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I read this book twice in my life, the first time in 1976 with Carl Byker, who became an LA documentary filmmaker. That experience of reading and talking IN relationship about a book about the importance of relationships in spirituality, that it was the essence of spirituality, that was new and unforgettable to me.

I was profoundly influenced by existentialism at the time, and I had been "brought up" (as they used to say) "in the church" (and a Dutch Calvinist church) as well, but existentialist theology was something new to me, not a teleological or "heaven focused" or even Jesus-focused religion, with which I had been largely raised. The point was to live in the here and now, which was something I was learning from Zen Buddhism. THAT was being God-like, to BE your conception of God and not live for the future, but now. It seems simple--and Buber shows it is not, really, it is very difficult to do and be--but that change in a view of spirituality from what God is doing to what I am doing was profoundly important to me and shaped a lot of my life, even after I left the church.