What is needed above all is that we should treat our social and cosmic environment AS AN ACTUAL LIVING BEING, with which we are in the most intimate reciprocal action, though without becoming merged into uniformity with it.
I am not sure at what point I realized that the man whom I had seen as my all-powerful and invincible father not only wanted me as I am, but also needed me to stand by him through the long journey into his own death. My father needed my friendship. It still seems to me to be an astonishing gift of God's grace that in the last years of his life I was able to stand with him as his friend who was his adult child.