Dan J. Brennan

Julie Clawson: White Men, Submission, and the Kingdom of God

Julie Clawson wrote on her Facebook status this past week: 

"Why is it always white, middle-class, highly-educated males who argue that dying to the self for the sake of commitment and accountability to a local church despite disagreement, silencing, or abuse is the only way one can be a part of the kingdom of God? And who then say that experience and emotion are not valid ways of knowing so that they do not have to ever listen to such theological voices that challenged the theologies of privilege that support their places of power in the system while silencing others. I don't care if my view is 'Romantic' or birthed from identity politics, when men tell women and minorities that they just need to shut up and submit to abuse for the sake of Jesus I do not see the kingdom of God at work."

This is why there are going to be more women--including women who are pastors, theologians, and therapists at the Sacred Friendship Gathering this year than there will be white men (white men who are leaders). More evangelical women than men see friendship as a healthy path for healthy community and gender reconciliation. White men are vulnerable to continue to emphasize abstract systems designed with one-size-fits all solutions to authority, voice, and leadership. 

There are huge challenges when educated white men emphasize the death of self, accountability within a local church as the only way for "real" Christian and spiritual experience and authority. Educated women in the 21st century like Julie get it. 

Sheer Delight in Your Friend

We've become so sub-incarnational in friendship, distancing ourselves away from embodied delight in our friend's embodied presence. Delight in your friend is a part of moral and spiritual formation. Evangelicals typically focus on the intellectual part of delight in friendship. But Diana Fritz Cates, in her classic book, Choosing to Feel: Virtue, Friendship, and Compassion for Friends steers us back to embracing incarnation and friendship:

“Intimate character-friends not only respect each other’s goodness and experience a kind of “intellectual pleasure” in the sharing of conversation and other activities. They also long for each other’s company. They are physically and emotionally stirred and delight by each other’s embodied presence...

“Friends can and do choose, for example, to engage in activities that bring them sheer delight in each other’s embodied presence. They can and do choose to take up new activities with each other when the fire in their relationship begins to smolder. They can and do choose to cultivate ways of perceiving each other that highlight each other’s most attractive intellectual, emotional, and physical qualities. True enough, character-friends are attracted to each other chiefly on the basis of each other’s character, but it cannot be denied that a person’s character often finds partial expression in things like her physical appearance and her level of physical fitness. Friends can and do choose, to some extent, to attend in their passionate perceptions to those physical expressions that bespeak what they take to be each other’s most lovable qualities of character. They can and do choose, to some extent, to regard tenderly those expressions that bespeak each other’s deepest vulnerabilities and weaknesses.”

Cross-Sex Friendship: Introducing the Virtue of Sensuous Attunement

Could it be that the virtue of attunement will arise as one of the chief virtues between men and women in intimate relationships in the twenty-first century?

Is attunement emerging as virtue for men and women to flourish in love, justice, and God’s ongoing dynamic redemption in the world?

Popular author John Gottman, voted as one of the top ten influential therapists in the past twenty-five years, suggests that attunement is the virtue that creates intimate trust and makes intimacy personal between couples.

Now Catholic scholar and feminist, Cristina Traina in her recent provocative book, Erotic Attunement: Parenthood and the Ethics of Sensuality between Unequals, argues that the virtue of “erotic attunement” is at the heart of healthy and good sensuality. It is essential for an ethics of sensuality. 

For me, her 376 page book is a compelling read on the virtue of attunement in maternal sexuality and sensuality. She fully engages the question: where is the clear line between interpersonal natural affection and exploitation of children? Although her focus is on breastfeeding, she discusses the whole range of sensual care of parent-infant: skin-to-skin contact, cuddling, touching, tickling, caressing, kissing, and so on.

She is well-versed in the danger of power in sexuality, sexual violence, and well-documented cases of parental incest. She does not gloss over parents addicted to sexual abuse.

Traina is well aware of the fact that uncritical devotion to maternal intuition renders female abusers invisible. She does not sugarcoat the dangers of abuse in mothers breastfeeding children.

Several years ago I was surprised when it suddenly dawned on me that breastfeeding and cross-sex friendship share significant parallels. Previously, I confess as a white male I had given little thought to breastfeeding.

But breastfeeding and intimate cross-sex friendship share some amazing similarities in challenges, desires, sensuality, intimacy, virtues, delights, and dangers. They obviously part company in several ways. One involves a relationship of unequals while the other involves equals. The other glaring difference is that breastfeeding is a physical bond between mother and child and for a specific temporary period of time.

But they are social and intimate practices which enlarge our view of sexuality, touch, desire, and delight from the narrow range of foreplay and sexual intercourse.

As someone with a passion for integrating sexuality and spirituality as well as a passion for intimate spiritual friendships between the sexes, I was deeply encouraged by Traina’s advocacy for recovering nonsexual delight, desire, and touch in human connection.

Drawing from Traina’s significant work, I would like to introduce the virtue of embodied attunement as the way forward for healthy intimate cross-sex friendships in the 21^st century.

Before we go any further I must clarify what I mean by sensuous attunement. By using the term, “sensuous” I am intending a holistic phrase encompassing the moral use of touch and sensuality. As men and women we are embodied selves. We are real people and all our desires are embodied or sensuous. We engage the other with our senses. The uphill battle for even including “sensuous” is that for many people, including Christians, sensuality is a code for sex or sexual intimacy.

This is something that Traina does address: we need to expand our language (and our experience) to include sensuality as something which is not referring to genital sex or foreplay. To highlight the confusing meanings of erotic and sensuality among serious-minded Christians I need to point out differences in meaning when using terms.

There are many moderate and progressive Catholics and Protestants who use the term, “erotic” as something which may include sex but does encompass something far broader than genital sexuality. For them, it is a desire and delight in all that is good and beautiful. Traina belongs in this group herself.

There is some movement among evangelicals to embrace a broader meaning of “erotic.” See for example neo-reformed James K.A. Smith in his most recent two books, Desiring the Kingdom and Imagining the Kingdom “I basically make no distinction between love and desire, eschewing any difference between eros and agapē… agapē is rightly directed eros."

However, for my friends who want to maintain a distinction with “erotic” meaning sexual connection as something different from nonsexual sensual connection, I am going to refer to sensuous attunement instead of erotic attunement.

If I quote Traina using the word erotic, she’s using it to mean delight, desire, sensuality, and pleasure and not anything that means foreplay, genital sex, or sexual abuse.  

She argues that we must make a distinction between sexual love and sensuous love but one will find eros in both loves (closely aligned with Smith’s view of agapē is rightly directed eros).

I want to provide you with some quotes on some specific aspects within her book. I think these are applicable to the virtue of sensuous attunement in cross-sex friendships.

I’ll be engaging these more in my next post.

The necessity of embodied loving—loving another through my embodied self and loving another’s particular embodied goodness.

"It is not possible to love another's goodness, her participation in God, separately from loving her embodied self, and it is not possible to love another except through my embodied self. This does not mean that I always love another's body with mine, but that our embodiedness-the space it takes up, its particular needs and pleasures-is always part of our relating, so that I cannot comprehensively love another's good without in some sense loving her body as well."

The posture of attuned openness and desire, is:

"a love desiring and delighting in other persons and the world within the horizon of God's all-encompassing love.... opened out toward and disposed to receive the other, attuned to the other's goodness in an attitude of availability."

The virtue of attuned openness and ethics of sensuality:

"The chief measure of our attunement is the success of our interactions with others.

Attunement invites others to transform their desires, not to feel the fear that leads to grasping, not to see others as threats to their egos.

Attunement is perceptive cultivation of right relation between persons, attunement is simply justice approached from the direction of intimacy.

Because we love and yearn for what is good and beautiful, attraction, desire, and often a degree of sensuality mark all significant human connections.

Attunement-the dance answering the partner's needs and desires-is the substance of the virtue.

We need an approach that recognizes the confluence of self-love and other-love in touch and also makes us aware of our own capacities to misread and abuse these loves and their goods."

On popular Freudianism:

"My goal is not a comprehensive historical explanation of this sexual reductionism… I argue that under the influence of Freudianism, Westerners, especially Americans, have ignored the complexity of intimate, bodily relations, instead selecting a few implicitly contradictory strands of meaning from them and labeling them "sexuality."

Pansexualism-the idea that sexual dynamics are present at all stages of life and in all human interaction-is a Freudian inheritance."

What do you think about the virtue of sensuous attunement? Is it a virtue which creates intimate trust within marriage and beyond? 

 

 

 

Wendy Wright on Spiritual Friendship

For my blog readers who might be unaware, it was Wendy Wright's small but powerhouse article, "Reflections on Spiritual Friendship" which rocked my world and gave me imagination for intimate friendships between men and women who are not married to each other.

Wright, a Roman Catholic, teaches at Creighton. We had a brief email correspondence back in 2006, I think. She emailed an article she wrote for the Weavings Journal in 1988. In my estimation, it remains one of the best articles ever written on spiritual friendships between men and women. Here, is just a small excerpt and you'll understand how this has impacted me. Kathy Escobar's reference to friendship as a discipline reminded me of Wright's article:

"Admiration is not Lust": Beauty, Lust, and Evangelical Shame

Dale Fincher of Soulation commented on his wife, Jonalyn Fincher's blog, Ruby Slippers. I have inserted italics.

Bold Boundaries: 8 Reasons You Don't Want to Miss This

 As followers of Jesus our highest calling is to follow Jesus first, safety second. Not safety first, and Jesus second. That’s why I am so looking forward to the next Sacred Friendship Gathering. 

Bold Boundaries:  Expanding Friendship Between Men and Women.

Yes, most of us know about a recent study which grabbed the headlines.

We also know that some Christians think bold boundaries translates as high walls. We have the best of intentions and we want to do the right thing. We build fences and draw lines in order to protect what we see as holy, sacred. This is good, admirable - but what if some of the boundaries we create are actually keeping us locked in from following Jesus?

 

What if our present understandings of boundaries in friendship between men and women actually fence us out from real growth, from real good, from real reconciliation???

 

 

 

Here are 8 solid reasons why you don't want to miss Bold Boundaries: Expanding Friendship Between Men and Women.

 

Wired for Intimacy: A Couple of Thoughts

A couple of things about Wired for Intimacy: 

Mutuality and Play: The Boundaries of Human Hope

"He makes us love all that he loves, for his love's sake, 

and makes us take pleasure in him and all his works." 

Julian of Norwich

"The recovery of play is an invitation to friendship. Playfulness means the devalutation of control. Play involves the capacity to trust and surrender. So also with friendship... In the midst of giving myself over to the experience, there seems to be a spontaneous movement from my own enjoyment to enjoyment of my friend." James Nelson, The Intimate Connection

I remember reading this four plus years ago before I had written Sacred Unions, Sacred Passions.  Is there is a healthy wildness to play between cross-gender friends that is delightfully free and a deep affirmation of God's splendor and goodness for men and women? 

I think play is definitely a part of what is included for men and women to be fully alive. If I could translate St. Irenaeus quote for today: "The glory of God is men and women fully alive--and playing together." Is there is a healthy wildness to play between cross-gender friends that delightfully promotes the glory of God in the here and now?  

Inappropriate Relationships and Evangelical Therapists Pt. 2

As it turns out, if you read part one in this series on “Inappropriate Relationships and Evangelical Therapists” I have something in common with thousands of evangelical therapists which would shock some of them:

If you’re married, it is not inappropriate for you to be alone with a member of the opposite sex (married or not married) with whom you share an intentional dyadic relationship when no one else is present. It’s not inappropriate to nurture shared vulnerability, mutuality, authenticity, deep empathetic connection, and tender, meaningful touch when no one else is around.

That’s it.

Inappropriate Relationships and Evangelical Therapists Pt. 1.

First, let me begin by stating that I have great respect and admiration for evangelical therapists. This is not intended to be a critique against those therapists who welcome clients of the opposite sex. I definitely support that practice.

What I wish to explore are several themes currently embraced by a number of evangelicals and their fear of intimate cross-gender friendships. In particular, where do evangelical therapists stand on issues such as inappropriate relationships, emotional adultery, emotional intimacy, sexual attraction, emotional fidelity, and talking about intimate matters of the heart with no one else present? 

There are evangelicals who are critical of professional therapy as a matter of general principle, and they would not be the focus of my exploration. That’s another post, another time.