If you’ve been around this blog for any length of time or read Sacred Unions, Sacred Passions, you will know that Catholic author and moral theologian, Paul Wadell, has shaped my views on cross-sex friendship.
Paul's vision of friendship has definitely enlarged my own. I think friendship changes everything. Whether you are married or single, widowed, or divorced, friendship changes everything. It is the path to life-transforming intimacy, happiness, and flourishing. If you're single it opens the door wide open for you to experience deep companionship, partnership, intimacy, and sharing goodness and beauty with another.
Paul, to my knowledge, has never written anything specifically focused on friendships between men and women. Some of his books have been goldmines on friendship: Friendship and the Moral Life , Becoming Friends, and Happiness and the Christian Moral Life have helped me tremendously in helping me understand the value of preferential friendship, the importance of intimacy and mutuality in friendship.
I have many favorite quotes from Paul. But these would have to fit in my top ten of his quotes. These have really shaped my thinking in my own life and my own vision for encouraging friendship between men and women. Here are my top ten sprinkled with my own comments.
1. “If the church is faithful to its identity as the friends of God, it should be a befriending community that not only welcomes all who come to it but also offers them a place where the grammar of intimacy and friendship can be learned.”
Becoming Friends
After reading Paul Wadell I became convinced that the churches should be a community of friends where we learn the grammar of intimacy and friendship. We learn what intimacy is between men and women in our marriages and friendships.
2. “There are potential dangers to friendship, especially the closest and the most intimate friendships of our lives. In fact, the very things that make friendships possible can also make them morally and spiritually unhealthy.”
The Christian Moral Life
This is a sober but real fact. Close intimate friendships can become spiritually unhealthy.
3. “The Trinitarian friendship of God teaches us that we are brought to life through love and we live through love…Either we learn the grace of intimacy and the secret of community or our lives are haunted by emptiness and loneliness.”
Becoming Friends
For singles or married. It's in the intimacy of friendship where we learn to give and receive life and goodness and beauty.
4. To enter friendship with anyone is to take up a new way of life because every friendship in some way reorders our lives and gives us new commitments. Every friendship makes a visible difference in our lives inasmuch as our lives begin to be structured around certain persons and projects rather than others.
Happiness and the Christian Moral Life
Friendships do restructure our lives. Our best and closest friendships restructure what our daily lives look like because share life, beauty and goodness with our friends.
5. The radical power of the best of friendships is that they empower us to break free from the destructive fantasies and ideologies of our culture in order to begin something better.”
Becoming Friends
Even embedded romantic and Freudian ideologies.
6. Friendships are morally important relationships because, in order for them to grow, deepen, and be sustained over time, a variety of virtues must be developed in the friends. Friendships cannot last unless the friends become skilled in justice, generosity, and patience. They have no future without the virtues of loyalty, trustworthiness, care, and forgiveness.
Happiness and the Christian Moral Life
7. “The more we share the life of a friendship, the more the friendship shapes and defines our life. We begin to think of who we are and what we are about increasingly in terms of the friendship.”
Happiness and the Christian Moral Life
This is where friendship shapes your identity. If you don't think your closest friendships change your identity then you have a small view of friendship.
8. "Love begins when we are touched, stirred, and moved by another thing’s good and beauty. Something about the other person speaks to us, enters into us, and draws us out of ourselves.”
Happiness and the Christian Moral Life
It's all about opening up to another's goodness and beauty and learning to do that in ever-deepening ways.
9. “Friendship is the love we should aspire because friendships create intimacy and communion between ourselves and others….we don’t just love our friends; rather, we also love the friendship itself and the intimacy and friendship it creates.”
Happiness and the Christian Moral Life
10. “Every real friendship—and any true community—contributes to our moral development and growth in the virtues because friendships draw us out of ourselves and teach us to care for others for their own sake.
Happiness and the Christian Moral Life
If our we begin to see friendship like this, we will see the vocation of friendship is the path of love to overcome sexism, objectification, lust, posessessivness, and power over another.
