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It is more than an honor to introduce to you Sam Wells, it is a joy. And I could take the traditional path and stick with just the facts. A priest, author of 20 books, the 21st to come out sometime this spring, and the 22nd to emerge from what Sam says here today. Married to Jo, herself, a priest in the Church of England and chaplain to the Archbishop of Canterbury.

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Father to Steffie and Laurie. And then again, I might also illustrate Twain's famous quip that history doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme. By describing the following interesting synchronicity, H. Richard Niebuhr delivered what would become Christ and Culture in this very lecture series.

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He offered those lectures some 18 years after his brother Reinhold was married to Ursula, a member of the Church of England and an Oxford graduate. Sam's grandfather officiated their wedding. But here's the best way to introduce Sam. Sam Wells is a theological pastor and a pastoral theologian.

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He is a preacher and a broadcaster and administrator and scholar who seeks to walk with the poor every day. He has served appointments in large churches and small ones, congregations struggling to survive, and institutions overflowing with endowments. He was born in Canada, has lived for several years in North Carolina, and currently ministers in the center of London. He has written about turning fate into destiny, turning scarcity into abundance, turning drama into improvisation,

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and turning enemies into friends. He has never been able to leave the church for the academy, or leave the academy for the church. He sees his writing as a form of prayer, and his ministry as a form of love, and his faith as a search for truth. His Curry lectures are entitled Being with God, and his first lecture is called God,

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being with God. My friend, Sam Wells. Thank you, Ted, for the kind invitation and the great honor of offering these lectures. And thank you all-- thank you all, I should say, for that very warm welcome.

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I've given you a handout, but because I'm an experienced lecturer, I don't expect you to have read it. So I'm just going to read to you, and for those who, for some reason, haven't got the handout in their hands or are listening to this on a recording or elsewhere, I'm just going to read you the first paragraph or so of the handout, and then you can put that to one side and pick it up later and never be parted from it henceforth. In my book, Living Without Enemies, I described four kinds of social engagement. Working for is the conventional professional model where one assumes that the other is the problem and that you yourself are bringing the solution.

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Think the mission trip. Working with is more like community organizing, where everyone gathers around the table and brings their skills to addressing the problem. Being with is where you don't focus on a problem, and you don't necessarily bring your skills, but you relish the other for their own sake. That's what my lectures are about.

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Being for is where you orient your life to advocating for the other in such a way that doesn't require face-to-face contact of any kind. In the book, I suggest that Jesus spent a week in Jerusalem working for us, doing what we could not do. Three years in Galilee working with us, building a social movement, and 30 years in Nazareth simply being with us, sharing our joys and sorrows. The premise of the book is that those percentages, 1% working for, 9% working with, and 90% being with, are theologically significant and the church's template for mission.

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So that introduces what I'm going to offer to you in these three lectures. The first lecture is entitled God being with God and is about the Trinity. The second is entitled God being with us and is about Jesus.

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And the third is entitled our being with one another and is about the work of the Holy Spirit in the life of the kingdom. So God being with God. Being with is, before anything else, a description of what it means for the persons of the Trinity to be so eternally with one another that they are called one, and yet one in such a dynamic and creative way that they are called three. I want to outline the dimensions of what the persons of the Trinity being with one another entails.

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The inner life of the Trinity establishes and elaborates the dynamics of being with. Beginning with the Trinity is a statement about whence all knowledge, all reality, all being comes. The Christian belief in God as Trinity is a straightforward claim that the fount and origin and sustaining and completing energy of all being is fundamentally being with. being with is thus the true nature and ultimate destiny of all things.

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My contention is that 'with' is the most important word in theology. Considering the Trinity first also enables us to explore being with in a context that is not submerged by sin. Here, today, I develop an eight-layer description of what being with entails, a description that will prove useful in my two subsequent lectures.

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And again on page three of the handout, you can have a list of those eight dimensions should you not immediately commit them to memory. My account layers eight aspects cumulatively, one upon another. Each rests and builds upon the layers below it. This description is by no means exhaustive, but is intended to be sufficiently illustrative, but it sets the balance between the created and the eschatological in such a way that we can see replicated or imitated elsewhere.

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Presence. Number one, presence. Being with means first presence. Presence is in four dimensions, height, breadth, depth and time.

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It is the coincidence of all four in the appearance of one being before another. In the case of the Trinity, it's hardly adequate to use the term physical. The Trinity is certainly not less than physical and without doubt so much more. But

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Physical, used analogically, implies tangible, here and not elsewhere, utterly given over, without remainder, undivided, wholehearted, and receptive. It means to be available for unmediated interaction, not a voice only or written words only, but incorporating all the communication that occurs non-verbally. In this sense, the persons of the Trinity are, without question, fully present with one another, one might even say perfectly present with one another.

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We may thus call presence a necessary but not sufficient aspect of being with, upon which rests all the others. This simple prerequisite, loosely termed just showing up, would seem a banal criterion with which to begin if it were not so commonly neglected or widely ignored. There can be no with without presence.

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Any assertion or reassurance of with that excludes presence (think of the phrase even though we're all these miles away, we're with you in your grief) either assumes the intermediary grace of the Holy Spirit to make present that which is in fact absent, or is a straightforward denial, however well-meaning, of tangible reality. The mutual indwelling of the Trinity is the model of what presence definitively means. God is unalloyed, unambiguous presence, no remainder, nothing withheld.

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Unlike human presence, that presence is always blessing. Human presence has the capacity to alter everything without a single word being said. A profound sense of attraction or repulsion, calm or anxiety, charm or manipulation, invariably runs far ahead of words. The divine presence, though it may evoke godly fear, not only has this wordless power, but is always on our side.

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Number two, attention. Presence on its own does not automatically secure with. In fact, it could be a form of being without with, a negative exposure to being that made being a withdrawn or uncooperative form of minimalism, a kind of theological working to rule, as if to say, I'm here, aren't I?

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What more do you want? The layer above presence may be termed attention. Attention is the practice of loving study, of noticing and remembering minute particulars, of engaging the senses to register and cherish unique and characteristic qualities, of digesting and savouring and dwelling upon appearance, gesture, texture, and tenderness.

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Attention introduces the dimension of desire, the recognition that being in another's presence does not simply represent a numerical increase, but potentially a deepening, an enriching, an inspiring, a revealing, a true encounter. The mutually indwelling persons of the Trinity look upon one another with rapt attention, seeing all, aching to hear all, missing nothing, so fixed in their gaze that they absorb one another's wisdom and grace by osmosis. Presence is showing up. It could be reluctant or truculent, but attention is eager, intent, sharp, poised, alert.

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never assuming something is about to happen, but always ready should it be so. This layer makes clear that being with is a vibrant, dynamic, demanding activity, rather than a passive, static one. Attention to the other need not imply, still less require, neglect of the self. But it does assume that the flourishing of the self is not the principal reason for existence or relationship.

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The Trinity is sometimes described as a dance. To dance requires the constant attention of each partner to each other's rhythm, energy, imagination, and direction. This is the language of loving attention. If presence risks being minimalist, attention risks being sentimental.

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Sentimental attention absorbs the other into a web of pre-existing projections and assumptions, not permitting oneself to see in the other the sharp edges and inconsistencies that constitute the contrary intractable stuff of existence. Describing the work of Iris Murdoch, Stanley Hauwas says, Most of our loving is more an assertion of self than a recognition of the other. We seldom love the other as he is.

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Rather, we love the other by imposing upon him our own preconceived image of who he is. For we cannot stand to love the other in his particularity as a contingent being destined for death. To love such an object is sure to bring pain, since we are destined to lose it. We therefore love the other, only as we make him as an aspect of our plan, we assume this assures his eternity and ours.

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By contrast, attention, loving attention, assumes suffering, assumes that there is no way truly to apprehend the other without being grieved by the other's complexity, or their difference, or their imperfections, or their loss, or all four. This need not be an action limited to interpersonal relations. The point is to divest the self of self-absorption and be formed so as to be able to take in the reality of other beings in their utter particularity.

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Iris Murdoch says, It may be a profound moral experience to take self-forgetful pleasure in the sheer, alien, pointless, independent existence of animals, birds, stones, and trees. The profound relationship between beauty, good, and the truth is the fact that each of them provides the occasion for such unselfings. The beginning of the moral life may be nothing more dramatic than the recognition of an inanimate object in all its particularity and detail.

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Attention requires such a degree of unselfing, a concentration on the details of another's existence. The persons of the Trinity have such an unselfed regard for one another, one that may inspire many such faithful imitations. A term closely related to attention which amplifies its meaning is 'desponibilite' as employed by Jacques Lacoc and Gabrielle Marcel. For Lacoc, 'la desponibilite' is the condition of relaxed awareness attained by improvisers in the theatre.

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An actor in this condition has trust and respect for self and other performers alertness, attention, engagement, narrative skills, facility with status roles, memory, and the ability to develop character and reincorporate discarded material. For Marcel, la disponibilite means availability, or being at the disposal of the other, on all levels, physical, spiritual, practical, emotional. It's the opposite of pride.

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which seeks to find all its resources within itself. La Disponibilite embodies the notion of attention in that it regards the other as a thou and not simply as a he or she, and incorporates the notion of presence in that it assumes the interaction of two physical beings. Treating others in the third person, by contrast, is regarding them as if they or oneself were absent.

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It's to encounter the other in a fragmentary way, to treat them as an abstraction, an example or incidence of certain generalizable characteristics or tendencies. In terms close to my own purpose, Marcel explains, The person who is at my disposal is the one who is capable of being with me, with the whole of himself when I am in need while the one who is not at my disposal seems merely to offer me a temporary loan raised on his resources for the one I am a presence for the other I am an object dare I imagine the picture of a father a problem of this kind they are a mystery They can seldom be treated except by engaging the web of relationships and circumstances in which the patient is set.

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To treat them as a problem is either to become exasperated with these tiresome circumstances or to render the illness incomprehensible. A physician or carer has to enter the life of the patient to a degree largely unnecessary in the case of a person who's experienced a broken bone. the resolution or healing of the patient's condition, is unlikely simply to stem from the employment of a formula or application of a technique. It's much more likely to require the adaptation of the efforts and openness of the patient, together with the imagination and patience of the physician, in the context of a community of care and support.

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If treated as a problem, mental illness can seldom be fixed. all involved must, to some extent, be prepared to enter the mystery. It perhaps goes without saying that the Trinity is a mystery and not a problem. The persons of the Trinity can never exhaust, still less master one another in their loving play of interaction.

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This explains why the Trinity can be described but never defined, for every definition is a kind of reduction. The term mystery discloses two further dimensions of being with, both amply displayed in the life of the Trinity, wonder and abundance. As to wonder, one does not wonder at a problem. One scrutinizes, investigates, calculates, hypothesizes upon experiments on and eventually solving.

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solves it. But one does wonder at a mystery. Wonder is a different mode of discourse from inquiry, description, or request, from interrogative, indicative, or imperative. Wonder is an invitation to an imaginative relationship, to a shared exploration of possibility and resonance, to a form of discovery where knowledge is less important than curiosity and playfulness,

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and a willingness to be open to multiple interpretations. It's not the static settling of a problem, but the dynamic unfurling of a mystery. Abundance belongs with wonder. It's the conviction that if something is of God, there is no shortage of it.

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That joy lies in learning to love the things God gives in plenty. while misery awaits those who set their hearts on the ephemeral objects of scarcity, that God gives everything needed for a life devoted to faithful following. Anxiety, by contrast, perceives scarcity everywhere, and is constantly inclined to hoard or to steal, to trespass into envy or greed, and to miss the value and pleasure of what it has in the restless pursuit to protect it, and acquire more.

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The persons of the Trinity exist in a mystery of wonder and abundance. Theirs is a wonder that goes beyond knowledge, an abundance that knows the joy of the other will never run out. It is a dynamic contentment, an inexhaustible awareness, an understanding that there is discovery without end, reward without limit, play without defeat, perception without diminishment. Here are some words of Ralph Harper that echo the language of despondibilite, meanwhile demonstrating the significance of abundance.

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Even a modest gift of oneself, tentatively shyly offered, can be qualitatively different from listening with half the soul. Some people never give themselves completely, sometimes because they fear there will be nothing left if they do. In this contrast, we see abundance exhibited despite shyness, contrasted with fear, founded on scarcity. Perhaps the key dimension of mystery is its inexhaustibility.

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One approaches a problem with a roving eye. There's always the prospect of another more significant, more challenging, more rewarding problem ahead and beyond, over the shoulder of this one. But since a mystery can never be solved, still less fixed, one can never expect wholly to leave it behind. There is, in entering every mystery, always the possibility that this will be the final resting place.

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This will be the place of encounter from which all else finds its perspective and depth. Sit in your cell, said Abba Moses, the Desert Father, to his inquiring visitor, and your cell will teach you everything. To be with is to treat each person as if they might be that cell.

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As if each person, if given presence and attention in full measure, could teach one everything. Problems are solved by being delineated, detached, and dismantled. Mysteries, it may turn out, could all somehow be connected. by labyrinthine tunnels of wisdom, mysticism, and truth.

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In such possibility lies one aspect of their inexhaustible character. This is how the persons of the Trinity contemplate one another. Delight. The next layer resting on mystery, attention, and presence is delight.

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Thus far, All that has been said about presence, attention, and mystery may make being with sound like a long travail of endurance, patience, and duty. But that's not the witness of the Trinity. The persons of the Trinity take delight in one another, in one another's existence, diversity, activity, and expression.

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One of the most compelling arguments for the practice of being with is that that is where the true joy lies. It's not fundamentally a self-denying orientation. It doesn't assume the attainment of an altruistic ideal. It rests on a conviction that like consequential ethics, working for, and even sometimes working with, take for granted a goal that turns out to be somewhat too proximate.

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Being with is eschatological, because it anticipates the communion of persons with their environment, with one another and with God, that will be their joy forever. Rather than prioritizing those activities that are instrumental in bringing about such a goal, Being With celebrates the goal itself by seeking to practice its habits right now. It's common

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for those whose whole orientation is directed towards working for or working with to be suspicious or dismissive of being with as doing nothing. A counter-argument is to point out how much working, especially for but also with, is an end in itself, a displacement activity rooted in fear or reluctance in the face of being with. How much is this fear truly about the elusiveness of joy? When one's life is constant work, constant deferral of the moment of reward, constant avoiding the gaze of the persons one is serving or is chewing, the opportunity to name the security one is pursuing, how much of this is taking refuge in the journey because of profound doubts about the destination?

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Being with is not inactivity. It's activity that is seeking to be the goal itself. to be the destination, rather than perpetually regarding the destination as an unspecified distant shimmer or a prosaic measurable quantity. The other key dimension of delight, beyond its eschatological character, is that it's reflexive.

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To take delight in another is simultaneously to allow them to take delight in me. It's part of the assumption of working for that any joy the recipient may find in me is strictly limited to satisfaction in the service I perform and the results derived from it. Any further joy is not to be sought and certainly not to be invited. It's bound to distract from, if not undermine or even discredit, the service I perform.

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But delight longs to be shared or risks becoming impoverished, even perverted. Part of the self-denying character of working for is denial of the opportunity to make a genuine relationship, one in which both parties may know and express joy and delight. Yet, this self-denial masks its limited perception of human flourishing. Integral to human flourishing is the sharing of mutual joy, not necessarily exuberant or erotic or egregious,

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But to be truly joy, it must go beyond the utilitarian and glimpse the eschatological. And to be truly mutual, it must be something experienced by both parties, not simply respectively at the same time, but in some degree through the recognition of the wonder of one another. The life of the Trinity is the mutual evocation of joy in one another. the delight taken in beholding the other equalled by the joy discovered in causing delight in the other.

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Participation. The fifth dimension of being with, resting on those that precede it, is participation. Here, perhaps most explicitly, belong the positive aspects of with. The Trinity displays that God is a shared enterprise.

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The purpose of all things is not to get to the destination quickly, efficiently, and then move on to other business. The purpose is to find ways to be and do with. Participation is all. There's no getting there unless all get there.

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Every action of the Trinity is an action of all three of its persons, and is the richer for that texture of participation. It's a commonplace to speak of athletic honor lying not in the winning, but in the taking part. Yet the satisfaction and the superficiality of athletic contests arises from the fact that life as a whole is not fundamentally made-up of victory or defeat, and only becomes so if one isolates and valorizes those parts that can be so described. There is nothing of eternal value that can be achieved or secured in isolation from other beings.

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There is nowhere to secure the booty of such a conquest, no way to protect it from the ravages of time or the oblivion of eternity, no person to whom to entrust it for safekeeping. All that is not participation is transitory. Put more positively, all that is participation is connected to the eschatological with. the abiding being-with of God, the Holy Trinity, and humanity restored in the new creation.

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Every mundane with carries a hint of that final with. We saw earlier in the dimension of delight that being-with is not primarily a matter of self-denial, more the discovery of joy in a location other than one's own creative and successful activity. a deeper joy than can be had alone. But there's still a place for self-effacement.

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Part of taking joy in the presence and activity of others is to realise that the story is not fundamentally about oneself. To be with is to seek to be a saint and not a hero, one who assumes that the decisive action takes place elsewhere, that the story is not about celebrating one's own qualities, that if one fails, all is not lost, and that faithful existence is fundamentally in the plural. The emphasis on 'with' discloses another difference between the saint and the hero.

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The hero performs for the watching, anonymous crowd and the intangible yet quantifiable glory. The saint has no sense of any watching eye beyond those whose company the saint has chosen or been chosen to keep. The saint is not sustained by applause or inhibited by the lack of it. The saint's presence, attention, mystery, and delight are evaluated by their eschatological nature, more tangibly, the degree to which they're shared and translated into with.

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This is the degree to which they resemble the inner relations of the persons of the Trinity. Number six, partnership. A closely related but subtly different dimension of being with is partnership. Together, participation and partnership cover much of the ground often spoken of in the language of reciprocity.

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The emphasis of participation is on recognizing the centrality of with, the anticipation of the eschatological involvement of all in the new creation before God. Partnership explores the nature of that with somewhat further, noting variegations and complementarities. The Trinity is made-up of three persons entirely with one another, so with that every action of the one is in some degree an action of all three, and that no action of one can contradict the action of another.

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But the three persons of the Trinity are not identical with one another. They are complementary in their diversity and creative in their difference. The life of the Trinity incorporates both the purposeless joy of participation for its own sake and the purposeful intent of partnership for the exercise and enjoyment of the diverse gifts of the respective persons. What it never has is a task so urgent or a goal so unambiguous that one member sees fit to drop the with and go it alone to get the job done.

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Partnership is the recognition that each party brings different and vital qualities to the table. In this sense, it's a dimension especially pertinent to working with, but it's also important to being with. After all, the two categories are highly permeable.

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Partnership is a development of attention in the way participation is a development of presence. That's to say, as attention notices and highlights particularities and unique qualities, So, partnership translates those qualities into complementary activity. Partnership brings out the dynamism and attention.

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More than just noticing and registering difference, more than just tolerating difference or even appreciating it, it rejoices in difference and puts it to work. It's important to note that being with, while it pays close regard to process and is sceptical of overemphasis on product, does not thereby exclude or denigrate activity in general, or productive activity in particular. The skepticism about focusing too much on the end product arises because such a focus invariably neglects or undermines the with.

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In other words, it devalues or downgrades the telos in the quest, usually the eager, urgent quest, for something more achievable, tangible, and less costly or demanding. Re-emphasizing the with means exploring all forms of shared existence and enterprise, from the more sedentary to the more physically engaged. For example, when a grandparent has had a stroke, being with for the grandchild does not mean the grandchild going and buying a walking frame or searching the internet for herbal remedies. These are for rather than with.

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There is a place for such support, but such support is not to be regarded as with, and cannot take the place of with. Instead, being with may mean sitting beside the bed in silence, perhaps holding a hand, it may mean telling stories and acknowledging fears, making plans and exploring possible therapies, watching television, or listening to the radio together. Or it may mean walking side by side as the grandparent learns to walk again. These are all forms of with.

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And they show the ways with goes beyond participation to partnership. Participation says it doesn't matter what it is, what matters is that we do it together. Partnership says if you do your part and I do mine, we can do something beautiful together. The significance of this is that for the stroke victim, it's often assumed, particularly from a working fore point of view, that there is no

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the victim can in fact do. Yet partnership through presence, attention and delight comes to perceive many things the victim can do and stays around to discover many more that the victim unearths for themselves. Partnership says, you have had a stroke, but you can help me with my colour blindness, with my dyslexia, with my anger, with my depression. In fact, because you're having to take things slowly and set aside the thirst for productivity, I can show you those parts of myself I wouldn't have entrusted to you before for fear I'd be wasting your precious time.

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Healing is not simply taking medication or receiving physical therapy that restores lost brain and limb and speech function. Healing means learning to enjoy to the full one's new range of abilities and discovering aptitudes one always had, but previously had not thought relevant or necessary. This latter is a journey that depends on participation and flowers in partnership.

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Number seven, enjoyment. I guess you could say this is the big one. If there's a single word that sums up the character of being with in Trinitarian perspective, and draws together all of the themes explored hitherto.

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That word is enjoyment. For Augustine, there are some things we use, some we enjoy, and some we both use and enjoy. Life is fundamentally about enjoying, and enjoying makes us happy. To enjoy something is to rest with satisfaction in it for its own sake.

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We use things to the extent that they assist us in pursuing the things we enjoy. The human condition is that of a profound confusion between what we should use and what we should enjoy. The result is that we frequently use what we should enjoy and enjoy what we should use. Here is Augustine's analogy of how we come to enjoy what we should instead use, delivered with a Carthaginian

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Latin accent. Suppose, then, we were wanderers in a strange country and could not live happily away from our fatherland, and that we felt wretched in our wandering and wishing to put an end to our misery, determined to return home. We find, however, that we must make use of some mode of conveyance, either by land or water, in order to reach that fatherland where our enjoyment is to commence. but the beauty of the country through which we pass and the very pleasure of the motion charm our hearts and turning these things which we ought to use into objects of enjoyment we become unwilling to hasten the end of our journey and becoming engrossed in a factitious delight our thoughts are diverted from that home whose delights would make us truly happy such is a picture of our condition

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in this life of mortality. Having made this helpful distinction, Augustine then states, The true objects of enjoyment then are the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, because they are eternal and unchangeable. All else is to be used that one may enjoy God. Then comes the crucial question, should human beings be enjoyed or used?

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Augustine's answer is that persons, including oneself, should be loved not for their own sake, but for God's sake. Thus, they should be used rather than enjoyed. I suggest we expand the notion of enjoyment from simply relating directly to God, to realizing that a joyful encounter with God's good creation is enjoying God. The crucial point in expanding the notion of enjoyment is to see that enjoyment is not self-explanatory.

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It requires all the dimensions described in my foregoing account. The point is crucial because what must be avoided is any sense of idolatry. Enjoying another is a participation in God's enjoyment of that other, not an idolatrous displacement of God by that other. The other remains other and is enjoyed in their otherness, especially in their otherness, rather than made one's own creature.

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God remains God and enjoys us as we enjoy the other and enjoys the other in and with our enjoying the other. As Rowan Williams states, summarizing Augustine's outlook, We cannot properly enjoy what we swiftly and definitively possess. Such possession results in inaction and ultimately contempt for the object.

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To render the same insight in the language of my own study, enjoyment must always respect the with. It's always a participatory and generative, never an exclusive or consuming process. The result of enjoyment is always more, always abundance, and never less, never scarcity.

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The persons of the Holy Trinity enjoy one another. That is the most succinct description of how they relate to one another, of what God being with God means. To enjoy is to be in one another's presence, to bestow profound attention on the other's differences and particularities, to enter the mystery of the other and the other's relational world, to delight in one another, and thus discover joy, to participate with one another simply for the sake of the with that is involved, and to see complementarities in partnership with one another. The persons of the Trinity enjoy one another with no thought to use.

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It's not that using is flawed and manipulative, a pejorative term to describe second-rate activity, it's that using names the habit of endless deferral, the reluctance ever to say or feel or know or communicate that this, this moment, this place, this person, is the site of encounter, the resting place, the angle of repose, the occasion for genuine worship. Here, the threeness of the Trinity is particularly significant. Enjoyment is always an open, inviting activity. It's not the possessive, jealous, exclusive absorption of two beings, one in the other, but a participation in an enjoyment that has already begun.

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To enjoy another is not simply not to use them. It is to say that at least for a given period, one has nothing more important to do than be entirely focused on them, to be with them in all the ways described thus far, to relish the ways that they've been fearfully and wonderfully made, and to bring oneself into joyful relationship with them. Enjoyment is perfect activity. It's a moment when the means and the ends so fold into one another that the distinction ceases to jar, when participants experience their activity as effortless because they cannot imagine doing anything else.

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For humans, it is the moment when it becomes impossible to tell what is I and what is the grace of God in me. For God, it is the moment when the imminent and the economic trinity are indistinguishable. To argue that enjoying another is to participate in God's enjoyment of them is to assume one further thing that Augustine does not assume. It's to understand that God enjoys us.

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Salvation is the extension to the good creation of the persons of the Trinity's enjoyment of one another. God bestows upon us presence, attention, mystery, delight, participation, and partnership. This is what the process of salvation looks like. This is what enjoyment looks like.

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This is what grace looks like. Eternal life is our enjoying God in best imitation of and response to God's perpetual and utter enjoyment of us. God does not use us in either the instrumental sense caricatured by Augustine's critics, or the humane sense advocated by his rehabilitators. We are not part of some grander plan.

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We are the plan. There is beyond to which God is reaching, and that includes and therefore uses us. We are the beyond. God's life is shaped never to be except to be with us.

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God enjoys us now and forever. That is the Gospel. Let me offer two analogies. In many cultures, a birthday is an occasion to celebrate a person not for their productivity, talent, skill, wealth, wisdom, or beauty, but simply for their existence as a created being.

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Anxiety can turn a birthday into an exercise of working for. You've been there. the making of cakes, the purchasing of expensive but not necessarily appropriate gifts, the arrangement of elaborate but not necessarily welcome surprises. At the heart of a birthday is the desire to be with the celebrant simply to express the goodness of their being alive and the uniqueness of their place in the world, a moment of thankfulness, particularity, and relish.

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It's a day to tell stories, share memories, dream dreams, delight in eccentricities, name insights, and treasure consolations. A birthday, when celebrated in such a way, is one of the most common experiences of being with. To enjoy someone is to regard them every day as if it were their birthday. Not to give them things, or to applaud their triumphs, or to manufacture happiness on their behalf,

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but to take delight in them and pay attention to them and relish them in sunshine and in rain. This is how the persons of the Trinity regard one another. To turn to another analogy, technologically shaped existence enables human beings to undertake a fast increasing number of activities with just one hand.

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The contemporary West is a culture committed to multitasking. Cars, computers and telephones are designed so that one can operate them with one hand while doing something else with the other. Few things interrupt the one-hand culture. Most innovation is oriented to enhancing it.

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One might say the things we do with one hand are those that we use. Those that take two hands are those we enjoy. To enjoy another person is to take them in two hands, to offer them time to cherish their particularity and their irreplaceability, to make it clear that experiencing them requires the whole of one's attention.

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It's to enjoy them in the way God enjoys them, to participate in God's enjoyment of them. The persons of the Trinity enjoy one another, as it were, with both hands. There is no multitasking involved. And God enjoys the good creation with both hands.

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Finally, number eight, glory. At every stage in laying out these seven dimensions of being with, I have described it explicitly as an alternative to instrumentalizing the other. especially the other who offers you no discernible material, social, or emotional benefit. I've played down the telos precisely because most forms of engagement highlight tangible, specific, measurable, achievable goals that reduce the telos to the proximate target of that which can be immediately foreseen, thereby making the other a means to that end.

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But there is a telos, and that telos constitutes the eighth layer of the description of being with, in which each of the layers rests on, requires, and incorporates the previous layers. That telos is glory. Here is perhaps the central verse of the Christian faith, And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a Father's only Son, full of grace and truth.

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This verse brings together several of the themes we've been exploring. God's life is shaped to be with us. Being with us is of a piece with the persons of the Trinity's existence as being with one another. Being with is full of grace and truth.

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And both the Trinity's being with one another and the Trinity's being with us in the Word made flesh are best described as, indeed, become the definition of glory. God being with God and God being with us are what we mean by the term glory. In his high priestly prayer in John 17, Jesus offers to the Father two petitions that have a particularly rich bearing on our discussion. The first is in verse 5, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had in your presence before the world existed.

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Here, Jesus affirms that glory consists fundamentally in the persons of the Trinity being with one another. But he employs that this glory can exist in the presence of human beings, as is about to happen in his own passion. The second is in verse 24. Father, I desire that those also whom you have given me may be with me where I am.

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to see my glory, which you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world. Here Jesus connects the notion of being with to the ultimate revelation of glory. Glory becomes the theme that connects the relations of the persons of the Trinity, the purpose of God in founding the world, the presence of God among human beings, and the notion of being with. We've seen

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how these eight layers, presence, attention, mystery, delight, participation, partnership, enjoyment, and glory, build on, incorporate, amplify, and enrich one another as they describe the notion of being with. To employ language I've introduced elsewhere, each layer over-accepts the previous and is over-accepted by the subsequent layer, in much the same way as each member of the Trinity over-accepts each of the others. One can thus see this account of being with as an amplification of the notion of over-accepting. All the wonder and mystery of being is joined to the delight and participation of with.

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Being with is not an abstract ideal, but a rendering of the inner relations of the persons of the Trinity, manifested in those persons' relations with humanity and the good creation. and with clear implications for humanity and the good creation's relations with one another. And it is to those relations I'm going to turn in my next two lectures. Once we depart from the inner relations of the Trinity, the flawed and fragile nature of human relations emerges as a pervading limitation.

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But having seen the way being with abides within the Trinity, we're able to perceive that being with is not simply God's and our, Adaptation to human sin, being with is... is the epitome of human participation in God, indeed of God's glory itself. Such is a Trinitarian account of the notion of being with.

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In my second and third lectures, I'll seek to work out these insights in understanding the ministry of Jesus and the Holy Spirit. Thank you very much.