Seeing the risk in this, we try to extract ourselves from this ocean of need. We embrace an illusion of autonomy and independence. We don't need anyone. We can stand alone.
This is a lie, of course. No person is an island. So we seemed doomed, pathology to the right, pathology to the left.
To escape this trap, what we need, according to Rowan Williams in his essay "On Being Creatures," isn't "limitless dependence"--the never ending cycle of neediness--but something sturdier and more consistent, what he calls "fundamental dependence."
What we need is gift that demands no return, a gift that is truly a gift, unconditionally. We need to depend upon something that doesn't need us to become itself, a ground of dependence that does't use us as "raw materials" to establish its identity. And this, says Williams, is the dependence we receive when we come to trust God:
The doctrine of creation in its classical form is the religious ground for such an act of trust. To say, ‘I exist (along with the whole of my environment) at God’s will, I am unconditionally dependent upon God’ means – at least – the following things. My existence in the world, including my need to imagine this as personal, active and giving, is ‘of God’; my search for an identity is something rooted in God’s freedom, which grounds the sheer thereness of the shared world I stand in. And to see that is already to have that need answered: my needful searching is part of what God gratuitously brings to be. The secret of understanding our createdness is that it makes both sense and nonsense of the ‘search for identity’: it justifies our need (i.e., it displays it as something other than a neutral fact) and it answers it. Before we are looked at, spoken to, acted on, we are, because of the look, the word, the act of God. God alone (as supremely free of the world) can bring a hearer into being by speaking, but uttering (making external, ‘outering’) what the life of God is, in a creative summons...
We are here, then, we are real, because of God’s ‘word’; our reality is not and cannot be either earned by us or eroded by others. And to say that we are unilaterally dependent on God is to recognise that God alone is beyond the precarious exchanges of creatures who need affirmation. With God alone, I am dealing with what does not need to construct or negotiate an identity, what is free to be itself without the process of struggle. Properly understood, this is the most liberating affirmation we could ever hear. God does not and cannot lay claim upon me so as to ‘become’ God; what I am cannot be made functional for God’s being; I can never be defined by the job of meeting God’s needs.
