As regular readers will know, I share in
The Shape of Joy how psychologists have come to highlight the impact of "mattering" upon mental well-being.
Mattering, however, comes in two forms. As I point out in The Shape of Joy there is "relational mattering" and "existential" or "cosmic" mattering. Relational mattering concerns mattering to other people. By contrast, existential mattering is metaphysical in nature, how your significance is an ontic fact, a simple truth about the nature of reality. Your existence simply has significance.
As I discuss in The Shape of Joy, research has shown that of the two, relational versus existential mattering, existential mattering is the more robust predictor of mental health. The reason should be obvious. In the face of relational rejection or loneliness we need our value to be grounded in something more durable and consistent than the current status of my social, familial, and romantic life. Or worthiness cannot be wholly in the hands of others.
And yet, there is an intimate connection between relational and existential mattering. For many of us, we can only come to believe in our existential significance by experiencing being significant to others. Mattering has to be relationally mediated, has to come to us externally, from others. This is something that Dietrich Bonhoeffer recognized:
Help must come from the outside...God has willed that we should seek and find God’s living Word in the testimony of other Christians, in the mouths of human beings. Therefore, Christians need other Christians who speak God’s Word to them. They need them again and again when they become uncertain and disheartened because, living by their own resources, they cannot help themselves without cheating themselves out of the truth...The Christ in their own hearts is weaker than the Christ in the word of other Christians. Their own hearts are uncertain; those of their brothers and sisters are sure.
Again, we mediate mattering for each other. Mattering flows from the relational to the existential, from the social to the metaphysical. When our hearts are uncertain we must speak life into each other. Help comes to us from the outside. Mattering is spoken into us. In our homes, with our friends, in our churches.
For example, one night out at the prison study I was talking about the love of God and Steve raised his hand.
"How can I believe," he asked, "that God loves me when no one in my life has ever told me that they loved me?"
I listened as Steve went on.
"My father never told me that he loved me. My mother never told that me she loved me. No one has ever told me that they loved me. So how can I believe that God loves me?"
Steve couldn't believe in his existential mattering because he never believed in his relational mattering. And I don't think Steve is alone. I think many people struggle to believe that God loves them. Their existential mattering just isn't believable due to how they've been wounded and harmed by others.
Believing that God loves us, in our existential mattering, is very, very hard. I'm reminded of this famous text from Ephesians 3 about the love of God:
I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
I pray that you may have the power to comprehend. Comprehend what? Your existential mattering. How deep and wide and high is the love of God for you.
This was a power that Steve lacked. Steve couldn't comprehend the love of God due to his lack of relational mattering.
And here is where Bonhoeffer's insight proves to be so important. We can mediate mattering to each other. We can live in such a way to make the love of God believable. I can stand in front of Steve and say, "Steve, I love you." And though that relational mattering Steve comes to believe in his existential mattering. Through my love the love of God becomes believable. We become sacraments of God's love, material signs of an invisible reality. We mediate mattering.
And through the quiet miracle of that mediation we become the voice through which another soul hears that their life shines with a cosmic, unshakable worth.
