop. 

[00:02:00] - Discussing James Filler’s book and relationality. 

[00:14:00] - Exploring the significance of grief. 

[00:29:00] - The relational nature of being and wisdom. 

[00:42:00] - Delving into Zen philosophy and Neoplatonism. 

[00:54:00] - The transformative power of grief and loss. 

[01:10:00] - Concluding thoughts and reflections on relational ontology.

The Power of Beliefs and Relationships

Potential expands by seeing others as competent and good.

Quotes:
"If we change the beliefs of limited potential into unlimited potentiality for good, it has a completely different effect on how we show up at work."

"People often think, only poisonous things grow in the workplace, but kind things grow as well."

Episode Highlights:
Last year, I published a book called The Spirit of Work: Timeless Wisdom, Current Realities. Here is a quote from the opening page by the late Indigenous author Richard Wagamese. He wrote, "All my relations mean all." With that quote, Richard focused on principles of harmony, unity, and equality for all of creation.

In this episode, we'll look at what we have been missing in our workplaces, how to and the power of having positive relations.

What Has Been Missing in Our Workplaces?
Relationality, harmony, unity, and equality have been missing from the workplace since the beginning of the industrial revolution. Richard's text describes a mindset, an attitude about who we are and how we should be in the world. We all carry these attitudes, mostly unconscious expressions of what we see social reality as. One of our powers as humans is to reflect on who we are and our actions.

The problem is a misdiagnosis of a malady that cannot be solved with logical proof alone. Research, statistics, and logical arguments do not have the power to affect hearts, minds, or behaviors. Reasoning does not affect people's deep-seated beliefs and allegiances to the communities they identify with. Attitudes and beliefs that see human nature as predominantly aggressive, self-serving, and incorrigibly motivated by self-interest dominate our workplace systems.

They are supported by books, movies, and games that project a bleak dystopian view of a human race with no future other than destruction. These attitudes have in common a limited view of what it means to be a human being and what it means to be a human being at work.

How Our Beliefs About Others Discourage or Encourage Growth:
What if we saw that people are motivated by being inspired and seen as competent and good? Changing these limiting beliefs about others into seeing their unlimited potentiality for good has a completely different effect on how we show up at work.

I used to believe I was surrounded by incompetence. When I examined it, I had a sense of superiority and rightness over everybody else that did not allow me to be open to learning or see things as they actually were.

Now if I feel frustrated with someone at work, I ask how I could have contributed to the issue and how we could turn this around together. This allows me to suspend judgement, investigate reality and make better decisions.

The Power of Positive Relationships:
As human beings, we need to appreciate the importance of positive relationships to growth. An 83-year-old Harvard study started in 1938 about the determinants of health, concluded that positive relationships keep us happier, healthier, and living longer. Although other actions matter, positive relationships have the most influence on well-being.

Reflective Questions:

1. How does your belief about who you are and how you should be in the world affect your relationship to work?
2. How do your beliefs about how the world works, why people act the way they do, and what constitutes reality affect your approach to the workplace? 
3. How do you show up at work because of these beliefs?

We tend to take these claims for granted: “Human beings are essentially relational.” “No man is an island.” “We’re created for connection.” “We’re made for relationships.” And testing the limits of this can be pretty much diabolical. Evan Rosa traces two stories of parental deprivation: Harry Harlow's "Monkey Love Experiments" and the horror of 1990's discovery of Romanian asylums for orphans, documented in the 1990 report "The Shame of a Nation,” on 20/20.

Then psychologist Mari Clements (Glenville State College, formerly Fuller School of Psychology) discusses the importance of healthy marriage dynamics for young children’s development and how it provides a secure emotional base; the relational imago Dei; the close emotional bonds that must take place early in life in order to provide the relational stability relational creatures need; we talk about important phases of human development, into adulthood; and the theological backdrop to these questions of the human drive and need for emotional connection.

This episode was made possible in part by the generous support of Blueprint 1543. For more information, visit Blueprint1543.org.

About Mari Clements

Mari Clements is Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs and Professor of Psychology at Glenville State College. Prior to this, she taught at Fuller School of Psychology and Penn State University.

Show Notes

• We tend to take these claims for granted: “Human beings are essentially relational.” “No man is an island.” “We’re created for connection.” “We’re made for relationships.” And testing the limits of this can be pretty much diabolical.
• Harry Harlow’s Monkey Love Experiments—Rhesus Monkeys (Video)
• “The Shame of a Nation,” 20/20 (1990) (Video)
• How family dynamics and marital conflict impacts children
• “If you stay in your marriage for the sake of the children, then you deserve, and your child deserves, for you to work on your marriage for the sake of the children. Just being together is actually not better for kids. The kids who look really bad are the kids whose parents are engaged in repetitive and nasty and awful conflict. And they're not getting good models for how to solve problems in their own relationships. They're not getting good models for what to expect from marriage. They're not getting good models for what that marriage relationship is supposed to be.”
• Even four-year-olds notice when parents are in conflict.
• Marriage as a secure emotional base for children.
• Parenting together as stewardship and sacred responsibility
• “In your relationship, you should glorify God better together than you would separately.”
• “There's a very important connection between how it is that children see their parents and how it is they typically see God.”
• Conditional love can produce an earning mindset in a child, not just with respect to the parent, but to God.
• Don’t be a Karen-parent who thinks their child can do no wrong.
• “That's the interesting thing about people, even when they're doing terrible things, they often are doing them for good reasons, right? In therapy you can hear couples say incredibly hurtful and awful things to each other.”
• The relational image of God
• Study of Infants in Orphanages during World War I and World War II: Infants with physical needs taken care of still wasted away and even died without human contact.
• God as Trinity, Jesus as Incarnational
• Relating rightly to our neighbors
• Impact of spousal treatment on how children treat parents and others.
• Wire Monkey vs Soft and Cuddly Monkey
• A close emotional bond must take place early in life in order to provide the relational stability relational creatures need.
• Definition of adulthood
• Babies can do amazing things.
• Still Face Experiment
• Intellectual vs Relational definitions of the Imago Dei
• Intellectual disability
• Bringing psychology into the service of theology

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Mari Clements
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Macie Bridge and Kaylen Yun
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
• This episode was made possible in part by the generous support of Blueprint 1543. For more information, visit Blueprint1543.org.

"To be a poet is to be an exile," says poet Christian Wiman. He echoes the most influential writer on his early life and work, Simone Weil, who wrote in her Gravity & Grace: "We must take the feeling of being at home into exile. We must be rooted in the absence of a place." Wiman spent most of the 2020 leg of the pandemic curating a story about home using 100 poems, seamed with prose from some of the wisest denizens of our species to narrate the tale. He joins Evan Rosa to read some of the poetry from the collection, talk about the connection between poetry and faith, and continue to examine the meaning of home through exiles' eyes. 

This episode was made possible in part by the generous support of the Tyndale House Foundation. For more information, visit tyndale.foundation.

Show Notes

• Home: 100 Poems
• Joseph Brodsky, exile from Russa
• Defining "Home"
• Mahmoud Darwish, "I Belong There"
• "I have learned and dismantled all the words in order to draw from them, a single word: home."
• Josef Pieper on tautology
• Poetry as a way of inhabiting rather than defining
• The epigraph from He Held Radical Light: "The world does not need to come from a god. For better or worse, the world is here. But it does need to go to one (where is he?). And that is why the poet exists." (Juan Ramon Jimenez)
• Why does the poet exist?
• "Existence is not existence until it's more than existence."
• Jack Gilbert, "Singing in My Difficult Mountains"
• "My fine house that love is."
• "To be a poet is to be an exile."
• Simone Weil: "We must be rooted in the absence of a place." (Gravity & Grace)
• A traveling place
• Modern humanity in exile, a secular notion
• Weil, The Need for Roots
• "I think all poets though, experience the feeling of displacement that comes with perception."
• W.B. Yeats on Maude Young, "I might have thrown poor words away and attempted to live."
• "Life is the thing. Words are always a kind of displacement."
• Wendell Berry's Sabbath: "There is a day when the road neither comes nor goes, and the way is not a way, but a place."
• Frantically nomadic
• Restlessness and the pull toward security
• Rooted in relationships
• "In my 20s, Simone Weil was the most important writer in my life. ... But now in my fifties, I feel a little differently. I still love Simone Weil, but I appreciate very much the work that someone like Wendell Berry has done to secure an existence against all the odds, secure a kind of existence in one place, and make it out of language as well."
• Vincent Van Gogh and Gaston Bachelard
• Stabilizing and Destabilizing
• Van Gogh: Life is round
• Bachelard: Dwelling in images and words
• Some real element of the past, brought into the present with metaphysical power: "I think there's some real element of the past of memory, that is made alive and volatile and even salvific, and it's not an image of youth. It is the actual thing being brought into the present."
• He Held Radical Light: seeking, through poetry, "those moments of mysterious intrusion, that feeling of collusion with eternity, of life and language riled to the one wild charge.”
• Poetry: the main way faith sustains Wiman
• "All poets are Jews." (Maria Sativa)
• "All poets are believers." (Christian Wiman)
• Something in poetry itself to further existence
• "If you do not believe in poetry, you cannot write it." (Wallace Stevens)
• Glory to God for dappled things
• The role of mystery in poetry and faith
• Following the music of poetry in a physical, physiological, improvisational way
• Wendell Berry on the Kingdom of God: "We contain that which contains us."
• Home in painful division in Wendell Berry
• Carson McCullers: Improvisation
• Braithwaite, "Bass"
• How is poetry in conversation with perplexity?
• James Baldwin, "Sonny's Blues" (Christian Wiman's "favorite short story in the world")
• "Dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing an order on it."
• Deep consolation in poetry
• Responding to the music of poetry
• Read poetry out loud
• Can you write good poetry without suffering much?
• George MacKay Brown, "Old Fisherman with Guitar"
• What is a life worth living? Creating and loving
• The pursuit of God is wrapped up with creating art and being freed to love.
• The impact of Christian Wiman's "Prayer"

About Christian Wiman

Poet Christian Wiman is Professor of the Practice of Religion and Literature at Yale Divinity School. He’s the author of several books of poetry, including Every Riven Thing, Hammer is the Prayer, and his most recent, Survival Is a Style. His memoirs include the bracing and beautiful My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer and He Held Radical Light: The Art of Faith, the Faith of Art. He edited an anthology of 100 poems on Joy a few years ago, and just released Home: 100 Poems this month.

Introduction (Evan Rosa)

"To be a poet is to be an exile," says Christian Wiman, a poet and Professor of the Practice of Religion and Literature at Yale Divinity School. Wiman knows this personally. When he was younger than now, he moved 40 times over a 15 year period. He would come early to work as Editor of Poetry Magazine to write his own, spilling line after line onto page from the driver seat of his car (he wrote my favorite poem of his that way he tells me). And the writer that defined him then was Simone Weil, who wrote in her Gravity and Grace, "We must take the feeling of being at home into exile. We must be rooted in the absence of a place."

And I wonder, if all poets are exiles, does that make us all poets? The generalized unease and anxiety that comes with being human often leaves us longing for a home. And each of us imagine a particular place, a perspective, a people, when we think of home. But it's always longing, isn't it. Especially in light of the fact that "we are home to each other"—that home is ultimately a relational reality built and maintained and indwelled with people—if that's true then no wonder we long for home all the more, because we long to be accepted, received, and loved all the more.

A recent theme of the podcast has been exile and migration. War correspondent Janine Di Giovanni offered perspective on the vanishing Christian population in the middle east; biblical scholar Francisco Lozada helped us view faith through the eyes of the immigrants hopeful sojourn. Today, that continues, even as we consider the very meaning of home by way of poetry.

Christian Wiman spent most of the 2020 leg of the pandemic curating a story about home using 100 poems, using with prose from some of the wisest denizens of our species to narrate the tale. The book came out this month, and you can listen to Miroslav Volf and Christian Wiman discuss the project on episode 36 of the podcast.

I asked Chris to come back on the show to read more of the poems he selected, talk about the connection between poetry and faith, and continue to examine the meaning of home through exiles' eyes. You might think that's exactly the wrong way to wonder about home. But Odysseus would tell you different as he fights his way back to Ithaca. Moses would tell you different as he leads the Jews through the wilderness. Jesus would tell you different as he goes to prepare a place for you.

And what other option do we have as wandering wonderers anyway—always longing for home, always praying for, in Christian Wiman's words, "those moments of mysterious intrusion, that feeling of collusion with eternity, of life and language riled to the one wild charge.”

Thanks for listening, and enjoy.

Production Notes

• This podcast featured poet Christian Wiman
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Martin Chan, Nathan Jowers, Natalie Lam, and Logan Ledman
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give