I think that the little word, with, is the most Christian word. What I mean is that Christianity makes sense of it in a way that other religions can’t. For Christianity, with has wonderful ultimacy ; other approaches to life and humanness don’t have the resources to draw on to support it. Christianity alone makes sense of with. So with has about it zesty aura that is profoundly Christian

With implies a balanced togetherness, where individuals, nonhuman or human, sustain dynamic communion without absorption. In fact, if communion turns to absorption—the one absorbing the other—one of the individuals is absorbed, the absorbing individual has become a monster, and communion has been eradicated.

In a religion that professes that reality is ultimately one, one person with another or with a group is only ever a good on the way to something better: absorption. By the same token, in a philosophy that professes that ultimate reality is material (yes, there is something in that sentence that should raise a question: does material profess?), persons in with relationship, either with each other or with the material is dissipated by reduction.

To be with someone in friendship, you and your friend, to quote Simone Weil, “hold at a certain distance him who is as necessary as food.” You balance oneness and distinctness evenly. In the most remarkable way, the oneness feeds the distinctness, and vice versa. Friendship is two friends in a ship: plurality and unity. Otherness is preserved and enhanced in communion. That’s with.

We all know that the applecart can be upset. You can, in your friendship, become emotionally fused, which is unhealthy, or, what is actually the other side of the same coin, too disconnected.

In the Christian religion, the ultimate reality is three Persons with each other in such perfect, dynamic communion that God is Three in One. Jesus is—my heart sings to say it—God with us, Emmanuel.  (Isaiah 7) The core promise of Scripture, I will be your God and you will be my people, comes to concrete incarnation in Christ. It comes to culmination at the end of the story: “Now the dwelling of God is with men…” (Rev. 20)

Consider this: the goal of Christian discipleship is to be godlike—not god-ish. Not even in the renewal of all things will we become God. God must like it that we are ourselves—a duh statement that somehow I continually must remind myself of. God is not interested in absorption.  It is wonderful to talk of being partakers of the divine nature, as Scripture does, union with Christ, and so on. But we may never hear in that the misinference that we disappear, as real beings, in the process. No—in fact, we become more distinctly ourselves in communion with God.

And consider this: God is the only real being you can worship and in the process become more yourself. Worshiping anything other than God is idolatry.  When we idolize something or someone other than God, it becomes less than what it was, and we become less than what we are. We become, Scripture says, beasts! (Psalm 73). Depersonalizing absorption is of a piece with idolatry.

But the love that is of God, expressed in love for God and love for neighbor (“as yourself”—I noticed in church this morning—balancing the persons in communion, the who has and the one who has not, in the act of care) isn’t absorption but rather is communion.

Aspiring to being with God, moment by moment as well as in the consummation, isn’t settling for second best! It isn’t even something we must endure because “we are human.” Communion among friends is what God himself is; with is inscribed in the heart of the deepest reality there is. Communion with him, and with each other (the second command is like the first one, Jesus says, Matt. 22), is the highest good.

Vibrant friendships exhibit with. Each person is more him or herself in the dynamic solidarity and co-presence, as each freely gives and receives. We may expect God’s coming (we call the sacrament, communion!) to display this dynamic. “My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you….I no longer call you servants…instead I have called you friends…(John 15) “If anyone loves me, he will obey my teaching. My Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.” (John 14).

So Christianity makes sense of with; with makes sense of Christianity. In this, Christianity is distinctive. How may we celebrate and enact such a remarkable word?