Man was never meant to be alone. He was created to exist in relationships. It is for this reason that a man leaves mother and father to marry his woman and start new relationships as lovers of one another and of their children. Men seek friendships and find great joy in the relationships with their friends. The ultimate fear and punishment for men is to be cut off from such human relationships. Sin is the destruction of relationships. Grace is the restoration, growth and flowering of such relationships.
I exist in a web of relationships – with nature, with people and with God. Nature is the environment that makes human life possible. She may sometimes be violent but has always been nurturing of humans. After all it was from the cataclysmic changes in nature that the primeval broth, from which live eventually emerged, was ‘cooked up’. I am an embodied consciousness with others in the world. I was born into the world through the love and care of Ima and Tatang. With the same love and care, I have brought others into this world. And along my journey I have been blessed by the presence of other loving and caring persons. I find the ultimate meaning of all these relationships in the God who created us all. I may not sense him the way I sense other things and beings in creation. But He has left enough signs and wonders in His creation for me to know, encounter and love Him.
Behold the Lamb of God who restores all of creation in perfect relationships with Him and with one another.
The next day he saw Jesus coming towards him and declared, ‘Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world! This is he of whom I said, “After me comes a man who ranks ahead of me because he was before me.”
John 1:29-30