It may be a trait of analogical thinking, or something much less sophisticated-sounding (like a small mind trying to understand something beyond its capability), but I often think of big things in terms of ordinary little things. Like love-friendship/bond-bondage/all kinds of relationships and psychological health: I understand this very broad and complex subject as a simple rubber band.

What prompted this rumination was, as usual, several seemingly disparate events: (1) Reading Joseph Pearce’s Shakespeare on Love: Seeing the Catholic Presence in Romeo and Juliet. (2) Re-awakened grief over a broken friendship from last year. (3) A recent family reunion from which I was excluded—again. (4) and (5) A couple of other things that happened recently, positive and negative, superficially unrelated.

We extend ourselves like rubber bands. We contract the same way. All kinds of relationships, whether they’re personal or impersonal, require us to extend ourselves. Submitting a story for publication, forming a new friendship, trying to find a plumber, making a plane reservation, falling in love—even most of our prayers—all these are self-extensions, in which our trust is required, our deference to others, our dependence on others’ acceptance or cooperation. They are expressions of our insufficiency in ourselves. A rubber band’s function is to stretch out in order to achieve some purpose or other, and in order to stretch, it must have some stationary anchor. Without a stationary anchor, it’s nonfunctional.

So we interact with the world like rubber bands. Interaction can be anonymous or very intimate. But the interaction has a purpose. The rubber band works successfully when that purpose is achieved; then the rubber band returns, contracts. Depending on the extent to which it’s stretched, that contraction can be gentle, painless, or it can snap back—even leaving an injury. In some cases, it can be stretched beyond endurance and break altogether. If it has no stationary anchor, it’s nonfunctional, and if it’s stretched too far, it’s destroyed—permanently.

Sometimes the stretch is minor, temporary: We seek a plumber, we find one, he comes and repairs the faucet, he leaves. Sometimes we extend ourselves in a much more serious or permanent way—we’re applying for a job, we’re seeking a mate.

There is something about a rubber band that’s basic: Its very function is to extend and contract. It cannot just sit there and never extend itself. If it does, it has no purpose, and it dies, just disintegrates. There is literally no such thing as independence. That’s not an opinion; it’s a self-evident fact of social and psychological physics.

Also, the rubber band loses its elasticity, becomes brittle and fragile, if it’s not extended often enough. But sometimes, when a rubber band has been too busy, extending itself in too many different directions, it finds that it must contract in order to find its anchor. It runs a risk of losing its anchor if it’s extended too frequently. It doesn’t break—it’s not destroyed—but the anchor is lost, and in order to become functional again, it must establish a new anchor. When that happens, it’s generally more careful to “mind the store” in future extensions. A wise rubber band fastens itself on Christ. It learns that its self is not the anchor—on the contrary, its self is what gets extended from the anchor. It cannot be the anchor. Some wisdom may be gained from the experience, and the rubber band no longer “extends” itself in prayer; rather, it rests there.

All our relationships, no matter how close and important, no matter how remote and insignificant, are extensions from, and contractions to, a stationary center. Mental and emotional health is dependent on monitoring and governing a simple rubber band. We are told by our secular culture always to estimate our lives and ourselves in terms of our relationships, but ultimately, we learn that no matter how successful such extensions are, they are impossible, meaningless—they cannot even exist by very definition—without the stationary anchor from which they are measured—and judged.