Photo albums remind us that much of life is shared experience: we are members of one another. In so many ways we are beholden to multitudes of folk present and remembered, whose lives are and were cross-referenced to our own.

Not only is our life a gift — the consequence of the love two people shared, but the whole of that which we are — personality and gifts, even the nature of our wins and losses — is tied to other people. No wonder we say, “an apple does not fall far from the tree.” The comic might counter with “except when the tree is on a hill.” Still, the melding of who I am firmly testifies to my being a relational being.

Theologian and writer Frederick Buechner dedicates one of his books, “The Sacred Journey” to a friend:

For Louis Patrick

and all the other saints,

remembered and forgotten, along the way.

Naming his friend and “all the other saints,” Buechner confesses that his life was and is shared life.

Were you to write a book of remembrances and a summary of your life, to whom might you dedicate those writings? What faces would loom up in your imagination? Whose voices would sound in the corridors of your mind? On all sides of our days and years are these others, often half-remembered, who brought to us in their being gifts beyond measure — gifts we have taken into our beings to give us the faces we wear.

God seems to have designed life as taking place in community. God gives to us these others. The writer of Genesis puts this thought in God’s mind: “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.” So God gives an “other” in the form of woman. Woman and man make the first community. It is this gift of the other that enriches and enhances our lives. That is how God’s love gets worked into our lives.

The self is a fragile construction and for the most part finds its wholeness in the presence of others. There is not one person who does not long to be loved and affirmed by the others in his or her life. It is in our being loved that we lose our anonymity. Accepted and loved, we are no longer nameless.

South American theologian Rubem Alves, reflecting on God’s intention for us, both in this world and the next, wrote:

“May there be, somewhere, a community of men, women, old people, children, and nursing babies who may be a first fruit, an aperitif, and a caress of the future.”

Such words signify the many-sided nature of all human relationship. Our happiness to a large degree is inextricably bound up with these various communities that shelter and nourish our minds and spirits.

We are beggars for those gifts of being that God chooses to give us through the others in our lives. We need that their lives be a blessing for us.

Writer Robert McAfee Brown was once asked, “What keeps you going?” He gave six answers. With number six he came on strong:

“Most of all, a commitment to and from friends and family, who love me even when I am unlovable, and thus image in human terms God’s love for us all, freeing us from both guilt and self-absorption, so that we can be directed into lives of concern for the very least of all God’s children.”

Just so! You and I need this liberating intimacy of family and friends. In the words of Antoine de Exupery, “Happiness! It is useless to seek it elsewhere than in this warmth of human relations. Our sordid interests imprison us within their walls.”

To be immediate to these others in our lives is to participate in the all-embracing order of things, where we are fortified by the love and attentiveness of one another.

The Rev. Merle G. Steva is minister of visitation at First Parish Church in Saco. He can be reached at:

mesteva@maine.rr.com