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135 12 Relationality in Religious Awareness We are involved with humanity, of that religious persons are assured, and although this involvement expresses itself variously in the different traditions persons have continued to bear witness to the relationality of human life: with each other and crucially with salvific truth without the abiding presence of which, it has been affirmed, human life would hardly become authentic, humane. Relationality is at the heart of what it means to be genuinely human. It is a quality in which one participates when one is not cut off from the past—an open past—or from others or from meaning or, for some, even from hope. Central in this relationality is response, particularly, as we have indicated, response to transcendence which provides a center of value and a mutually recognized basis of and for community. Without relationality, there is fragmentation, disintegration , even despair, certainly isolation and estrangement. Relationality stands behind our capacity to be intelligible, to have thoughts wherein differentiations and connections operate, distinctions and comparisons apply. If things and thoughts are unrelated and disconnected, personality dislocation occurs—or has already occurred. Part of the lament of younger generations arises from a sense of disconnectedness of life, one’s own and others, of one academic discipline from others, of religious doctrines and environmental issues, of theological affirmations and self-understanding, of a human activity that we call science and a human activity that we call faithfulness. Without relationality, individuals remain isolated integers, failing to live fully as persons. In this chapter, we direct our attention to religious paradigms that depict foundations for relationality, particularly between persons and transcendence, without which reality and without which personal responses, the Buddha, Amida Buddha, and the Christ lose their identity. We will not argue that these focal religious images are the same or that they are analogous. The point is that they are homologous, that is to say, they are demonstrative of how we human beings 136 I n t he C om p a ny of Fr ie nd s have found our way to, or have been enabled to, conceptualize, to represent in ideas, what has simultaneously transformed our lives, is not entirely of our own creation, and at the same time exceeds our grasp. That transcendence is beyond our ability to conceptualize it fully, that in responding to it we discover wherein we enter a process of transcending—transcending what we had thought, how we had lived—we are consequently aware that religious awareness, although highly significant in being supportive in its integrative quality, is not itself salvific. Ultimately, perhaps one might speak of a salvific immediacy of engagement in which dimensions necessary for relations to occur have themselves become transcended. That engagement is, it seems, salvific. But speaking and writing of that engagement tend readily also to exceed our grasp, our conceptuality, our language. However, relationality in religious awareness is nearer to hand, indeed, provides support for living life well and about this, it appears, religious persons have given us remarkable testimonies. We begin with the way Theravāda Buddhists, because they have been able to become engaged with Salvific Truth (Dhamma) through the teachings (dhamma) of the Buddha, have represented the relationality of the Buddha with the Salvific Truth that he rediscovered and those teachings, which he gave to humanity, that lead to that Salvific Truth. Next we move to Jōdo Shinshū referring briefly to the contribution of T’an-luan and especially to the sense of relationality in Shinran’s understanding of the disclosure of Salvific Truth. We will next move to the relationality involved in one’s consideration of Jesus as the Christ in a key dimension of theological reflection that demonstrates his role in relationality as presented in the Christian theological affirmation of the Trinity . These inquiries will converge in our important theme of relationality, which persons have discovered in their religious lives, a triadic relationality of transcendence , modes of human apprehension, and the creative response of persons. Persons familiar with the major contributions to religious studies by Wilfred Smith will detect my indebtedness to his way of approaching issues of religiousness and more importantly, in this chapter, to his dynamic sense of transcendence as process, as involving human beings. Transcendence, for Smith, is not static, something out there and beyond, as is inadequately often thought. One spots the dynamic process transcendence involves in Smith’s observations: Central to an understanding of the universe, of humanity, and of transcendence itself as...

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