Hello, my name is Father Gregory Pine, and I'm a Dominican friar of the province of St Joseph. I teach at the Dominican

House of Studies and I work for the domestic Institute, and this is Pine to the Aquinas.

Recently I was invited to the apartment of a friend

for like a little house preaching event.

So she had invited maybe a dozen of her friends,

many of whom are not Christian.

And so my task was to set forward something that was, you know,

caragmatic, that is to say, which proclaimed our Lord Jesus Christ,

but also appealing to those who may have never heard Christ proclaimed before or may have

heard Christ proclaimed before but you know weren't drawn by that or weren't

attracted by that. So I decided to speak a little bit about relationships because in these circumstances my kind of instinct is to try to find a handhold in their humanity because yeah the natural laws at work in each

human heart and we are all of us driven by similar you know instincts or by a similar openness to reality.

And I think one thing that resonates with all of us is a desire to be in

meaningful relationships or purposeful relationships.

So I thought that, you know, having thought about these things things I might share them with you as well so these are three approaches to relationships here we go

Okay, so we would like to have good relationships. I think many of us would like to have good relationships. That's a starting point. And I think that you can just assert that because many people just recognize it as, yeah, okay, totally, for sure, self-evident.

There are some people who will not concede that, who will say, no, not interested in meaningful or purposeful

relationships, but I think it's only after having had or having suffered many

failed attempts, right? So after having suffered abuse or trauma or

disappointment or dismay of whatever sort, but I think that abuse or trauma or

disappointment or dismay of whatever sort but I think that like when you kind of get through the layers of Sadness and anger you'll find still a kind of openness to relationship because we're made for relationship.

So you've heard it said like man is a political animal, that's Aristotle,

...