What might it mean "to be a person"? I worry that I've lost you already! But please hang in, since this won't be hopelessly philosophical. Actually, it's ultimately on how we are most God-like, most "made in the image and likeness," and that doesn't discriminate against possible extra-terrestrials like "E.T."!

"Being a person" is obviously one of the most important things about us, so it certainly should have some overlap with "being religious."

Most of us take for granted that we as persons are self-contained, (separable) self-conscious objects. Crudely put, we are highly evolved (or divinely created) bags of chemicals and their compounds. My rights as a U.S. citizen are somehow self-contained, either endowed by God or simply recognized by a constitutional government.

Its ideal occurs in the poetic lines "I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul." This is heroic American individualism.

Ayn Rand, author of such novels as "The Fountainhead," "Atlas Shrugged," "Anthem," or philosophical essays such as "The Virtue of Selfishness," might serve as a solid representative of an extreme version of such individualism, its glories and its vulnerabilities.

Paul Simon's "I am a rock, I am an island."

I am a substantial identity, defined by DNA, which keeps me "the same person," even though I obviously change throughout my lifetime.

This was summarized in the phrase "individual substance of a rational nature." I am an individual example of a changeless rational "essence." The emphasis is upon changeless essential humanness, in an individual, and not on its essential, and I mean essential, irreplaceable, relationships. All those relationships contribute irreplaceably to who and what I am. I do not make sense apart from them.

And so, person has been differently defined as an "incommunicable existence of an intellectual nature." Namely, a human being is not so much a defined substance as a relational existence. "Ek-sistence" means a "relational standing."

Let's look at a few building blocks of "person."

1) You could be defined as a "what," namely a specimen of Homo sapiens. You are definable by science, and capable of analysis and healing (or not) by a medical profession built upon the predictability of the human body and psyche. Your "essence" is to be human.

2) But you might be even more properly recognized as a "who," a unique example of Homo sapiens, with an utterly unique center of consciousness, which is ultimately "incommunicable." You have a unique identity, and a unique origin and trajectory and destination.

3) Thus you are a "whence" and a "whither," and these can serve as indications of just how truly relational you are

Let's look at the most ordinary, and yet the most precious, of such relationships.

You can and do love another person.

In the situation-comedy version, after the hallowed "seven years" of marriage, you could have a disagreement with your spouse: "You aren't the person I married!"

Of course s/he is not the person you married! Your mutual love has transformed each of you. You essentially shared your life, your very being with another person. You have shared with whole groups of people from birth and probably even before birth.

Is your self-center and self-definition weakening a bit here?? Giving too much of yourself away? Finding that you do indeed derive part of your very being from such relationships? How does a "master of my fate" meaningfully share in love with other people?

Further, this aggressive conversation between lovers can continue with the remark: "Doesn't our love mean anything to you anymore?"

"Our love."

OK, to flirt with instant boredom, let's look at middle-school grammar for a few nanoseconds: "I am" (first person); "you are" (second person); "it is" (third person). End of grammar discussion.

You just said, "Our love." Is "our love" an object, an "it," and we can speak of "it" in the "third person"?

By now, "our love" is an essential (no longer "accidental") part of us. But it is not "just you," and it is not "just me" and moreover, "it" is not an "it." The love is "you-and-me." It is us, both you and me. It is neither restrictively you, nor restrictively me. In an obvious way, it is other-than-me, other-than-you, but "our love" in a way makes both of us to be who we most truly are.

Similarly, I am not a biological "father" unless I have children. My children, physically, and their and my shared love, and the shared love of spouses (and of single people obviously) find essential parts of their inmost identity created by that which is not them, not part of the highly structured bag of chemicals.

In innumerable cases, what is not-me is recognizable as essential to me.

Is this not the heart and center of Buddhist compassion? I do not have compassion, I am compassion.

Every relationship that I have ever had, now have, and will have in the future has been, is, will be, an essential part of my personhood.

What is behind this conversation is, again, the distinction between substance, which is what something most essentially and unchangeably is, and "accidents," namely those things that can change, and the reality will still remain what it is.

For example, you can change all of the things which only accidentally define you, such as quantity, quality, location, time, posture, color, possessions, acting or being acted upon. You also have "relationships," namely the chance occurrences of how you are momentarily or consistently related to something else. These are purely "accidental." The person that you "are" never changes.

Except in the Christian Trinity, relation was "the weakest of attributes."

What was new in the mix was the Christian concept of relational personhood in a Trinitarian God. That really changed all the stakes.

In the Trinity, the very substance of "persona" is intra-constituted by relationality. Christianity was intentionally moving away from any kind of subordinate "down-flow" among the realities of the Trinity. "Son" was not to be seen as inferior to "Father," nor was "Holy Spirit." All were/are fully God.

God is one. But God is not simplistic monotheism. God is essentially relational. The lovely ancient word for God's interpersonal relationality is "perichoresis," inter-relational Dance.

God is eternal origin/"Father," God-self-immanent; God is eternal Word and Image/"Son," God-self-transcendent; and God is eternal coherence Love/"Spirit," God-self-relation.

God is eternal self-relational unity, before time and creation. In time and creation, God is centrally revealed as origin-word-spirit through and in Jesus of Nazareth. (And perhaps we eventually may see this relationality in Torah, Atman, Buddha nature and Qur'an?)

Might all this be a clue into what Christians may think is "made in the image and likeness of God"?

Human beings are clearly self-immanent, "incommunicable," and yet essentially also self-transcendent. Is this not what the reflection above on "our love" reveals, as well, then, in graded priority, true of all of our relationships? Apart from psychological and sociological pathologies of a variety of kinds (sin and its effects), are we not also self-relational, coherence, a center of such relationships?

Our "image and likeness" to God is most manifested in our gifted, graced, perduring infinite worth, shared.

This is John Donne's "No man is an island apart from the main[land]," Martin Luther King's "inextricable network of mutuality."

As 1 Corinthians 15.28 puts it, "God shall be All in All," and yet we shall be: Shared.

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Dr. George Gilmore, Ph.D., is professor of humanities at Spring Hill College in Mobile, Ala. Send an email to {email ggilmore@shc.edu}ggilmore@shc.edu{/email}. © copyright 2006 by George Gilmore