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The first of the concentric circles beyond the self is that which has to do with an other, the person with whom we are in most intimate relationship. The second circle, to which we turn in this chapter, is what I have here called "familial" -- that is to say, with our family or in similar groupings. By the family I do not mean only what nowadays sociologists call "the nuclear family" -- husband, wife, and children. What we shall be considering is the relatively close-knit unit or group, composed of a few people -- normatively, of course, a family in the ordinary sense but also other possible associations that involve the presence of a person with several others, so that there can be an expression of belonging, with mutual love and concern, sympathy, and understanding, and hence the opportunity and occasion for enrichment and growth in each of the participants. Perhaps one may think here of communes or of very close friends with whom one finds real companionship.

We have seen, in the intimate relations of person-to-person, negative possibilities that can seriously damage if not destroy the relationship. Here, as we turn to larger groupings, we may profit by looking at the positive side. When we do this, we shall have a useful indication of the elements that constitute a healthy and mature existence as this may be shared in exactly such familiar situations or in those that resemble them.

The negatives have been self-centeredness, depersonalization. cruelty, carelessness or irresponsibility, and disproportionate emphasis upon one single aspect of the relationship -- and with these a joylessness in the linking of one with an other. The positives, therefore, will be an awareness of others and a sharing of life with them, an augmenting of personal identity and integrity, an upbuilding in healing and caring, concern for the others that will not permit cruelty or carelessness, and a stress upon the wholeness of each in the grouping -- and with all these, a joy in being together which makes the common life delightful and aesthetically fulfilling or harmonious. As we went through the negatives, so here we shall go through the positives. For the positives respond to, and at the same time manifest, human needs and their satisfaction. Just as in one-to-one relationships the negatives damage and may destroy, so the positives (now applied to familial groupings) will produce right ways of becoming and, hence, promote sound and healthy development. In such groupings, seen positively, there is the opportunity for a genuine flowering of human potentiality. Perhaps this is why the family and suchlike groupings are commonly regarded as among the most rewarding of all modes of human community.

In our relationships with one other person, but also in the larger familial relations we are now considering, what is being sought and from time to time achieved is genuine mutuality. It is in fact belonging in a very real sense, where one knows others and enjoys being with them, yet with due regard for their integrity and for their personal identity. They are not thought to be "individuals" in isolation from others; their belonging seems instinctively to entail a desire to share in common concerns and interests. The loner, who has no such urge, is not very typical of most of the human race. He or she may best be seen, perhaps, as someone whose natural human wish for sharing has somehow been warped or stunted, maybe in early childhood or at a later stage where there has been a sense of rejection or disregard. Normally and typically, every man and woman wants and seeks for companionship of some sort, not only with those who are closest but with others as well.

I have already urged that it is a mistake to think that humans are by nature totally self centered. The error arises from a wrong interpretation of the obvious fact that everybody wants to be a self, to have a sense of the value of his or her selfhood, and to realize, so far as may be, the potentialities given in that selfhood. Thus, self-awareness and even a degree of self-concern are both necessary for each of us and also a condition for the sharing that each seeks. Without such specific identity and the related integrity of self there would be nothing to share; we should all of us be lost in a repetition of the same thing over and over again. There would be a dull and uninviting uniformity that would fail to seek, find, and value the variety and difference that makes human existence both delightful or enjoyable and also painful. The union of persons, both in the more intimate sense and in the wider sense of degrees of sociality, requires that there be distinct persons, each marked by his or her own speciality, with whom association may be found. Of the pain that this necessarily entails we shall speak later; here let it be said that it is erroneous to assume, as have some careless theologians and sociologists among others, that human wrong is located in self-concern. The truth is that everybody needs to be aware that he or she counts in the total human picture. Wrong enters the picture only at the point where this entirely natural and necessary self-concern becomes the controlling interest, so that others are given no place in thought and practice. That is the contradiction of mutuality and is the kind of belonging in which other persons are taken to be only adjectival to one’s own existence.

It is easily seen that familial groupings of the kind we are now discussing are made possible only through this wish for mutuality. Common enterprises, shared concerns, pursuit of agreed upon goals, and the like provide for us the means through which giving-and-receiving may be attained. But they should not become exaggerated or obsessive, so that there is nothing else in the relationship. A husband and a wife have their shared concern for their children, if they have any; they are concerned also about the house in which they live and about whatever initial interests may have drawn them together in the first place. In participation one with the other they find a genuine fulfillment of selfhood, and society at large is enriched by this achievement. A central devotion to what we may style "the common good" is part of the sense. When Rollo May writes in his book Paulus (p. 113) about his friend and teacher Paul Tillich, he speaks about Tillich’s relationships with others by saying, "His love for us was relentless in his . . . insistence on our best. It was a magnificent grace to us that he would not let us escape from becoming what we truly are." Here we see both a deep appreciation of each for herself or himself and a readiness to demand this from those with whom one is associated. At the same time, in the devotion to a common good -- in this case, to the particular subject in which both have an interest -- there is a fine instance of healthy and enriching ways of promoting for each the fullest realization of selfhood that is possible. Each of us, in becoming, needs exactly some such awareness of belonging with others in the total human enterprise.

Tied in with this is our second point. Familial life when at its best is so ordered that the personal quality of others is augmented; they cannot be treated as if they were merely objects or things to be used by one person simply to promote that person’s own development. This is an implication of genuine love. Such love cannot conceivably wish to "thingify" or depersonalize; when we see depersonalizing taking place, we can be sure that instead of love we have only a sentimental substitute or what amounts to a mere pretension (romantic or tolerant) for true concern. Words are easy to speak, but what is important in relationships is acts done, rather than chatter, and done in a manner that assists growth in others.

If this is true, then it is obvious that a familial grouping cannot be marked by cruelty, whether this is of a plainly physical sort or the more subtle (but more harmful) kind that likes to make others feel uncomfortable or unwanted or unnecessary. Love forbids such cruelty. Love is always for healing and never for hurting. In intimate relationships this sadism can be terrible in its effects; so also in familial groupings it can be frightening in the way in which it damages integrity and leads to a deterioration of character not only in the victim but also in the one who inflicts the harm. On the other hand, concern for others expressed in helpful and upbuilding action results in the best growth of all who are in the group -- including, once again, the person who shows this concern.

Such dedication to the good of others does not imply a lack of firmness nor does it acquiesce readily in less than the best. The quotation from Rollo May about his friend and teacher Paul Tillich shows that one of the ways in which genuine caring is manifested is precisely in the insistence that others shall "become what they truly are," to use May’s own phrase. In other words, they are assisted in realizing their potentialities and are (so to say) incited to move in that direction. Nothing can be worse than indifference in this matter; such unconcern has the effect of cruelty, even if often quite unconsciously, by negating the other. There is an old saying that speaks about "being cruel to be kind." That is an unhappy way of putting it, for cruelty is never right. But it probably is intended to point to what I have called firmness, and what others have styled "adamant demand," in the expectation of, as well as in an insistence upon, the best from others. This shows love in a way much deeper than the laissez-faire attitude that is easy to adopt but often enough is only a demonstration that there is no real caring at all.

Most of us can testify to the sense of hurt we have felt when someone with whom we thought we were in close rapport in some group of friends -- or in family life in the narrower sense -- demonstrates by act that he or she does not really very much care for us. Many a family or group of close friends can bear witness to the damage done when one of its members is like that or when the whole group shows carelessness. The consequence is a sense of discouragement, for it implies disregard or dismissal from consideration. This may not be cruelty in either the physical or psychological sense, narrowly interpreted, but certainly it is cruelty in that it is a failure to recognize and respond to the personal quality of each member. What Coleridge used to call "personeity" is integral to the human self: it must be respected. When it is respected, there can be a remarkable flowering of hitherto unsuspected possibility. Like a rose that opens its petals when the sun shines upon it, this or that person may open up in a remarkable manner. There is no place where one or the other of these -- augmenting or diminishing -- may be more effectual than in familial groups.

Does each care for all? That is the basic question here, and it is related immediately to the responsibility about which I have spoken. This responsibility includes the two factors of readiness to respond to others who are associated with us and our accountability in respect to those others. The latter can be possible only when the former is present. The one who can take seriously his or her accountability for others is the one who first of all has "answered back" to the reality of those others. In groupings like the family, the importance of this can readily be seen; if I do not respond to my husband or wife or children, in that profound sense, I am all too likely to be careless about responsibility for them and to them. But when there is on my part an openness and a genuine responsiveness. I find myself seriously involved and know that in however small a degree I am accountable for them and to them. There is a deepening of mutuality and a growing-together in the relationship that is rewarding and joyous.

This carries with it a concern for what I have styled the "self-esteem" of others. That means that I cannot let them think that they have no value in themselves; I cannot "take care of them" as if they were worthless or incompetent or helpless. The integral selfhood of the others, each with his or her self-esteem, demands that i acknowledge them for themselves, with the capacity to make their decisions and "do their own thing." No other, however closely knit with me in some grouping, is an extension of myself; to think that way, above all to act as if that were the case, is destructive of the giving and receiving that can characterize human belonging when it is functioning at its best.

This is why awareness of and sensitivity to mutuality or sharing must be part of familial existence. This closeness, however, needs to be put in the context of other and wider contacts. Without that context, there is the danger that the family and its like will become so focused on itself, so inward-looking, that it becomes a cell of unhealthy life, not of healthy and developing life. Sociologists and anthropologists have spoken of the way in which the nuclear family -- the small group of three or four persons -- can be vicious because it may (not must) become centered on its own existence and, hence, entirely inward-looking -- like a pond with no outlet. The small group is especially open to danger here. A married couple with one or two children can spend all their time and effort on themselves. They can lose sight of the larger community, save insofar as they are anxious to keep up appearances. They can try to make their neighbors and acquaintances think that they are sufficient unto themselves and, hence, reject advances from or toward others round about. The final result can be disastrous,

What Sir Edmund Leach in his Reith lectures a few years ago called "the dirty little secrets" of the group -- by which he meant not sexual doings of one sort or another but the group’s financial position, its petty maneuvers to maintain a place in society, its secret and "shameful" (as it sees it) dependence on hire-purchase plans or installment buying -- may become so dominant that all its time and effort will be given to such worries. In the long run there is then a failure, since it is not possible for any group to be sufficient unto itself. We all need the give-and-take of our societal existence. And for what it is worth, it is useful to point out that what is here true for the familial relationships is also, and sometimes horribly, true in respect to neighborhoods, or cities, and nations. Ours is indeed a belonging world, and we can live well and happily only on such terms as are appropriate to such a world.

The analogue, in familial groups, to the disproportionate or "inordinate" emphasis on genital sexuality in one-to-one relationships is to be found in a total centering upon the particular associations of the group. Just as the physical union of two persons becomes rich and rewarding, and not only gratifying in a physical and emotional sense, when it is expressive of a wide sharing of life together, so also a family that is totally centered in itself, without concern for those around it and for the broader matters they represent, is likely to lose a great deal, while with such an awareness and wider sharing it is likely to be rich and rewarding. Total group-centering can be morbid and sick and even self-destructive. On the other hand, openness to others and delight in their presence and activity can give color and vitality to the group’s own existence. A family -- say, a couple with children -- needs that context. From such contacts with the "outside world" opportunity is given for surprise, contrast, challenge, and joy. Thus, the family is delivered from what somebody has well called "the abyss of self-centered isolation."

I have spoken of joy, and this brings us to the last of the positive directives or guidelines for healthy and happy familial life. A group that does not experience such joy in belonging together is hardly likely to survive for very long, save by a superficial bonding of those who really have nothing in common. The members exist together, to be sure, but they find no delight or satisfaction in that association. But this joy is not to be had for nothing. This is why entrance upon familial life of any sort requires care in the selection of partner or partners, along with a willingness to spend oneself for the familial group being established.

In that selection, several factors play their part, such as common interests, but also a sufficient difference is needed so that life does not become monotonous. What is wanted is contrast but not conflict. A beautiful painting has no mere repetition of color and line but presents sufficient contrast to give variety and charm without setting up an ugly conflict among these colors and lines. This is even more obvious in music, where there must not be discordant opposition of theme and mood and style but a harmonization of these in a grand totality of sound. In a familial group something of this sort of pattern should also be present. Harmony is the precondition for the deepening of life together, with the joy this can bring. And as the years go by, each person in the group comes to understand the differences, to accept them, and to delight in them.

Thus, a family needs the positives that I have been presenting; it needs also to avoid, so far as possible, the negatives that are their opposite. But it is unlikely that any familial group is likely to achieve perfection in this or any other respect. Certainly genuine effort can help. But human life together, like the life of each one of us, is a becoming, not a static thing; it is a direction taken, a routing of experiences, toward a goal that is valued as important. Judgment at any point along the line should always be in terms of that direction or routing -- this is true for a group as for a person. Specific momentary acts or thoughts or words have their significance in that they indicate whether or not the direction or routing is for the best ends. Failure to understand this and to come to terms with it will produce dissatisfaction and even pessimistic rejection of good already known. Or it may produce a kind of easy satisfaction with the status quo, acceptance of the partial good as if it were the fully realized one, or dismissal of the final goal through concentration on this or that specific problem.

I have said that the nuclear family is a fact of our own day. It is often defended as being the way things have always been, to such an extent that it is given an almost idolatrous devotion, not least in ethical and religious discussions. As a matter of fact, however, it is of fairly recent origin. In older times, as social historians have shown, the extended family was the normal arrangement, and it still continues to be normal in many parts of the world, even if in Western countries this is not always recognized. Such an extended family included in its membership relatives and other near members of the clan or sect or group. There would be grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins, children, and, of course, the parents of the contemporary group or those who otherwise were in a position of leadership. The numbers and the kinds of membership varied, to be sure, from culture to culture, place to place, and time to time. But the grouping would cross generations and would bring together old and young, immediate and somewhat more remote family connections and siblings, and others, too -- all of these might live in one place or sufficiently close so that a common life was possible. Even so recently as the days before the First World War, as some of the older of us can remember, it was quite normal for one or more grandparents, perhaps an aunt or an uncle or both, sometimes cousins of first-degree, and even others somewhat related, to share a house together or to be readily accessible in times of trouble or in moments of familial celebration. They would give help where this was needed; they would be consulted about problems; they would participate in family activities: and often they would have their part in family decision making.

Obviously, all this is not very frequent today, and in many parts of our Western world it has disappeared altogether. The familial group is smaller, not only because family planning has become a matter of ordinary practice but also because economic and social conditions have made large households almost impossible to maintain. Older people are likely to be cared for in special homes or communities for the aged and for those who have retired from active work. Sometimes, of course, the elderly prefer to be on their own. But even if they do not (and many do not) wish this, social pressures are sufficient to make them feel that it will be better for them not to burden others by their presence and demands.

One of the problems this situation has brought about is precisely the possibility of a far too ingrown and self-retarding attitude. The family is closed in upon itself and lacks genuine openness to others, especially those who by reason of consanguinity or similar status might provide fresh opportunities for enrichment and growth, with more challenges for new kinds of response and with awareness of the diversity of human existence. The end result may be a refusal to admit others at all: anybody who "butts in" will certainly be rejected. This need not happen; but it does indeed happen far too frequently. Doubtless we all know familial groups where this introversion is found.

Probably one of the main causes for the increasingly large numbers of divorces or separations in the usual family group is simply that husband or wife become bored or "fed up" with the narrowness and restrictions they meet. They then try to find something or someone new and interesting. Children can suffer badly in these circumstances, although they are better off when there is a real break if the parents are so bored with one another or even so dislike one another that the children’s existence is made miserable. People often say that they will "stick together" because the children otherwise will have no "real home." Of course, the fact is that in such a situation these children do not have a "real home" in any serious sense. All they have is a place in which they can sleep and eat.

Familial life is not ideal or perfect most of the time. It can only have value if and as its members decide to work at it, not in a painfully severe fashion but with genuine willingness to do what they can to promote and augment the relationship, with due recognition of likely failures and with a readiness to accept these when they happen. But to do this requires forgiveness. That is to say, each must make allowances for the defects of others quite as much as being aware of his or her own defects. All must seek the good of each. To forgive is never easy; neither is acceptance of forgiveness. Yet without the spirit of forgiveness nobody can hope to share life with others. This is not the same as advocating cheap toleration or easy acceptance. True forgiveness demands a concern and care for others, a sincere readiness to cooperate with them so that their best may be achieved, and a faithful expectation that each can grow toward that best. Here, of course, the religious awareness of divine forgiveness provides the clue to what human forgiveness must be. And it requires always a not easily acquired willingness to take risks.

With forgiveness goes forbearance. Here is a situation in which "letting be," to use a phrase from Martin Heidegger with which John Macquarrie has made us familiar, is so important. Just as God’s continuing creative activity does not directly "make" things but rather allows, encourages, and assists them to "make themselves," so in the familial group we can allow others to "make themselves," with all the difficulties this may seem to include. I believe that this principle runs through the whole cosmos, but its necessity is very plain for the familial relationship. Assumption of control by any one member of the group can have as a consequence the denial to others of the proper exercise of their capacity for free decision. When something like this happens, we no longer have a genuine family unit; instead, we have lord and servants, master and slaves, tyrant and submissive subjects. It becomes even worse when the servants, slaves, or subjects come to feel and to act as if this is the way things must be; then they have given up their human dignity and have denied the human potentiality that is properly theirs.

Probably most of us have known familial groups in which one of the parents assumes just such a position of total domination. If there are children, they will revolt. The parent will be greatly disturbed by this revolt, whether it is subtly expressed or when it is implemented in the child or children actually "leaving home" or manifesting outright and open rebellion. But the person or persons who are subjected to domination have not really had a ‘home." They have felt that they are in a prison, and they become (sometimes violently) antagonistic to the parent who, doubtless with good intentions, has denied them the freedom so essential to becoming truly human. It is tragic to see how frequently the one who dominates does this with "good intentions"; it reminds one of Pascal’s saying that people "never sin so seriously as when they do it with good intentions."

I have said that in this chapter I am using the word family to include not only what is usually meant by that word but also other types or varieties of close relationship with more than an other. One of these, about which there is not time to speak in detail, is the "commune," a mode of grouping that in some parts of the Western world has become increasingly popular. Observers have predicted that this sort of social grouping will be the successor to the nuclear family. One may doubt that this will happen; yet certainly a commune can often come close to the old extended family, even if the reason for its existence is different, The fact remains that a considerable number of young people are now finding genuine fulfillment in life together in this new fashion.

But maybe it is not so new, after all. One thinks of monasteries and convents and similar small communities that have existed in the past and that exist even today. In those communities there are "rules," like the famous one devised by St. Benedict and still in force in the religious order he founded, This rule allows for considerable diversity yet establishes a remarkable unity among those who accept it. The trouble with such rules, however, is that they may be taken as absolute, without regard for the changes needed in adapting them to a new age. No rule can be final and complete; plainly enough, as the poet wrote, "new occasions teach new duties," while "time makes ancient good uncouth." Fortunately, this is realized today, and most of the followers of the "religious life" in convents and monasteries and similar communities have labored in recent years for a considerable relaxation, but without giving up their general agreement on basic principles. To a large degree, freedom is granted to the members, but they are still bound together by glad acceptance of the common life, and they use the rule as a guideline rather than as an arbitrarily imposed dictate.

A family grouping of any sort should be a cell of healthy and joyous caring, where warmth is felt and where love is experienced. Such groupings make possible remarkable development; they are enormously helpful to men and women in their becoming. And when we move from the intimate one-to-one relationship, through the sort or relationships with which in this chapter we have been concerned, to an even wider range (the third of my concentric circles) of human belonging in the broad social development of the human race, we shall find that many of the same principles hold good. Of the religious community, to which we shall later also give attention, this is obviously true. And the reason for this continuity is, I believe, that the very grain of the universe runs that way. In other words, these principles are in accordance with the divine activity in the creation.

Human existence is the enterprise of becoming a created finite lover, in which each person belongs to society. The aim or goal is the increase of good among all the participants. But to put it in that way is to overlook the equally important fact that each of us has his or her own specificity or speciality; it is also to fail to notice that men and women desire most of all that there shall be an other -- a person who can become, in the belonging that is a necessary factor, the ‘dearest and best." This need not exclude other less intimate relationships, for to love an other usually brings about a further readiness for and an openness to other contacts, less intensive but very real, with other persons who are not the chosen other. When such openness and readiness is absent, the relationship between the primary two can very well become jealous and possessive. And if this happens, what is seen is not really love but an expression of self-centeredness and often a hidden wish to control. Love is mutuality, not ownership, and one way it can be achieved is precisely through the wider kind of contacts and concerns.

Human loving in its personal aspect might be seen as the first of a series of concentric circles, whose point of departure (so to say) is the self in its personal identity. We should love ourselves and have self-esteem; there is nothing to be said for rejecting or negating this. Jesus is reported to have taught that we "should love our neighbor as ourselves," and that implies that each of us can have an entirely proper self-concern, which is very different from self-centeredness to the exclusion of others in our general belonging. Then, a second circle is the kind of relationship we have with our family or our immediate friends. A third circle is to be seen in our community or the neighborhood of which we are part. And beyond this, there is still another circle where we are concerned with our fellows in our country or nation (I shall call this, for convenience sake, the "city"), making us English or American or Russian or Chinese. Finally, there is the human race as a whole and the natural setting in which all of us exist. It will not be possible in these chapters to give attention to all of these circles. What we shall do is to speak first in this chapter of what I call "personal human relationships," while in the two following chapters our interest will be centered on "familial relationships" and broader "social relationships" (including neighborhood and the like, with reference also to the significance of the "city"). A final topic will be "the religious community"; this must be discussed because the orientation here adopted includes human existence together with, in, and under God, the primal cause and the final affect.

The reason for this last inclusion ought to be apparent. In and through all the circles, a response is being made, rightly or wrongly, for good or for ill, to the world at large and, beyond that, to the cosmic Love-in-act. Thus, we have to do with what the philosopher Josiah Royce used to call "world loyalty." Hence, there is always a genuine religious response, although this may not necessarily be made in a vividly conscious fashion. In the different religions of the world, however diverse these may be in their ideas of deity and of human fulfillment, or even in their substitution of some other devotion like Buddhist Nirvana, there is just such a "religious" response.

A rightly developing personality is related in differing ways and with differing intensity with the whole range of reality, and humans are becoming what they have in them to become in their response to this whole range, again with differing intensity and with various kinds of awareness. Incidentally, it is worth our noting that the very word response has two meanings. One is precisely this "answering back" or response in the usual sense; another, which in common usage becomes "responsibility," is our human accountability for what we do (or fail to do) in making just such a response. About this more will be said later.

Here we need also to recall our earlier insistence on the body-mind complex, which is our human existence, with its rationality, volition, moral capacity, and (above all, perhaps) aesthetic aspect and with its ability to give and receive in love. To remember this is to bring to mind that we are speaking of a unity of selfhood. This needs to be taken seriously at every level but nowhere so much as in the circle of one-to-one relationships with an other. For we humans love with our body as well as with our mind or "soul," although this does not necessarily or always entail specifically genital contacts.

It will be useful to begin this chapter by giving due consideration to this broad fact about us and to see our human sexuality, in its deepest sense, as having much to do with how we respond. Each of us is a sexual creature like others in the animal kingdom, although our human sexuality is also different from that which we observe in that kingdom. There is a distinctive human kind of sexuality, both in the broader sense and also in the narrower genital sense.

In the animal realm, as a simple biological fact, the sexual drive, desire, and equipment are directed toward the reproduction of the race, with a high degree of excitation to promote this -- and perhaps also with some trace of affection on the part of those who engage in sexual activity. At the specifically human level, however, the primary function of the sexual desire, drive, and equipment is not reproductive but conjunctive or unitive. Of course, this does not make procreation unimportant or merely incidental. With persons of differing gender, the possibility of conception is usually present. Where a morally responsible decision has been taken by the partners, this is likely to be a consequence of sexual intercourse, and it is obviously right and desirable.

Part of the distinctively human expression of pervasive sexuality is the bringing of children into the world, at least for those who are not celibate (where such contact does not occur) or homosexual (where procreation is not possible). But it is also the case that the children are, or should be, desired by their parents and not accidentally conceived and also that those children should have care and wise training. This is why, in my conviction, contraception in the sense of "planned parenthood" is a moral duty. To reduce humans in their physical sexual activity to the level of the barnyard is surely wrong, and it is odd that those who ban contraception (save for the "rhythm" method) are, in fact, making just that reduction, certainly with good intentions, but thereby involving themselves in a strangely self-contradictory position. For in humans sexuality is the bodily and psychological basis for the possibility of shared love. This is plainly true for heterosexual persons; it is, I think, equally true for homosexual persons, about whom I shall have something more to say later in this chapter.

The meaning of human sexuality, then, is primarily relational. It is an essential component of human existence. Each of us is a sexual creature, as I have indicated; this is nothing to be ashamed of. It is integral to our nature as human and is part of our total human development in becoming and belonging. We are not with others simply "in our minds." We are with them in the concrete reality of our full humanness. Thus, human sexuality is a "doing," whether explicitly genital or not: it is not merely a "thinking" matter. In all our relationships with others, our sexuality is involved, although we are not consciously aware of this all the time. Even friendship between two persons, without such explicit acts, has its sexual component, and it should be acknowledged honestly. Failure to recognize this has led to much that is warped and twisted in human life. The "spinster" type (more often found among men than among women, I believe), the hypercritical person who is frequently also hypocritical, the nasty-mindedness often seen in persons who seem to be afraid of or to dislike anything remotely sexual, are not happy examples. If I really love another, I love that other with my whole self, not just with a selected portion of that self -- and in that wholeness the sexual component is unquestionably present.

To accept this is very important, especially in Anglo-Saxon lands where it has been thought for a long time that some human relationships can be totally platonic, spiritual, mental, nonphysical. This has led many people to fear such contacts as are found in Latin countries, where touching, kissing, embracing, and the like are taken for granted. We may conclude that in those countries there is a much healthier, because a more total, awareness of how humans function. Perhaps their acceptance of such contacts helps to explain why, as experts have told us, there are fewer serious emotional disturbances of a neurotic or psychotic kind than in our own lands. The sad truth is that many of us entertain, although not always consciously, a Manichean attitude toward the body, as part of a similar negative attitude toward the material world. We are altogether too "spiritual," rejecting or minimizing our embodiedness, which we tend to think to be somehow unfortunate or sometimes even "dirty."

That distaste or fear can be, in itself, a dangerous and damaging matter. What is even worse, it can lead to repressions that turn humans into suspicious and (as I have said) hypercritical or hypocritical creatures whose presence makes others uncomfortable and whose own inner lives can become frustrated and miserable. My point here is simply that the pervasive reality of sexuality is given in our human experience and is an entirely good thing. C.S. Lewis once put this neatly, "God must like sex, he made it." To accept this fact gladly, even joyously, is part of healthy human living. And as Lewis indicated in that brief remark, it is part of our gratitude to God to see that such sexuality is one of God’s good gifts that we are to use responsibly. That responsibility requires a certain human "control," as we shall argue in the sequal -- not control as servile obedience to imposed regulations set by society or even by God, but as useful guidelines to the best ways in which to express this inescapable part of our human existence.

One way of getting at the point is by considering the celibate man or woman whose specific vocation is not to act genitally but to redirect the sexual drive, desire, and equipment for other ends that are taken as good for that particular person. It may seem surprising to introduce such people at this place, but it is a great mistake to assume that monks and nuns in Catholic circles, or the members of the similar Taizé community among Protestants, have killed their sexuality. Doubtless, in the past many sought to do just that, but nowadays few if any monks or nuns would be willing to say that he or she has done this or wishes to do this. Sometimes, to be sure, men and women in an earlier age became celibate because of their fear of sexuality or because there was no other available place for them in society. They were expected in such instances "to put their sexuality to death," as the saying went. Not today, however. I think here of an Oxford monk who indignantly denied that he had done any such thing; what he had done, he said, was to seek a re-channeling of his sexual nature so that instead of having genital contacts he could express this human drive by serving others, by teaching, and by prayer. I think also of a nun whom I once knew well. In her presence one felt that one was with a person who used her inescapable sexuality to help other persons in a lovely, attractive, and entirely nongenital way.

There is a distinction, then, but not a separation, to be made between the deep, pervasive sexuality that is integral to our human nature, on the one hand, and the various ways (some genital, some in self giving without genital contact) of expression of that sexuality, on the other.

I have mentioned homosexuality, and a few words should be said about that sort of sexual expression, to which (we have been informed) perhaps 10 percent of the human family are oriented. In the past, people who were homosexually inclined, and especially those who were active in that respect, were regarded as sinful, corrupt, or criminal. Today they are seen by understanding people to be different but not deviant. They are the way they are through no choice of their own. What they should be given is assistance, when this is wanted, to live their lives happily and well, following their own orientation without condemnation or contempt. Happily, today those who are not blinded by uncriticized religious prejudice (including misuse of certain biblical passages) or conventional ideas of proper sexual behavior (as if morals were a matter of counting noses or following some social pattern without question) are ready to accept the fact of the homosexual orientation, and many religious groups are now prepared to adopt this positive attitude.

But if for homosexual people intimate relationships are more readily found with someone of their own gender, it is obviously true that the great majority of men and women find their fulfillment with people of the other gender. For most of these, the way for this expression is through the estate of marriage or some similar sharing of life together. This will include familial life, to which we turn in the next chapter. Here our concern is simply with the intimate relationship with an other, without necessarily involving such family life, the care of children, and whatever else has become part of the common manifestation of personal relationship. Certainly a one-to-one relationship deepens and develops human existence. At the same time, however, there is a possible distortion in that kind of belonging, which then produces unlovely results. In that case, there can be tragic twistings, jealousy, possessiveness, and other damaging consequences. I shall now say something about some aspects of this distortion, all of them of course related to the basic sexuality of humankind.

Before I do that, however, there is another point that should be made. I suppose some might think that the result of such a discussion as this would be to set up, as a sort of ideal, what is nowadays called "the well-adjusted person. I can only say, "God forbid!" if that is taken to mean the type often commended by certain followers of the "mental health" school, with no idiosyncrasies, no distinctive qualities, no particular marks of speciality. People like that are so well-adjusted to the expectations of conventional society that they become boring and dull. Anybody who is perfectly adjusted to contemporary conventional society is really very badly adjusted to the basic reality of things in the cosmos! Hence, far from urging any such model, I should urge that each person, in his or her specificity, is intended to become what he or she has the potential for becoming -- and that will mean great variety, many differing types of fulfillment and self-realization, each with its value and importance. The common principle here is only that each human should be moving toward actualization, with others, in and under the divine Love -- a Love, one may be sure, that prefers variety, novelty, and even oddity (if I may say so!) to the sheer uniformity that is to be found in products of a machine.

With this clear, let us now proceed to speak of the five aspects of human defection that seem to be the most serious manifestations of distortion in relationship. First of all, such a relationship can be consciously or unconsciously centered upon oneself, without due regard for the other person in it. Here there is a denial of the belonging side of human experience. One person may be so centered on himself or herself that the two cannot really share life, excepting in the most superficial fashion. Second, there can be the treatment of the other as if he or she were a thing, not a person. To be a person is to be a particular routing of experiences toward goals that satisfy latent potentialities special to each of us. But it is tragically possible to neglect or overlook this and to act with and toward another as if the other’s importance lay simply in providing a means toward one’s own satisfaction. Third, there can be cruel or hateful manifestations, either directly or in subtle psychological fashion; in either case, this is damaging to self-esteem in the other and turns that other into an object to be compelled and coerced. Fourth, in denial of such self-esteem or in disregarding it there can be the assumption of a wrong kind of responsibility, with a callous disregard of deepest opportunities for sharing life. As a young woman once said to me, "When somebody tells me that he will be responsible for me, I feel that he’s denying that I’m a real person and looks upon me as merely instrumental to his own desires!" -- this is nothing less than a subtle variety of rape. Fifth, there can be such a focus upon one particular aspect of the relationship (in specifically sexual matters, this may be an interest only in the physical side) that the total human personality is not taken into account, in all its richness and promise. In effect, each of these is basically a failure in genuine loving, as we shall see at the end of this chapter.

If we now turn to the first, or to wrong self-centeredness, it is obvious that we have here a denial of genuine reciprocity or mutuality. It is focused on what can be "got" from the other. Here there may seem to be some sort of giving, but it is a giving that is interested only in "the main chance" or in what the other may be persuaded to do or be. There may be some sort of response to the other, but this can be grudging and thoughtless, because it is only a way of using the other to secure what is wanted for the self. Of course, I am not here condemning the self-assertion that is proper if each of us is to have personal integrity and identity. Nobody need make himself or herself a doormat for others to trample under foot. That would be an inverted form of the pride that goes with total self-concern. But anybody who is arrogant, contemptuous of others, and thus wholly centered in self can never enter into deeply fruitful relationships. That sort of person is a fraud. The becoming that is so essential can only be had when the other’s becoming is recognized and valued for itself and not simply as adjectival to self.

A second and related sort of distortion is the depersonalization of the relationship. The other may be treated as something to be used, not as one who is accepted in his or her own becoming. This can happen in subtle ways, not always obvious to an observer. The truth is that genuine love always personalizes; in doing so it respects and values the personal integrity and identity of the other. In any sort of human contact, it is possible to be moving in this direction. Casual contacts with others, even on such limited occasions as dealing with those who serve one in a shop, can do that. They can have the possibility, however slight, of personalization, or alternatively someone can regard the other as a thing that is there only for her or his own benefit. In that latter case the other is reduced to a mere object -- for instance, in one’s casual contact with a shop assistant, where there could be no close relationship but where at best there might be friendliness and courtesy, the other could just as well be a vending machine. In more intimate relationships with the other, something of this sort can also happen. One uses the other for one’s own pleasure or satisfaction. And genuine love can never do that.

A third aspect of distortion is cruelty or actual damage to the partner. This sadistic attitude and pattern of behavior is plainly seen in certain kinds of physical sexuality. But it is also present in carelessness and indifference that are not explicitly sexual in the genital sense. In civilized society and among civilized persons, this sadism may be somewhat tempered, yet in person-to-person relationships it can be dreadfully apparent. The cutting comment, the unkind phrase, or the inconsiderate act may inflict frightful pain. Often this is not actually intended, but its avoidance demands from each one attention to the other and to the other’s feelings. It is also to be remembered that the person who acts sadistically is himself or herself a victim, quite as much, if less obviously, as is the actual object of the word or act. Fullness of human self-realization is denied to both, and this contradicts the love that is intended or desired.

A fourth aspect of distortion has to do with responsibility. I have noted that in our being thus responsible we should never fail to entertain a genuine esteem for the other. That other is to be accepted in and for himself or herself and never left to assume that her or his value is simply in being "available." Above all, the other cannot be made to feel that he or she is not worth very much. In giving help to the other in some problem or difficulty, the giving can be done in a way that puts the recipient at a disadvantage so that he or she is made to feel less of a person. But this need not be so; it is always possible to assist without condescension and without allowing the recipient to sense, somehow or other, that the donor is deigning to act kindly and helpfully.

Finally, there is the danger of denying proper proportion or patterning, in such a way that one particular element or aspect of the relationship is made so central that its wholeness or totality is denied or at least called into question. In the Middle Ages, this lack of proportion or patterning was known as inordination. For example, physical relations are good in themselves, as expressions of genuine love and mutuality; when they are all that matters in the relationship, they become patently inordinate and no longer can symbolize and augment mutuality or the sharing of total life. Similarly, a certain shared interest may originally draw people together, but if that is all they have in common, then wholeness is denied or minimized. Wider sharing provides a healthy setting for particular shared interests. Love is concerned to establish just that wider sharing.

In all these kinds of possible distortion, then, there is a rejection of real loving, although often, perhaps usually, this is not intended. Love moves toward a fulfillment in which each partner genuinely shares. Its contradiction can be found in each of the concentric circles and perhaps nowhere so obviously as in person-to-person relationships. Needless to say, this is not a matter of sentimentality; it is not mere emotionalism; it is not easy toleration. On the contrary, it can be adamant, difficult, demanding; yet it is always gracious, generous, and helpful. In our intimate one-to-one relations, with an other, there is much more intense caring: but even in ordinary day-to-day contacts there can be something of that same quality.

For the majority of members of the human race, as I have urged, this most intimate relationship is found in the estate of marriage, although in close friendships and in homosexual orientation it can also be present. Here I wish to speak very briefly about the way in which marriage may provide an occasion for distortion and damage. Even in the best of human institutions, of which marriage can serve as a supreme example, there can be damage when somehow the intention to share life fully is absent. Here is a one-to-one relationship par excellence. But it is not to be achieved without effort, although it is at its best when there is also real spontaneity in the expression of love together. And it may break down. Its preservation requires effort, and it is worth the trouble it takes to ensure its continuance. On the other hand, when there is an utter collapse of mutuality, it is surely better to recognize the fact and to separate. To paraphrase a saying of Jesus, "Marriage was made for man, not man for marriage." This enormously valuable and valued estate is not a straitjacket nor is it a Procrustean bed in which human capacities and talents are to be lopped off to accommodate men and women to an imposed condition of miserable union. If that is recognized, we must also admit that divorce may be the right thing under such tragic circumstances.

What it comes down to, then, is our understanding that human existence, in its becoming and in its belonging, is a direction for creative advance. By their very nature, humans are intended to be moving toward fulfillment in love, in mutuality and sharing, so that those who participate in any relationship, and above all in the intimate one that can be enjoyed with an other, may be given the opportunity to find satisfaction and realization of potentiality in and with this other and with others. Such a direction of life is open. to newness, with a greater future sharing, while in the present moment there is delight and happiness. What is more, such love can overflow; of this possibility, the child or children in a marriage stand as a symbol. The two can create with their offspring a little cell of creative loving.

The human enterprise is a great adventure, as we move from the relatively settled world of our past, through decisions and actions in the present, toward the unexplored but alluring world of the future. This forward movement gives zest to life, as Whitehead rightly saw and said. In no area is this adventure so promising as in the one-to-one, person-to-person, relationships where two human lives are glad to share and work together, for the best good of each and with love as the motivation and resource as well as the result of that sharing.

I conclude with one final point. Such genuine love is marked by a joy that rises above duty; it can be "fun." Why is this? The answer surely is that right functioning is always characterized by a deep sense of well-being. We know this about our bodies. When they are functioning rightly there is a basic contentment. So also for the whole range of our existence. When we are moving in the direction proper to us as humans we enjoy a feeling of satisfaction. This does not imply unimaginative, stolid, or dully repetitive existence. On the contrary, there may be and there should be something of a "divine discontent" in all human life, since none of us is fully and entirely what we have in us to become. There will be a striving toward as well as a desire for more and better things. At the same time there can be a wonderful happiness and a deep sense of joy in our relationship one with an other.

None of us can live to, of, and for self alone. To be human is not only to "become" but also to "belong" -- to belong with other people, sharing with them in the human situation, participating in their interests, receiving from them and giving to them. This is why talk about ourselves as "individuals" is misleading; we are not so much individuals as persons. The dictionary definition of individual is ‘one instance of a class, species, or type"; no mention is made of relationships. But the word person suggests -- or ought to suggest, if we have regard for the historical development of its usage -- just such relationships, contexts, and setting. When people speak of individuals, they usually imply a stress on the self alone, almost, if not always, in isolation or separation from others. When they speak of persons, they imply the notion of social belonging in which men and women are so related that one might very well say that personality and sociality are two sides of the same coin, two aspects of the same reality.

In this chapter we shall begin with exactly those ideas, first with reference to ourselves. Then the next chapter will be a consideration of the one other to whom we are most intimately related, be it wife or lover or husband or very close friend. After that we shall look at wider relationships, first with the family and then with neighbors. Finally, we shall discuss the "city," or the broad and inclusive social group to which we belong. The purpose throughout will be to arrive at some understanding of what human becoming and belonging signify. It is natural that we start with our own self-awareness as this or that person. Yet we cannot remain there because (as I have urged) our specific human identity is largely dependent upon where we are, with another and with others and in genuine rapport with the human world as a whole.

I have just been speaking about our belonging; but we must also remember that to be human is to be becoming something or other. That is of first importance since in our self-awareness we do not feel as if we were "finished articles" but know that we are "on the move." This fact of our experience is not always given the attention it deserves, and many times descriptions of humankind are produced that suggest a quasi-morphological portrayal, as if human existence were like counting the spots on some insect or were like a diagram of a dead cat as it is studied in a biological laboratory. This sort of description may have value in certain scientific contexts, but if taken by itself it can be radically false.

We have seen that the world in which we exist is itself a matter of becoming and belonging. The evolutionary nature of things is plain enough; so is its societal quality. Evolution in this sense is no longer a matter of opinion, despite the crazy program of the so-called creationists in the United States. Evolution is an established fact about the world. Obviously the sort of change and the time span in which such change takes place varies from level to level -- a rock does not change in the same fashion as an animal does. But it would be wrong to think that this denies change, just as it would be absurd to assume that everything "moves" in a manner identical with everything else. Still, general principles can be applied as widely as our knowledge goes; I have already made suggestions about such principles.

Now in a world like that, the ultimate constituents are events and not "substantial entities" to which predicates may then be attached if we wish to do so. The reality is the process: that is the point of the title of Whitehead’s Gifford lectures, Process and Reality. Ordinary observation by a beholder might seem to give us a different picture. We speak of this table at which I am now sitting. Yet any informed person knows that the table is an astonishingly complex mass of whirling bits of energy or moments of activity. Its hardness and permanence are in one sense an illusion; to speak of them is convenient and important in some respects but misleading in the last analysis. In one sense, too, each of us has an identity; but that is to be found in a series of routings of events and experiences that are held together in some sort of unity of direction. These can appear to give us both permanence and some sort of fixity. There certainly is the identity; but it is not the kind that depends upon absolute changelessness.

In the world as we now know it to be, all the constituent events are held in some sort of continuity of aim or intention, whether this is consciously or unconsciously entertained. Of course, the potentiality for each given occasion may not be vividly realized. When things are going rightly, toward actualizing their potentiality, the achievement is not independent of other occasions but in real dependence upon them. There is an interrelationship here that impels us to think organically. Human existence is a clear instance of this social process. Thus, we must say that each human life affects and influences others, as it is itself affected and influenced by them. We know that we cannot escape our social context; it is an inescapable fact for us humans, as for all else in the creation. Hence, we find fulfillment possible in just such social contacts with others of our kind. And this business of fulfillment implies goals toward which our existence points. Here once more is a human application of a general truth. With it we know also that we are able to decide, in some genuine freedom, for or against these goals, in that we can cut off one possibility by adopting another. Basically, the goal for each one of us is to become, in our belonging, as completely human as is possible for us. Alas, it is also possible for us to opt for non-actualization of the goal and thus to fall into sheer repetition of prior states or to rest content with the status quo and thereby fail to advance at all toward this completeness.

For us humans, as in the world as large, persuasion rather that coercion is effectual in bringing us to our potential self-realization. Often enough it may seem that force is more likely to bring this about; but probably all of us understand that robotlike obedience to imposed coercive measures is likely to produce violent negation, once we have become mature enough to recognize what is going on. It may be possible to force somebody to do this or that, but the result is usually a mechanical response and not a fully human one. A young man may coerce a girl to go through the motions of lovemaking: what he cannot do is to force the girl really to love him, responding to him as a free human person and participating gladly in the enterprise we call lovemaking.

Obviously there are limits to what is possible on the human (and on every other) level. There is a patterning or ordering of the world and of human existence that prescribes such limits. But for the effecting of the free movement toward fulfillment, lure or invitation or attraction is the chief means for drawing existence toward its possible goal. Many modern people in the West have lost sight of this fact, although in other cultures (as in Chinese Taoism) it has been well understood. For those who accept a religious interpretation of the world and human life, as we are doing in this book, there is another and related point. God is in the picture. Yet God is not only the supreme irrationality (as Whitehead said) in that deity cannot be "explained" in terms of ordinary concepts -- although deity can be seen as what Whitehead styled the "chief exemplification" of the principles required to interpret things. God is also the all-inclusive reality who is initiative of creative advance and (for our present purpose this is equally significant) receptive of what that advance brings about. It is God who is the supreme lure or attraction and who invites (for the most part through creaturely or "secular" agencies) the response of the creatures as they move from their initial possibility toward their concrete actualization.

This tells us also that God is affected and influenced by what happens in the world and in human life. I have noted this on earlier pages; here it is only necessary to add that precisely this fact gives existence, and for us a fortiori human existence, its value or what Whitehead called its "importance." Human life is not "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." On the contrary, as most of us know most of the time, there is a deeply felt sense of genuine value; this is what makes life worth living, as it is often said. So there is a dignity about the human enterprise. No man or woman is unimportant or pointless, however worthless he or she may appear to be. Thus, each of us, as a person, plays a part and has a place in the ongoing of creation -- "we count" and what we do counts also.

We also, like every other bit of existence, have a certain real causative capacity. Our decisions, made in such genuine freedom as is ours, have their part in the wider and more pervasive creative advance. I have said that traditional theism usually considers God to be the only causative agent that has any great significance, everything else possessing what at best is a derivative and ultimately a "Pickwickian" causative role. That means that God has been seen as absolutely omnipotent or all-controlling, while creaturely agents have little if anything to do ultimately with what goes on. Furthermore, when God is thus conceived, God does not have a real, but only a logical, relationship with that creation; God is not affected by it in any important way. But if our argument in this book is correct, the real situation is very different. The creative advance depends in part on us, in our causative capacity. Not that we are all that matters and that there is no more-than-human agency at work in the cosmos; but rather, that the value of our existence is both an expression of, and an agency available for, what God is up to in the world. That world is still in the making; thus, we are co-workers with God, if we will allow this to be true, even as we may also be working against God when we reject our basic human potentiality and "do wrong."

Now, since persuasion at the human level is the clue to the wider and all-encompassing cosmic aim or purpose, we can affirm that precisely as and when the human agent responds by deciding for, not against, the lure of love, the invitation comes to us to become more and more genuinely instrumental to that love -- although "instrumental" is not exactly right, since our own self-realization is integral to the picture. It is too bad that some zealous theologians have tried to argue that this self-realization has been made (by those who talk in fairly secular terms) a substitute for the fulfillment of the divine purpose. But the truth is that talk of such self-realization is simply another way of stating what a Process theist sees to be God’s purpose for us. One sometimes suspects that those theologians are fearful of losing their distinctive role by surrendering to secular understanding, and as a consequence they set up an intolerable dualism or dichotomy. They are possessed of "faithless fears’’ because they are deeply afraid of what seem to them to be "worldly" values. At all costs they must retain their job!

When we humans decide against responding in love to the divine lure, known to us under so many incognitos, we are at the same time and by the same token, denying our own potentiality as human. On the other hand, when we respond in love for love, and with it for the establishment of the justice that love desires and enacts, we are on the way toward realizing our potential humanity and becoming more truly what we have it in us to become. We are also lending our service, be it great or small and under whatever circumstances are available to us, to the great cosmic thrust for good. That is, we are serving God. Our human happiness is found there, at a level much deeper than in a superficial "pleasant feeling."

In such a religious context we can grasp more adequately what it means to be a human person. Scientific research and discovery, like everything else that we have learned about ourselves and the world, only gives this a wider setting and helps in deepening our genuine humanity. Thanks to work done in psychology and physiology, for instance, we know about ourselves as body-mind organisms; hence, we can understand more adequately the "dynamics" of personality. To think of ourselves as "souls" who happen to "inhabit bodies" for a short time is to deny the concrete reality of human existence. Incidentally, it is also to reject the biblical view, in which we are said to be made of the stuff of the earth, upon which God breathes to create "living entities" not "living souls," as the Authorized or King James Bible inaccurately translates the Hebrew of the Genesis story. We are indeed possessed of "spirit," but in the Jewish context this is not some object or "thing" but rather is a way of indicating relationships, with an openness of humans to others and to God. And to speak of "God’s Spirit" is to say that God, too, is open to relationships.

In our human situation or condition, we are greatly impeded in the move to self realization (or in religious idiom, to fulfillment in God) by the accumulated wrong doings we have inherited thanks to the causal efficacy of the past upon the present. Traditionally this had been called Original Sin. That is an unfortunate and misleading phrase. But the fact of that condition is very real, however unhappy may be the words used to indicate it. Hence, we cannot be cheerfully and easily optimistic about progress; it is not identical with process. On the other hand, we need not be entirely pessimistic. Good can be chosen and the right can be done. We need realism here, with due recognition given to both sides of the human story. We are responsible for the consequences of our decisions, not least as they have their affect upon how things go forward. Herein lies our accountability, both for our own becoming and for what we do with and about our belonging. Both our dynamism and our sociality or participation have their results. In our intimate contacts and in our wider relationships, what we do brings about a better or a worse situation. To be human is to be "on the way," along with our brothers and sisters; yet this is not necessarily the "right way," nor is our society necessarily a "good society" at any given moment.

Since human existence is a direction taken, rather than a point at which we have already arrived, further movement (together with an awareness of our human identity) will depend largely upon how we respond both to the past and to the impact of the present upon us. The future is in the picture, too, since inevitably we "project ourselves" toward the goals we have made our own. We have to decide how best we may arrive at those goals if they are good ones and avoid them if they are bad ones. In this, each one of us has his or her own speciality, since nobody’s past or present options or future aims are simply identical with those of others, In that speciality, once again, we are complex body-mind creatures. Not only that of which we are consciously aware or subconsciously accept but also what might well be called the "visceral" or deeply bodily inheritance go toward making us what we are and offering possibilities for what we may become.

At our best we take for ourselves the "subjective aim" of moving toward complete humanness. What begins as the "initial aim" given by God in our very existence can be adopted as our own aim, and toward its achievement we may strive. Yet we are not alone. Our fellow humans are there, too. Above all, God is there, with the lures that augment this striving -- in religious language, God’s grace is working toward us, in us, for us, and with us. Or better put, God is thus working, because "grace" is nothing other than God in action and not something added onto or used by the divine reality itself.

In all this, the distinctively human quality is seen in our awareness and self-awareness. Whatever may be true elsewhere in the cosmos, the appearance of human life marked the emergence (after a long course of evolutionary development) of a kind of created occasion that can and does know itself and others, certainly with an intensity unparalleled (so far as we can see) elsewhere in the creation. Hence, we humans are to some degree "rational," with a capacity for understanding, thought, and introspection, as well as for observation. Each of us is also possessed of a volitional drive or energizing ability. Above all, each of us has deep feeling-tones. This last has been forgotten in a good deal of traditional analysis of human life, and failure to see that we have those "feeling-tones" is bound to produce a sadly distorted idea of personality. The "aesthetic," in this profound sense, with its expression in appreciation, evaluation, enjoyment or displeasure, and the like, is as much a part of our human experience as the rational and volitional aspects. Children whose aesthetic capacity is damaged or denied suffer tragically from this deficiency. This is why a sound education should have a place for the aesthetic (in this profound sense) to help the young person move toward real maturity, and all of us need to see and express this side of our selfhood. Alas, many men and women live impoverished lives because their aesthetic capacity has not been given much attention and they have not been helped to grow in an appreciative grasp of the world, of themselves, and of others.

Above all, however, human existence (whatever may and must be said about other levels of existence in the cosmos) is characterized by the possibility of loving. I mean here the conscious or partly conscious sharing or giving-and-receiving that marks relationship as its best. Sometimes this can be highly charged; often it may be fairly low-key. Depth of loving is our best human possibility -- even if now and again (as psychologists tell us) it is of the love-hate variety. In this respect our humanness is a microcosmic expression of the macroscopic or divine reality of Love-in-action. In religious talk we rightly speak about our moving toward "the image of God" who is such Love-in-act. To become created lovers is to realize our human potentiality at its best. Thus, to be open to love is also to be open to God. Each of us, in his or her specific fashion, is intended by God to become a lover -- and thereby to belong in a great cosmic society of loving of which human loving is a reflection.

What has been said thus far presupposes the freedom about which I have spoken so frequently. Granted that we do not have unlimited choice, we do yet have some such ability. All the arguments for determinism cannot convince us that we lack this freedom. Indeed, the most hardened determinists prove, by the very vigor of their effort to convince others of their case, the exact opposite of what they are seeking to demonstrate. As Bishop Butler said, it is silly to let arguments get in the way of this experienced fact. We all act as if we were free: that action is itself proof enough of our own genuine freedom. What we choose may be for right or wrong, as we all know; but this is part of what makes our human existence highly problematical for us.

The tragic truth is that to decide rightly is not easy. For centuries, as we have observed, the human race has had to accept the consequences of decisions made by those who went before. These often worked against proper human self-realization. The human race as a whole is in the situation that Paul Tillich described by the words estrangement and alienation. There are at least four aspects here. Each of us is alienated to some degree from his or her own proper destiny in the divine intention. Each of us is estranged, to a greater or lesser degree, from our fellow humans. Each of us is alienated, again in varying degrees, from the world of nature, which is our habitation and from which humankind has emerged. And each of us is estranged in some serious sense from the cosmic Love that would have us find our proper fulfillment in the accomplishment of greater good in the world. Such alienation or estrangement brings about a sense of human frustration, sometimes felt very keenly but more often and with most of us in something like Thoreau’s "quiet desperation," known at moments when we cannot sleep or when we are not happy about what we have been doing or thinking. In religious language this is our condition as sinners. In secular idiom, it is our failure rightly to move on in our becoming and belonging.

Such a situation does not imply that we are totally corrupt, with nothing good about us and with no possibility of a change by which we may once again respond rightly to the circumambient lures and begin moving in the truly fulfilling direction. To think of ourselves as totally corrupt would be far too pessimistic: it would not take account of the patent fact that there is much goodness in the world and in human experience as we know it. In recent years some influential theologians have revived that negative view and have talked like the older Calvinistic scholastics about humans as "lost souls." The wisdom of the race, however, both in its secular expression and in its religious teaching, has spoken otherwise. That wisdom has indeed acknowledged the problematical situation of men and women and has conceded honestly that "we are not able of ourselves to help ourselves," if this is taken to suggest that we can change "all on our own." Yet it has also testified to a residual goodness in the world and in human life, so that the situation is not hopeless.

In various ways wise men and women have shown their conviction, based on their own experience and observation, that the stuff of which humans are made is good stuff and that human potentiality remains a good potentiality. In traditional Christian teaching at its best, this is seen in the distinction that has been made between the "image of God." in which we are made or toward which we are intended to move, and the "likeness of God," which has been seriously damaged by us. To be sure, this distinction between "image" and "likeness" is based on a mistaken exegesis of the Genesis story. But Irenaeus of Lyons, who first made the point, may have been wrong in his exegesis but splendidly right in the point he was getting at when he made it.

Every area of human existence has certainly been affected by our human situation as well as by our own decisions and actions; yet this need not equal, and in the most characteristic Christian thought has never been thought to equal, a condition of "total depravity." Decision for the good is not impossible, even if it is extraordinarily difficult in many circumstances. In any event, the love of God, working in and with us as a lure toward the right, is never absent. Of course, we shall make mistakes and in that way contribute to the further implementation of a bad situation. On the other hand, we may so respond to the lure of God (often enough in what I have consistently called its secular expression) that we may be enabled to make some contribution, however small it may seem, to the ongoing process toward greater good. Thus, we can both acknowledge our failures and accept our responsibility, while we are prepared to "stand up and be counted" for what we have been and done. We must do this bravely, with honest readings to admit imperfection and failure. But the cosmic process itself sets limits to our capacity to wreck it: this is where the cosmic thrust or dynamic we call God may exercise a kind of control beyond the usual persuasive mode of its expression.

Christian faith has something to add here. It speaks about our "redemption" by God. That establishes the high relevance of Christianity to human living. It asserts that the divine Love, operative at every moment and in every part of the creation, is always available to the creatures. But even more than that, it asserts that the divine Love is prepared to accept us as we are and for what we may become, to forgive the wrongs we have done, and at the same time to employ our obviously imperfect human existence for better and fuller realization of good in the future. The theological term for this Christian assertion is "justification by grace through faith." It does not for a moment argue that evil is good. But it holds that even the worst decisions and actions of men and women, with the appalling results they have brought about, can somehow be used by God if what we do is offered to deity and, thus, can become the occasion for a deepening awareness of, and a better response to, Love’s demands and Love’s readiness to assist them in their human situation.

We humans are continually being challenged to decide as best we can, in the light of such knowledge as is available to us; to act upon those decisions; to be open to as many good possibilities as can be envisaged but not to hesitate to make necessary choices among them: and above all to trust confidently that God values both us and our contributions. So it is that the creative God is also the redeeming God. Humans may be "freed to love," as I like to put it, although of themselves alone they find it impossible to do that. In spite of our inadequacy, as well as our repeated defection, there is still hope for us.

I have been writing in what may seem to some to be a highly abstract fashion. I do not apologize for this; but I admit gladly that W.H. Auden put the point in much less abstract, indeed in a telling and moving, manner when he wrote the following lines:

We live in a world where the reality of evil -- of various sorts, such as natural disorder, animal suffering, human pain and accident, and moral wrong as well as sin -- is an inescapable fact. Of course, at times this is not vividly experienced. Most of us, most of the time, probably manage to live a reasonably happy life and avoid dwelling on what is wrong in the creation. But there are also the moments of tragedy -- someone we love dies of cancer, there is an appalling airplane crash, we hear about a devastating earthquake or a tidal wave, famine strikes some part of the world -- when any man or woman who is at all sensitive will admit that this is not "a nice world" but rather is filled with tragedy, sadness, and pain. What is more, we humans are selfish, lustful, destructive, and careless of our human sisters and brothers much of the time if not all of the time. And to some the most dreadful aspect is the spectacle called by Tennyson "nature red in tooth and claw." when it seems that the animal kingdom is marked by shocking cruelty and suffering.

A discussion of evil is essential at this point in our discussion. For if we believe in God, we must somehow reconcile these appalling facts with the belief that God is good and caring. Only so can we make sense of the world and of ourselves in that world. Hence, we face the question. Why is there evil in the world and in human experience? In this chapter we are looking at the fact of evil from a specifically Christian perspective, and no Christian can be like the ostrich, which is said to bury its head in the sand when a storm sweeps over the desert. But if there is anything to say that will assist us to deal with this question, it can only be entertained if first we look honestly at the facts. As Thomas Hardy once put it,

As it happens, authentic Christian faith throughout the centuries has sought to do just this, but often with indifferent success. Why is this?

I believe that much of the time the chief difficulty is with the "model" or concept of God that Christians have taken to be right, when it is not only inadequate but actually mistaken. Earlier in this book I have discussed those errors, noting what Whitehead had to say about what he styled The apostasy" of much Christian theism, with its talk about deity as like a "despotic ruler" who is in complete control of everything that happens in the creation and, hence, must be responsible for all that takes place within it. In an older day, insurance policies used to express this idea when they spoke about natural catastrophes and other such happenings as ‘acts of God." Ordinary men and women seem often to think of God as callously inflicting evil or as indifferent to what goes on in the world. I need not repeat here what has already been said about a genuinely Christian picture of God, in contrast to these and other notions. I only insist again that if the great central Christian affirmation is indeed that the clue to God’s "nature and activity" is the event of Jesus Christ, then it is imperative to see and say that "God is Love" and that God never acts in such a fashion that deity may correctly be regarded as responsible directly or even permissively (save in there being a world at all) for anything and everything that takes place in the creation. God’s nature and God’s activity are always caring and loving, persuading and luring, never sheerly coercive and never imposed arbitrarily on that creation.

In a sense, however, this conviction makes the fact of evil all the more inexplicable and puzzling. But here it is important to recognize that a corollary of this conception of God as "sheer Love," and as always acting lovingly, is that the creation has its freedom, its causative capacity, and its necessary accountability for what occurs in that freedom. Hence, the world is not some sort of object that God shoves around, intrudes into, and manipulates. To the contrary, it is there as a given fact with its specific characteristics that God respects and with which God deals.

Perhaps this can best be exemplified by what we know in our own experience. In our relationships with others, when those relationships are fully human, there is always the granting to the "other" the right to decide whether or not, and how, that "other" will respond to our attitude and action toward her or him. The relationship presupposes a personal kind of activity and attitude that will be expressed in various ways but never through sheer force or coercion exercised by one upon the other. Now what is true in our experience at the human level is also true, in appropriate fashion, of God’s way in the world. The insurance policy’s notion that "act of God" means something else is entirely mistaken -- mistaken, that is, if the "brief Galilean vision" is our best intimation of God. Indeed, the most patent manifestation of an "act of God," a Christian should insist, is a particular human existence in which rationality, imagination, respect, moral integrity, and the like were most present and visible. The ancient Christian thinker Irenaeus of Lyons once said that "the glory of God is man fully alive." This is the way in which a Christian can understand Jesus Christ as "an act of God," and similarly, it provides a clue to how God may be taken to act in every range of the creation. God respects and uses the creaturely status of each element in the world and, indeed, of the world altogether.

Thus. God is not arbitrary power acting immediately upon the world, as it were, without any mediation, controlling everything in it and, hence, directly responsible for what takes place. That is an idea that is associated with ancient tyrannies and despotisms and is fallacious when applied to God’s relationship with the creation. Nor is God unaffected by what goes on in the world: rather, what happens there matters to God and makes a difference for and to God. In such a context, the world has its own independence, its own freedom, and its own accountability. As I have said, we can see this vividly as a matter of human experience, and we can legitimately generalize from that human level, taking it as indicative (however remotely) of what is going on everywhere and always.

At the level of strictly natural existence, as also in inanimate nature, such qualities are not obviously observable. Yet we know nowadays that human existence has emerged from and is a part of the total "natural world." Therefore, that world can be properly interpreted only when we begin where we are, in human life with its relative independence, freedom, and accountability. Far too often in the past and far too frequently even today, thinkers have argued the other way on; they have assumed that human existence can be understood only in terms of the nonhuman. The result has been disastrous. It is the explanation of much that is wrong in human living. Perhaps the ancients had some excuse when they thought in this fashion; for us today, with our awareness of an evolutionary creation, there is no excuse to continue in so mistaken a fashion. We might even say that awareness of just that evolutionary creation has been a blessing and not (as some seem to feel) a dreadful curse.

Hence, it is necessary to reconceive some ancient beliefs. Omnipotence does not mean God’s sheer existence as "almighty power without qualification. Omniscience and omnipresence can also be given a different meaning. Omnipotence is the strength of the divine Love-in-act in a world that (as I have said again and again) possesses its own independence and freedom. Omniscience means that Love, God as Love, is all-knowing about what in fact happens and of the various possibilities that the creation may actualize -- but without dictating them. Omnipresence tells us that the divine Love is everywhere and always present and at work to augment the good, often in very surprising places -- a Christian would point especially to a humble human life, to a man born in a manger, and to that same man rejected and put to death, as the place where such active presentness is most clearly seen.

Does this signify that God is "finite" or "limited"? Only if we have begun with the presumption that what is ultimate must be sheer coercive power and control. But God is not "finite," if it is true that Love is the ultimate reality, as a Christian who knows his or her business ought to maintain. Nor is God "limited," excepting insofar as Love cannot -- literally cannot, being Love -- control everything but must wait for some such response to its prior invitation as may be found, in differing ways and with most varying intensity, in the world that is ours and God’s. The response at the natural level and at the so-called "animal level" may be minimal. Yet it is there when, for example, an electron "decides" -- that is to say, "cuts off’ (which is what decide means etymologically) one available possibility by adopting another. Modern quantum theory, the "uncertaincy principle," and "particle physics" demonstrate this genuine openness. Of course, there is no conscious choice at such points, but experience precedes consciousness, which is a fairly high level of such experience. And so up the scale, through more complex natural phenomena, until at the human level (with its obvious independence and accountability) freedom is grasped in a conscious experience.

We often call things "natural evils": hurricanes, earthquakes, and tidal waves: in animal life, the struggle for existence among and within species, but never with the intentional inflicting of pain, since at that level there can be little if any real intentionality as we understand it in ourselves: and with us humans the horror of sheer self-centeredness, neglect of or hatred for others, the inflicting of pain, injustice, and oppression, with all that these bring about. Such occurrences show vividly and clearly what can go wrong. Our world is not "predestinated" in this way or that. It is not regulated by "laws which never shall be broken," save only by the basic law of inevitable consequences for what is done, whether for good or for ill. As modern scientists increasingly stress, it is an "open world," where choices make a difference and where that difference has its results in the continuing "ongoing." In such a world, God cannot be held responsible for what we, or any other element or aspect of the creation, choose to do. God accepts the facts for what they are, given this relative creaturely freedom, and God deals with these facts as they are. The divine purpose is the wider and more inclusive working of "Love-in-act," or God, with a responsive love from the creaturely side. Furthermore, as St. Paul puts it in Rom. 8:28, "God works in every respect towards a good end"; God calls us to be (in Whitehead’s fine words) "co-creators" in the creative advance.

Having said all this, it is now proper for us to suggest what might be styled "ameliorating considerations." However black the picture may be as we look at it, there is something to be said on the other side.

First of all, this world was not "created" exactly as we now see it, in a single, all-at-once act. Thanks to evolutionary science we know that it is a world in which for untold millenia creation there has been, still is, and will continue to be a process or development. In a way, we might say that it resembles a place where an artisan is engaged in making something or other; there are loose ends here and there, bits and pieces that are not yet completed, remnants of earlier efforts that did not quite fulfill the artisan’s plan. Ours is an "unfinished world," as somebody has put it, We cannot expect, if that is true, to find everything perfectly accomplished. On the contrary, what we are bound to find is a continuing work in which the aim is to create something splendid and beautiful -- but that final aim is not yet achieved. In Christian thought and in biblical writing, there is talk of eschatology, or a future-to-be-realized one day. Doubtless the biblical material on the subject is in highly metaphorical poetic, or (if you will) mythological language. Such language is natural to all religious discourse. We cannot talk literally about matters like that because we cannot penetrate into the divine nature, purpose, and goal. Nonetheless, the material helps us to see that "there is more to come," and Christian faith would insist that God is actively engaged in working toward that end, not remote from and unconcerned with what takes place, but genuinely and vigorously acting toward it and in it with respect for and use of creaturely freedom and accountability.

Second, a considerable part of "natural evil" is called that only when and as human life is involved. A tidal wave that devastates an uninhabited island in the South Pacific is not usually called evil. But when men and women suffer from the results of the wave, we are more likely to call it evil. Furthermore, a good deal that takes place in the natural order is tied in with providing what L. J. Henderson, the Harvard scientists, once called "the fitness of the environment," in which conditions are maintained that make possible human existence now and in the future. Without at least some such happenings, human life on this planet would long since have disappeared.

In the third place, there is, as I have already said, no intentional inflicting of evil in most if not all suffering in the animal world. Unlike humans, who can and often do set out to make others suffer, animals are primarily concerned to "protect their territory," as students of their behavior tell us, or to save their young from attack, or to secure necessary supplies of food for their survival. If these experts are to be trusted -- and I here recall a world-famous biologist with whom I once talked -- the actual suffering in the animal world is much less severe than it seems to us to be. We tend to project our own sensitivity here, said this friend, who went on to tell me (to my surprise) that when a crab tears away the claw of another crab, as I had reported to him, the probability is that what the latter feels is more like a twinge than like the anguish that the tearing away of a limb would cause in us. Incidentally, this did not lead my friend to say that there is no pain there but only that we should not commit the "pathetic fallacy" of reading our own feeling-tones into the animal world. At the same time, he insisted that it is quite wrong for us to inflict any unnecessary suffering on animals -- which was why he opposed "blood sports," although he was not a vegetarian.

Fourth, in a world where things can and often do go wrong, it is not surprising that, for example, parasites thrive on their "host" and, therefore, damage and even destroy that upon which they depend. Sometimes the suffering caused in this fashion (as with malignant cancerous growth) has its ultimate origin in some human misuse, bad diet or infection or lack, again without malicious intent on the part of the agent that causes it. Furthermore, we need to recognize the plain fact that a good deal of physical and, even more obviously, of psychological suffering is made possible through exactly the same human (and other) conditioning that makes it possible to enjoy the sense of well-being, even of joy. that marks most of human (and, in an analagous fashion, animal) existence. We should be careful in our approach. For we could not "feel pain," but neither could we "feel happiness." if we did not have such psycho-physical equipment. Laughter and tears are intimately related, as folk wisdom knows and as many poets have told us. It is also the case that our human solidarity, our participation in a common life, and our intimacy with others occasion much of the suffering that we experience. When a friend suffers, especially if that person is one for whom we care deeply, the anguish can be enormous. This we all know, yet frequently we do not take it into account when we speak of various sorts of human suffering.

I shall not discuss in detail the question of moral evil, nor shall I speak of what in religious language is called "sin." These topics are far too big to receive here the attention they deserve. But it must be said that moral evil and sin are tied in with the very freedom and responsibility that men and women know and value. They are the result of our relatively free moral decisions or they are caused by the social situation in which we men and women inevitably find ourselves. We are often accountable for them: no fully human person is likely to blame somebody or something else for all of them. In one sense however we are all "accountable" here, because we belong to a society of humans that is often based upon, or that creates, injustice, oppression, servitude, and other unhappy aspects of the world. In two other books I have discussed these at some length: Goodness Distorted (London: Mowbrays. 1970) and Cosmic Love and Human Wrong (New York: Paulist Press, 1978): perhaps I may refer the reader to them for a fuller treatment of moral evil and sin.

The several points that have just been made as "ameliorating considerations" do not reduce the reality of evil. However, they help us to avoid the totally pessimistic interpretation that can easily be mistaken for genuine realism in understanding. Or, to use again Hardy’s words, there is a "better" as there is a "worst." Total gloom is just as unrealistic as bland optimism. And on the whole, most of human and animal life is enjoyed, and the living of it gives considerable satisfaction.

Now we return to the earlier question about God’s nature and point out that deity is not unrelated to, nor unaffected by, the creation in which God is active. We can affirm that the exercise of "power" in that divine working is only for maintaining a cosmos or an orderly pattern rather than allowing the world to fall into chaotic or anarchic confusion. But throughout, God is deeply concerned for it. For relationship is concern, whether positive or negative. What God does positively is to labor toward richer, fuller, more inclusive, expanding existence: negatively God acts against the evil that may be there, and by what might be styled "the divine alchemy" God seems able to "bring good out of evil" -- although this is no excuse for the doing of evil so that good may come in the end. Such an attitude would be alien to the whole picture that we have here sought to present about God’s ways with the creation.

God is Love -- and this is an active Love. "A thing is what it does," I have quoted from Whitehead. Active and concerned loving always seeks to identify itself with the beloved; it cannot remain aloof but must participate, so far as possible, in the beloved’s pains and difficulties quite as much as in his or her joys and happiness. This is precisely what Christians have said about God when they have taken seriously the faith that God is disclosed, enacted, expressed. or "incarnate" in the total event of Jesus Christ. In that event, with a distinctive clarity, God is seen to be actively present, to have made himself or herself one with, and thus genuinely a sharer in, creaturely existence at our human level. This conviction may then be taken as a clue for the reading of all that God does. Then God will be seen as a suffering God who shares in the anguish of the creation yet is not overcome or destroyed by that sharing. For a corollary of the Christian conviction is that divine Love, enacted in this human existence, was not defeated by the death that is part of the creaturely lot. The various stories that tell of Jesus’ "resurrection," when suitably "demythologized," tell us that Love expressed in the world, sharing in the world’s pain, and knowing from "inside" its anguish, "cannot be holden of death," as the New Testament phrases it. The reports about that "resurrection" cannot easily be reconciled to make a consistent narrative. Yet the fact of the disciples’ awareness that Jesus, in the totality of his existence, was victorious is plain to see: God "raised him from the dead."

God is "the fellow-sufferer who understands," in Whitehead’s fine phrase. But God does more than "understand"; God is in the world, knowing it from the inside and not merely as an external observer who deeply sympathizes. Of course, Whitehead meant that, too. God is actively engaged in overcoming evil, in all its differing modes. The divine aim or purpose, in a world that has its own independence and freedom, is precisely to overcome evil. But that is not done in one fell swoop; it can only be done by a continuing and persistent effort on God’s part. And there is a consequence for us.

What is that consequence? I have stressed that we are called as humans to be what St. Paul styled "fellow-workers with God." We are to work with God in furthering the creative advance of the world in goodness. truth, justice, righteousness, care, and love. Such is the practical Christian vocation. Therefore, our Christian attitude toward whatever is evil is a firm rejection of it and an earnest effort against it, to the end that it shall be overcome, negated, removed from the world or transformed into an occasion for good to emerge.

Of course, we can do little if anything against natural disaster; we cannot remove or defeat tidal waves or earthquakes, although we can see to it that people do not live in places where these are likely to occur. We can do something to alleviate pain in the animal world, if only by refusing to inflict suffering beyond absolute necessity. We can work against illness and disease, by the use of such knowledge and techniques as are acquired through the study of those ills. Above all, we can open ourselves to the forces for good that are present in the world, so that human self-centered-ness, cruelty to one’s fellows, oppression. hatred, and contempt shall not prevail among us. This is the challenge to us in our Christian discipleship.

When the day comes for judgment upon our loyalty and dedication, God will ask us (or so we might put it) the question that was put by the captain in the Hundred Years War when he came upon a soldier who had skulked in his tent while the fierce struggle was going on: "When we fought at Arles, were you there?" If we were not there, in that continuing struggle for the good, we have shown ourselves to be unprofitable servants. We have been judged, and at our best we judge ourselves, to be unworthy of our "high calling in Christ Jesus our Lord." Even if there is no simple, straightforward, and easy explanation of evil, the obligation is laid upon us to work with God against it. The depth of Christian faith is to see, with Mother Julian of Norwich, that in and with God "all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well." However, this conviction can be entertained meaningfully and realistically only if first of all we have recognized evil and have played our part in God’s suffering, yet triumphant, activity against it.

Finally, do our liturgy and teaching express vividly this reality of God as Love-in-action and ourselves as God’s agents in active loving? Anything that denies or minimizes that basic reality should have no place in our worship, our prayer, or our meditation. Fortunately, most of the newer services found in the recently revised service books of many Christian groups are in this sense more deeply Christian than earlier services. Surely it is necessary to eradicate from our theology whatever would suggest that God is in control of everything, exactly as it happens, and hence is fully responsible for what is wrong. Here much remains to be done; yet there are encouraging signs that Christian theologians are at work on this task, and we may hope that a more genuinely Christian theology may be the result of their labors. Our discipleship, which often has tended to be moralistic in a legal sense, also needs to be reconceived so that love has the preeminence, rather than the coldly moralistic interpretations of the divine purpose so often taught the past and even today hanging on in many supposedly Christian circles. Here there is much still to be done.

For any genuinely dedicated Christian, faith and practice, worship and work, go hand in hand. Despite our ignorance of much that we might like to know and with an honest recognition that we do not and cannot "have all the answers to all the questions," we yet have enough to impel us to be responsible and zealous in thought and word and deed. As a distinguished English divine of an earlier generation once put it, Christian "faith is not belief in spite of evidence, but life in scorn of consequence." In fact, that faith is itself a call to action, and part of the action is for us to serve as God’s agents in overcoming evil wherever we see it and to work with God and with our fellow humans so that the divine purpose of God for creation may be more effectively realized.

The title of this book, Becoming and Belonging, indicates the two main points that I shall stress in its several chapters. The wider philosophical conceptuality that includes them is that one known today as Process Thought, with which I have been working for more than forty years of academic life. That wider conceptuality will be used here for Christian purposes. But the two points that I noted, becoming and belonging, are especially important for us: the former points to the "processive" or developmental nature of all reality; the latter to the communal or social quality in that reality. My concern is to show that in each of the several topics to be considered -- Christianity as an organic whole; the fact of evil known to every one of us; the meaning of human personality in itself, in its familial, and in its social aspects; and the religious community -- becoming and belonging must be taken with utmost seriousness.

I write as a Christian -- and as a priest of the Anglican church. Hence I believe that human existence is grounded in God who in Christian faith is seen as primal cause and final affect and whose "nature and name," in Charles Wesley’s words, is sheer Love. It is one of the tragedies of Christian theology that the divine Love has not always been made central. As Alfred North Whitehead once put it,

Whitehead’s reference to "the Christian gospels" brings to mind one of his finest utterances, which I shall have occasion to quote again in this chapter. He was speaking of "the supreme moment in religious history, according to Christianity," and he wrote:

He then went on to ask, "Can there be any doubt that the power of Christianity lies in its revelation in act, of that which Pilate divined in theory?" (pp. 170-71) By it, he believed "we are delivered from the kinds of theism which would portray God as the ruling Caesar, or the ruthless moralist, or the unmoved mover," since here the stress is on the tender elements in the world, which slowly and in quietness operate by love. . . . Love neither rules, nor is it unmoved; also it is a little oblivious as to morals." (Process and Reality, pp. 520-21)

I have quoted these passages from Whitehead for two reasons: first, because he is the "founding father" of the Process conceptuality; and second, because what he says in them points to God as "pure unbounded Love" and to our own human existence as intended to be a creaturely love (doubtless imperfect and defective because finite and mortal). Their becoming and their belonging are part of that intended existence. And here is the main theme of this book.

To say this about God requires further discussion. To say it about us is very far from making human living simple and easy. On the contrary, it complicates matters, since it opens up possibilities for men and women that otherwise might be overlooked or neglected. It reveals that depths to which we humans may fall and the heights to which we may rise. And to speak of love both as the divine reality and as the clue to truly human existence is not to talk sentimentality or cheap emotionalism or easy toleration. Yet, as Sophocles in Oedipus in Colonus has the father say to the daughter, "One word frees us from all the weight and pain of life: that word is love." If a Greek tragedian could say this, surely a Christian who is committed to "the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord" must affirm it all the more vigorously, with a deeper meaning and with stronger conviction -- recognizing, at the same moment, that to say, really to mean, and to intend to live by such an affirmation takes all there is of him or her.

In respect, then, to the human concerns that occupy our attention in these chapters, becoming and belonging, as characteristic of love-in-action, will be emphasized. The context for the entire treatment will be a consistent and coherent worldview that in my belief is appropriate to the Christian tradition of faith, worship, and life and that at the same time can make sense to men and women today in their desire for a meaningful interpretation of their existence, of the world in which that existence is found, and of the divine reality we call God. And we can profit these days from a vigorous emphasis on God as "Pure unbounded Love," to offset the all-too-frequent talk about deity in terms of sheer power or as a rigid moralist, not to mention the tendency to think of deity as the far-distant and unconcerned "first cause" of the world.

So what has Christian faith to tell Us? First of all, God is seen as supremely Love-in-act. Since God is this, God must be in real, not merely logical, relation with the created order. God both gives and receives. And the clue to the divine nature is always to be found in the divine activity: "a thing is what it does," as Whitehead said in a different but not unconnected respect. If God is really actively engaged with and in the world, adapting the divine intention to it, taking into the divine life what occurs there, and hence seriously affected by it quite as much as sustaining it creatively and working within it to accomplish an enduring purpose, then indeed God must be understood in a fashion that is most suitably symbolized by what we know of relationship at the human level -- granted, of course, that we say this with an O altitudo, to use Sir Thomas Browne’s phrase. Thus, God transcends yet also undergirds the creation, works in it, and receives from it.

An extended quotation from Prof. Keith Ward’s recent book, Rational Theology and the Creativity of God, is relevant here. He writes:

Probably Professor Ward would not call himself a Process philosopher or theologian, yet clearly his argument here is in close agreement with the Process understanding I am urging upon the reader. He is prepared to say, in the same discussion, that we can call God nothing other than "self-giving Love." What is more, he sees that to talk in the fashion in which he has done is intimately tied in with a picture of deity that is both biblically responsible and in accordance with what our contemporary knowledge has to tell us about the way things appear to us through observation and investigation.

If (as I like to do) we use Whiteheadian language, we properly make important distinctions when we speak of deity. We can say that, as primordial, God is the continuum of all possibilities, the treasure-house of potentiality to be applied to the creation; that, as consequent (or as affected by that creation), God is the recipient of all value of good achieved in the creative advance; and that, as superjective, God "pours back into the world" (as Whitehead once put it) that which has thus been received from it but is now harmonized within the divine life that is "the Harmony of harmonies."

In Charles Hartshorne’s way of saying it, God is eternally and absolutely Love-in-act and is utterly faithful to righteous and caring purposes. Yet God in the concrete and divine existence is always related to the world in such a way that there is divine self-identification with and openness to affect from the world. God is committed to the creation and, therefore, cannot be taken as statically timeless but rather as eminently "time-full" -- from the past, in the present, toward the future. And in accomplishing the divine purpose, there is complete respect for, and a valuing and employment of, the creation’s own dignity and freedom, its responsibility for decisions, and its capacity to act as a genuine cause in the total advance.

God is disclosed in some degree or manner everywhere throughout the creation, and this is always in terms of the divine activity or what God is doing with it, for it, and in it. But there are some points or places where there may be a more "important" disclosure. The creation is not "uniformitarian" but varied, aesthetically contrasting the now with the then, the here with the there. In this fashion, a particular event or occasion may be taken as our best clue to or symbol of what, so to say. God is "up to" all the time and everywhere. And God is both active and passive; he or she initiates possibility, lures towards realization, and is therefore "modified" (as Keith Ward puts it) by that movement and its results. God both acts and is acted upon, a position that much "classical theism" has refused to take. But since this is the case with God, we can speak meaningfully of a divine enrichment by accomplished good in creation, and we can also allow for what might be styled a divine sadness because of wrong creaturely decisions and what they bring about. God shares in the anguish of the world; God suffers with the world without being overcome by the wrong in it: in Whitehead’s fine phrase, God is "the fellow-sufferer who understands."

Second, the basic significance of the creation is to be found in its contribution to the divine life, for the enrichment of that life. The world has its own integrity, its own capacity to act causatively, its own creative power; it is not like a puppet that God pulls by a string. Yet it is open to the divine action upon it, and thanks to that action and its own creativity, it may move toward its own proper good and thus find self-fulfillment. Hence, God’s purpose for the creature and the creature’s self-realization are not contradictory one of the other; they are different ways of seeing and speaking about the same enterprise. God’s inescapable "secular function" is precisely here: guiding, luring, and attracting. Thus, the initiating possibility can become a genuine actualization. Nor is this confined to the human or historical level, as some theologies seem to assume, but is found everywhere, although obviously not always recognized and named for what it is. In a word, the divine activity is cosmic in scope, including in its concern the natural order and what goes on there.

In the third place, human existence (about which we shall have much more to say at a later stage) is itself a creaturely movement intended to reflect and serve instrumentally for the divine goodness. To move toward actualizing human possibility, in full integrity of body, mind, will, affection, and always in social belonging, is to become human. To fall away from it is to fail the human goal and at the same time to fail the cosmic process and the God who is the basic thrust or drive in that process, Our deepest human problem is to know and use, through decision, this capacity to develop toward fulfillment. Our deepest human tragedy is that easily attainable ends and a self-centered achievement may be chosen by us. Then human existence is frustrated, trivialized, and degraded. What is more, the fact of our human sociality is such that wrongness in one place infects the whole enterprise, just as rightness has its wide influence and its good consequences for others of our race. Something of the same sort may be said, by analogy, of other ranges of the creation.

Lastly, evil -- which will be discussed at some length in the next chapter -- is a reality we humans all experience, observe, and do. Yet it is not willed by God, either directly or permissively, as if things might have been otherwise, but God allows evil to happen. Only insofar as there is a world at all, with its necessary freedom, can God be said thus to be responsible. But God’s limitation, as Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne have insisted, is sheer goodness. In that goodness God grants freedom to the creation, with the result that decisions, conscious or unconscious, may and in fact do produce evil that God neither wills nor wants. We cannot be cheerfully optimistic about the world or about ourselves; neither need we be entirely pessimistic, as if nothing could be done about the matter. Instead, we should be realistic, facing the fact of evil in all its forms but ready also to see that the infinite resourcefulness of the divine Love-in-act can find ways of handling such evil, so that a positive good may result in the end. We humans are invited to join in the struggle to overcome evil and to further good. About this more will also be said in the chapter that follows.

Perhaps I have indicated sufficiently how a Christian Process Theology sees God, the world, and human existence. Let us now turn to some specifically Christian affirmations, and here I must be selective since far too many aspects of Christian faith might be discussed. I have chosen for first attention the area known as Christology: "the doctrine of Christ," as it is called in theological textbooks. I shall then say something again about human existence in the light of Christology; and I shall conclude with the question of human destiny. I hope that what is said about these topics will illustrate the fashion in which other aspects of Christian thought would be handled by one who accepts the Process way of seeing things.

We can have no doubt that in Christian faith the event of Jesus Christ is central and decisive. As Whitehead once put it, "Buddhism and Christianity find their origins in two inspired moments of history, the life of the Buddha and the life of Christ. The Buddha gave his doctrine to enlighten the world; Christ gave his life. It is for Christians to discern the doctrine" (Religion in the Making, p. 55). Unquestionably, Whitehead was right in this observation, and a large part of Christian theology has sought to do precisely this: "discern the doctrine." But the fact of the event comes first.

It is frequently said that Christianity is "a historical religion." In one sense this is certainly true since it comes to us through a long historical tradition or social process whose origin is found in something that is believed to have happened factually in the distant past. On the other hand, if "historical" implies that we possess material that gives us an entirely accurate and completely reliable account of the life and work of Jesus, such as we might have about Julius Caesar or Napoleon, it is an inexact and misleading phrase. After a long period of literary, historical, and form-critical study of the New Testament, along with more recent work on the "redaction" of its several books in the light of the motives that led their authors to select and arrange the material then available to them, it is clear that any claim to "simple historicity" is false.

Whitehead was no biblical scholar, but he noted, in the same context as the quotation I have just given from him, that "we do not possess a systematic detailed record of the life of Christ." He went on to say that what we do possess is "a peculiarly vivid record of the first response to it in the minds of the first group of disciples after the lapse of some years, with their recollections, interpretations, and incipient formulations." That is to say, we have in the New Testament a very early -- almost a primitive -- witness to the impact or impression made by Jesus Christ. This is a witness that is given to us "from faith to faith" -- from the faith of those who in early days committed themselves in response to it and with the intention of awakening faith in others.

In a recent essay by Leslie Houlden, which appears in the symposium Alternative Approaches to New Testament Study (edited by A. E. Harvey), the point is well made:

Houlden goes on to tell us that there is diversity in the reporting of how this impact occurred: yet he rejects the claim, sometimes made by highly skeptical scholars, "that no intelligible picture can emerge and no statement, of greater or lesser probability, concerning the Jesus whose impact those who gave the early witness experienced, can be made" (p. 134).

If fundamentalist Christians look at the scriptural material as generally inerrant, many more liberal Christians have all too often thought that by proper analysis it is possible to acquire information about the so-called Jesus of history and then to speak with confidence about what he said and did and even about what he believed about himself and his vocation. But this will not really do. Everything that we "know" about Jesus comes to us through the apostolic witness, as this has been handed down in the living tradition of the Christian community of faith, worship, and life. The New Testament is part of that tradition, not separated from it; therefore, its significance is in reporting the earliest ways, so far as we can recover them, in which Jesus was understood by men and women who themselves were caught up in that tradition and who found (as Houlden notes) "an experience of salvation, of new well-being in relation to God" in their response to the event about which the witness spoke (p. 135). In the community that "remembered Jesus," to use John Knox’s phrase, the primitive experience found that this same Jesus was made available to them "in the Spirit," which animated the fellowship and which seemed to them decisive for human existence under God.

There is also a further point to be made here. This has to do with what nowadays is styled the cultural relativism that marks any report of events in the past. Far too frequently an appeal is made to some biblical passage or series of passages, or to ancient Christian thinkers, as if this would readily settle whatever question is under discussion. But we must recognize that a difference of outlook makes our own situation unlike that of any given period in the past, Even in the Bible itself there is an enormous diversity of view so that no single position can be called "biblical" without qualification. Here some words of Leonard Hodgson are worth quoting: "As one who has been a professional teacher of theology for forty years, I now publicly declare my hope that no pupil of mine will ever be guilty of using the expression ‘The Bible says’" (For Faith and Freedom, vol. 2, p. 12). With respect also to earlier Christian thinkers and their various statements, there is Hodgson’s further remark -- which those of us who were his students vividly recall -- that we must always ask something like this: "What must the truth be for us now, if people like that" -- he was referring both to biblical writers and theologians in the past history of the Church -- ’ ‘put it in the way they did?" Here as everywhere Hodgson’s honesty was apparent. He saw that "new occasions" not only "teach new duties" but that they also "make ancient good uncouth" and that our responsibility, granted the relativism that attaches to all our experience and our statement, is to think afresh, on the basis of the general apostolic witness and with due regard for earlier Christian teaching, as well as in the light of our own experience of "newness of life," so that what we have to say is nove (newly said) and often is also nove (the saying of new things). I am using here the famous words of Vincent of Lerins, a Christian scholar of the early Church. Only by this sort of approach can we hope to be faithful to the living tradition that by that very "aliveness" makes archaeological theologizing incredible and intolerable. Like every social process, the Christian community has its own identity in the direction or routing that it takes from the past, in the present, and toward the future; but we dare not stop it, if we could, at some given point that happens to be attractive to us with our own special predilections and prejudices.

However, recognition of this inescapable relativism does not mean that we have no grounds for a faith that is in genuine continuity with what has gone before. By what Whitehead styled "the appeal to the direct intuition of special occasions -- " he was referring to the primitive days of the Church in which Jesus’ impact was known as a reality -- we may possess, and Christian conviction affirms that we do possess, a key or clue "of universal validity, to be applied by faith to the ordering of all experience." What this signifies for Christian theology is the need to produce some formulation ("doctrine"); but the important thing is not the exact details of such formulations, nor even the formulations themselves, but the reality with which they seek to deal. The definitions, whatever they may be, are inevitably tied in with the worldview they presuppose. Changing circumstances, new conditions, and differing ways of seeing things are a fact; they require of us some attempt at reconception. For a "dogma," in the sense of a precise statement or formulation, can never be final; it can only be "adequate" to the period in which it has been worked out. On the other hand, as Whitehead went on to say, "the great instantaneous conviction behind the dogma" is indeed the "good news or gospel" that is basic to the community’s identity, and the community is enabled "to maintain its integrity by its recurrence to the inspired simplicity of its origin."

How then can we today interpret this event we indicate when we say ‘Jesus"? First, it is imperative for us to see the originating event in its totality: to study the preparation for it reported in the Old Testament, which sums up Jewish religious conviction in all its diversity and complexity; to note what the early witness tells us about the person at its center and how that person was received": and to discern what has happened in consequence during succeeding centuries. In this totality there is, of course, included the story of Jesus’ remembered teaching, acts, and relationships, as well as his death and the way in which through death he was believed to have been "let loose into the world" (as John Masefield once put it) as he was also believed to have been "raised from the dead" and received by God into the divine life. For Christian faith there is here "the supreme moment in history," as Whitehead said. Nowhere has this been more beautifully described than by Whitehead in the passage quoted earlier:

We observed that Whitehead went on to ask, "Can there be any doubt that the power of Christianity lies in its revelation in act, of that which Plato divined in theory?" And what did Plato -- and many others in various religions and cultures, each in his or her own fashion -- thus "divine in theory"? The answer is plain, and Whitehead phrases it simply: "The divine element in the world is to be conceived as a persuasive agency and not as a coercive agency." In other words, the basic insight of Christian faith, in the context of the other world religions, is that "God is Love." Love active in creation and Love the essential character of God.

What is known as Christology is the effort to make sense of all this, not in abstraction from the experience of Christian people but as a consequence of that continuing experience. In the past this task has been undertaken by way of talk about two "substances" (one divine, one human) united in one person" or talk about two wills (again one divine and one human) in one person or talk about two "consciousnesses" thus united. Over the years such talk seems to me to have shown its inadequacy and indeed its impossibility for us. I urge that our best approach is to take with great seriousness the primacy and centrality of love -- in this case, God’s prevenient or initiative Love as this is responded to in obedient human love. When Theodore of Mopsuestia, an Antiochene theologian in the age of the Christian Fathers, spoke of sunapheia (or deep union) and eudokia (or divine goodwill) as helping us here, he was right. These provide a clue to the way in which Jesus Christ may be interpreted as that One in whom God’s activity in Love and as Love and a genuine responsive human movement in love were brought together in a union that was neither incidental nor accidental but enduring.

Yet we need to remember that such a position cannot be demonstrated by appeal to this or that detail of Jesus’ life, since we do not have the information that would make that appeal valid. What can be done, however, is to refer to the early apostolic witness, seen in the context of the living Christian tradition, and to the manner in which that witness stressed both the centrality of the figure of Jesus and the enormous impact he had made. The conclusion of the matter is plainly stated in I John: "Herein is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us, and sent his Son that we might live through him.

I now turn to speak fairly briefly about what it means to be human, although in later chapters this will be discussed at length. We have seen that each of us is a living process, not a static "it" that was once created and now continues without change. Each of us is a "becoming" whose existence is toward making actual the initial possibilities given to us; we move toward, or away from, that realization. Each of us is a particular "himself" or "herself." Compounded of body, mind, emotion, and possessed of a striving after goals, we are grasped by, and we grasp, one or other of the many lures that come to us: we make our decisions, often insignificant but sometimes very decisive. We are a "becoming," we are also a "belonging," since we share in the common human life -- "no man is an island entire unto itself," said John Donne in a famous passage -- and what we decide affects others and also affects God. Our human possibility, therefore, is to move toward "the image of God" who is Love-in-act. Hence, we are to become "lovers-in-the-making" in all our shared finitude, obvious mortality, and patent defectiveness.

We share also in the accumulated wrong in our world, not only through our own wrong choices but because we inherit a distorted situation thanks to millennia of wrong choices in the history of which we are part. Our moral judgments, both in respect to ourselves and to others, must therefore be made in terms of the general direction in which we are moving. The significance of particular incidents is to be found in their indication of that direction, whether toward true humanness or toward a debasing of our humanity. God treats us as sons and daughters, providing attractions from his or her circumambient love and usually under creaturely incognitos (including above all our fellow humans), which can save us from ourselves and set us on the path toward fuller shared existence here and now, with the promise that our achievements, when they are for good, will be received by God. When they are not for good they may still be taken by God and be transformed into occasions for the better. But we dare not "run to Daddy" to set things right when, through our own errors and wrongdoings, things have gone badly. God "redeems us" but not by denying our own freedom and accountability, Redemption is by God’s taking us now for what we have it in us to become and for what (through our commitment in faith in that same God) is already intimated and even experienced in some degree.

Finally, we may ask about human destiny. In the Process conceptuality, as also in the biblical material, God is seen as affected by what happens in the creation. What happens makes a difference to God and in God, although God remains always the supreme, worshipful, dependable, and unsurpassable one, "than whom nothing greater can be conceived." Once received by God, no accomplished good can be "lost." Charles Hartshorne has spoken of "the divine memory as unfailing both in its retention and in its employment of what has been received. This is "objective immortality," in Whitehead’s phrasing; by virtue of it, creaturely "perishing" does not mean total annihilation but rather participation in the divine existence. All this can be seen as a valid Christian interpretation of our destiny as men and women.

But is such participation also "subjective," so that the human agent has a conscious awareness of it? Here there is a difference of opinion among Process theologians. Many would affirm some sort of subjective immortality: others would say that subjective immortality, while conceivable, is not a requirement of Christian faith. I agree with the latter group because I take seriously the theo-centrism or "God-centeredness" of that faith and the obvious fact of human finitude. Yet, on the other hand, for a Christian, death cannot mean the "total annihilation" mentioned above. It does indeed mark the end of our finite existence; but it is an end that has its terminus in God, and hence it cannot be utter annihilation. If God receives and remembers, infallibly and unfailingly, nothing is really "lost"; it persists in God who is never lost. Achieved good, accomplished justice, truth in its fullness: all these are forever "safe" in God, to whom alone (as a biblical text puts it) belongs immortality. Whatever that may include, all is ad dei gloriam -- in the deepest sense of those splendid Latin words.

In a recent book (After Death: Life in God, SCM Press) I have argued that what has just been said is a proper "demythologizing" of traditional Christian talk about death, judgment, resurrection, and eternal life. I have also urged that all these have their existential significance for our living here and now. In any event, we need to remember the saying of St. Francis de Sales: "We are to seek the God of consolations, not the consolations of God." To be "raised" from death into the life of God is the glorious fulfillment of all human aspiration. struggle, and desire, both for ourselves and for those whom we hold dear.

Fifteen years ago I had the privilege of serving for a month as a visiting professor at the Institute for Religion and Human Development, located at the Texas Medical Center in Houston, Texas, in the United States. While there I was asked to deliver a series of public lectures, intended for educated lay people and also doctors, nurses, and staff connected with the center. The topic that I was asked to take as my overall subject was "What it means to be a human person." The lectures were delivered (in March 1974) and were received very kindly by the quite large audiences that came to the center each week to listen to me.

I had no intention of publishing the lectures, but I retained my notes, for what they were worth, with the thought that some of the material might be used on another occasion. As a matter of fact, not one but two occasions arose, within the last two years, when I was able to develop those notes into lectures that (in a slightly altered form) constitute the present small book. The first of the occasions was in 1987, when I was invited by the Reverend Arthur F. McNulty, Jr., rector of Calvary Episcopal Church in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to speak daily for a week at that church. The subject of those talks was the meaning of human existence, in its various relationships, as understood in that sort of theological inquiry with which for many years I have been associated -- namely, Process Theology.

The second of these occasions was in June 1988. I was invited by the Reverend James W. Evans and his wife, Margaret Evans, to be the speaker at one of a series of summer meetings they arrange in Wisconsin, where they have been living since retiring from work in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. These summer sessions, each lasting a week, include music and art, with lectures on some appropriate religious subject. Once again, the topic for my share in the June 1988 session was the meaning of human existence -- and again, from the perspective of Process Theology.

Thus, what is here presented is the set of lectures given in Pittsburgh and in Wisconsin. with two chapters added at the beginning. One chapter is an introduction to Christian faith as this is seen by Process Christian thinkers. The other added chapter has to do with the question of evil, in its various forms. The fact of evil in the world and in human experience raises serious questions for any Christian discussion, as much about human existence as about the reality and activity of God who in Christian faith is affirmed to be nothing other than "pure unbounded love."

The title given this book, Becoming and Belonging, indicates the general approach that I have taken: to exist as human is to exist as an instance of "becoming" or developing (for better or worse) and is also to belong with others of our kind in a great enterprise in which each one of us belongs and to which each one of us makes her or his contribution, for good or for ill.

I am grateful to the two places that invited me to give these lectures; I am grateful to the audiences in both places, who listened in a kindly and interested fashion to what I had to say; and above all I am grateful to the McNultys and the Evanses for their hospitality and for their warm friendship, lasting over many years

Norman Pittenger

King’s College

University of Cambridge

England

July 1988