My daily commute to work is often less like a commute and more like a session of the Society for Outdoing Each Other With Recommendations of Obscure Music and Books.

I may be ahead of the game, as far as obscure music recommendations go. My carpool buddy’s daughter once apparently asked in awe where he found all this music. “I have a source,” he replied. (That source would be me.)

But my carpool buddy has long been ahead of the game, as far as obscure book recommendations go. And he recently earned double points for recommending a delightful children’s book.

It all began while he was browsing the children’s section of the public library with his son. “Oooh,” he thought (or so he reported to me a few days later, on the drive to work), “this will be a cool book. With a title like ‘Join the Skeleton,’ it must be about anatomy. What a great learning opportunity!” But when he pulled the book off the shelf, he was surprised to discover that it was not actually called “Join the Skeleton.” Rather, it was called “John the Skeleton.”

Being the placid person and ravenous reader that he is, my carpool buddy shrugged and added the book to his checkout pile, figuring that “John the Skeleton,” while probably not a children’s book about anatomy, would likely have as much literary merit as a book called “Join the Skeleton.”

Oh, does “John the Skeleton” ever have literary merit.

I don’t want to give away too many spoilers, but I will say a few words about “John the Skeleton.” It’s by an Estonian author, and it tells the story an anatomy-classroom model who gets to spend his retirement years with new friends—Gramps and Grams—on their farm in the country. Neither my carpool buddy nor I read Estonian, by the way; the book has been translated for the reading pleasure of an English-speaking audience.

And what a pleasure this book is!

It’s silly, and that’s always fun. It’s sweet, and that’s always uplifting. But most of all, it is breathtakingly human. That’s right: a book about a model skeleton is fundamentally, overwhelmingly, amazingly human.

You see, John the skeleton has all sorts of ordinary, everyday adventures with Gramps and Grams and sometimes their grandchildren. They make snow angels, they sit in the sauna, they prune trees, they run errands in town, they drink tea. And they do all of these ordinary things within the context of a joyful relationship grounded in reverent respect for the sacredness of all God’s good creation. No one hesitates to envelop John the skeleton in the gentle, reverent, respectful embrace of friendship and love.

By depicting an inanimate, albeit cheerfully anthropomorphized item of classroom technology as being worthy of love, friendship, and respect, the author calls attention to one of the key ingredients of a joyful relationship. No matter how many or what kind of actors are involved in any given relationship, that relationship must be grounded in each one’s respect for the others.

That’s the kind of message we need more of.

It’s easy to forget the deep joy of being in respectful relationship with self, others, our Creator, and the earth that sustains us. “The spirit of the world,” to borrow language from Thomas Merton, quickly overwhelms the simple joy of sacred togetherness built on mutual respect for each other’s dignity and needs. “The spirit of the world” focuses our attention not on togetherness, but on transactional relationships: what can I get out of this relationship? What’s in it for me?

We are encouraged to “network,” not necessarily as a way of building community and social embeddedness, but as a way of connecting with the right resources to further our careers. All of us—and students especially—are encouraged to cultivate “reference relationships”: relationships with people who can vouch for our qualities in professional settings. We are encouraged, perhaps unintentionally, by online dating apps and other forms of social media to rate and compare our own “marketability” or “appeal” or “success” and that of others. We fall easily into the trap of transactional relationships, always on the lookout for what we can “get” out of an interaction or relationship. At the very least, we fall easily into the trap of subconsciously wondering how little time or effort or other investment we must make to keep a relationship alive.

And it’s no wonder that we fall into these traps. We live in a world of both subtle and overt competition for scarce resources. Some of these resources, such as clean water, are truly scarce. Some of them, such as education and jobs and access to healthcare, might not be scarce at all, if it were not profitable to make them so. Under such circumstances, it is easy to view relationships with one another and our shared earthly home as a series of transactions. These transactions are not about sacred togetherness; they are about exchanging knowledge or resources in ways that keep us from losing ground, or maybe – if we’re lucky – even gaining a bit of ground in the high-stakes competition for survival in a world where some have an abundance, and an abundance have almost nothing.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. With intentionality and awareness, we can take an explicit stance against the prevailing “spirit of the world”. We can restore relationship to a time of sacred togetherness, a time of joy in one another’s presence, a time, above all, of deep respect for the other.

– Lori Randall

P.S. If you’re looking for inspiration as you renew your commitment to the sacred togetherness of relationship, check your local library for a copy of “John the Skeleton”! In the meantime, click here to enjoy a song about the joyful simplicity of loving one another.