Last night, as my little brother and sister and I were in the kitchen, me typing an essay for AP Lang and Comp and them eating their before-bedtime meal, I heard the whale-like creak of the garage door opening. Oh, good, I thought. Babysitting time over.

My dad walked through the door. “I heard a good definition today,” he said.

“Can you tell me it?”

“Sure,” he said. He sat on the stool and straddled it. He folded his gigantic, muscular hands on his lap.

“Well, I learned the difference between coercion and communion,” he said. “Coercion is making someone agree with you. Communion is mutually agreeing to go somewhere with someone. So if you feel like I’m coercing you, let me know.”

Though I didn’t know the words, I have been trying to live in communion instead of coercion for a while now. It doesn’t come naturally to me; I have that journalistic debate streak and judgemental edge. I constantly try to whittle off my friends’ and family’s’ perceived faults. For example, if my friend complains to me about something I consider trivial, I poke holes in her logic as soon as she pauses for breath.

This is not healthy, and it is not good for our relationship.  

The times I have lived in communion have been beneficial to my relationships. I think this is because relationships are healthy only when people relax into them, and it is hard to relax when someone is coercing you.

Over the summer, I was upset with the lack of communion between my friend and I. I realized that the cause of that disconnection was that I was poking and prodding my friend, trying to pick away the things I didn’t like until she was carved into what I wanted. So, I decided to listen to my friend without coercing her. We hung out the next day, and I just listened. As I left her house that afternoon, she walked me to the door.

“This was really fun today,” she said.

This experience has repeated itself several different times with several different friends. It really is amazing how communing with a person shifts the dynamic of a relationship into something new. People in communion are more likely to open up to each other and feel safe to be vulnerable, instead of striving to compete.

Dwight Schrute from “The Office” said that on-time delivery is the soil in which the seeds of business grow; I think the same can be said of communion and relationships.

Communion is the soil in which the seeds of relationships grow.