Faith & formation

Four Rooms, and Who Is Already Inside

By Dr. Donetta D. Quinones, PhD, LMHC, LPC  ·  5 min read

Most of us carry a rough map of who is close to us, and most of those maps are wrong in the same direction.

They are sorted by warmth of feeling rather than by what has actually been exchanged. So the map ends up recording how we feel about people rather than where they are standing.

Here is a sturdier one. Four rooms, from the outside in.

The four

• Awareness. You know of them. You have information — possibly a great deal of it, possibly quite intimate-sounding information. Nothing has been exchanged.
• Transaction. Something moves between you, and it works. Help given, service done, need met. Real, and often warm. But it is organised around what passes between you, and it stops when the passing stops.
• Participation. You are in something together over time. Shared work, shared history, the accumulated weight of having been through things. This is where most good long relationships live, and it is not a lesser room.
• Presence. Being with, without an agenda item. No exchange required for it to be worth the time.

The One who is nearest is very often the one we have placed furthest out.

Why the map goes wrong

Because transaction generates warmth, and we read warmth as depth.

Someone who reliably helps you will feel close, and may be close, but the feeling is produced by the exchange and not by the knowing. Remove the exchange and you find out which it was — which is why redundancy and illness and moving house are such brutal auditors of a friendship list.

The same error runs in the God direction, and more strongly, because the transaction there is so constant. Requests go up. Help arrives. Service goes out. Everything functions.

And a person can spend thirty years in room two, doing it sincerely, and describe it — accurately, by the only measure they are using — as a close walk.

The door that only opens from one side

There is one asymmetry worth naming, and it is the thing that makes this hopeful rather than merely diagnostic.

With people, you cannot move yourself inward. You can offer; they have to receive. The fourth room requires two willing parties and you only control one.

In the God direction, that door is not the obstacle. The invitation has already been issued, at cost, and is standing. Which means the question is not whether you will be let in.

The question is whether you will spend any time in a room where nothing is being accomplished.