Dan J. Brennan

Julie Clawson: White Men, Submission, and the Kingdom of God Pt 2

It is not giving up power to accuse those who leave a church of losing any authority or stepping outside of the kingdom of God. That is using power to manipulate and guilt people into submission. 

Julie Clawson

This is the second post reflecting on Julie Clawson's recent FB status. If you missed my first post it is here. Julie is reacting to white men who want us to follow their way of life in the kingdom of God. "Real" community for them is bound up in a tightly connected dynamic of death to self and submission to a local church. 

3. The challenge of not conflating God's authority exclusively with death to self, submission and the local church.

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. 

Love, Sex and Friendship

Equal to the Task has one of the strongest single chapter apologetics for cross-gender friendship intimacy I've seen from an evangelical author. I guess it didn't sell too well.  Although it is indeed one of the strongest, it was a big admission of hers in this chapter to express "I love you" to a male friend.  It is a big point in the friendship when those words can come out of one's lips.  But the love relationship is only getting off the ground there.  :-)

She does though, get at something that I want to make a strong case for in my book--although her book was published before "spiritual formation" became popular for Protestant Christians--she understands the discipline and passionate love in cross-gender friendship--the gift could be at the center of one's own spiritual formation.  I tend to think that there are a small cluster of relationships (marriage is one but not the only one) that are at the heart of one's spiritual formation in community.  It's one of the biggest points I want to make in my book

Emotional Intimacy and Men: Deconstructing Contemporary Gender Myths

"What is this world worth without the enjoyment of friendship, and the cultivation of the social feelings of the heart?...My heart is now so full of matters and things patient to be whispered in the ear of a trusty friend, that I can pour them into yours forever."

Wisdom's Friends: Jesus, Friendship and Spiritual Direction

"Jesus himself embodies friendship, particularly in the approaching passion or 'hour' that overshadows the entire farewell discourse.  This self-engagement incarnates the life-giving love of God affirmed in John 3:16, and it forms the basis for the claim in 1 John 3:16: 'By this we know love, that he appointed his life for us; and we ought to appoint our lives for one another' (author's translation).  More than simply a moral paradigm, Jesus is the lover/ friend whose love effects life in the beloved by granting them an intimacy with God that itself can be called friendship with God."

This is a treat for me to blog on this tonight.  I've been meaning to get back to this one!

Reframing the Codependency Story Pt. 2

Mary Pipher on point two...that Therapy has been hard on Women....does that surprise you?  Women it seems, have often been helped by therapy.  But Pipher is striking at something much more significant:  "Therapists have a long history of scapegoating women.  Characteristics associated with men, such as independence and dominance, have been labeled healthy, while characteristics associated with women, such as connectedness, and sharing of power, have been labeled weak and neurotic."

She continues "If children were in trouble the mother was held responsible.  She was either too close and suffocating or too distant and emasculating...

In formulations of childhood pathology, both the culture and genetics were ignored and instead, women were blamed.  Women were accused of double-binding their families.  That is, they sent their children messages that supposedly made the children crazy...Women were held responsible for the well-being of everyone in the family...Women...trusted their therapists even as therapists diagnosed them...Women internalized their therapist's ideas...They felt guilty and dealt with things as best as they could....Most women will do anything, including becoming mental patients, to help their families." 

Reframing the Codependency Story

This book is ten years old but the excerpt I want to quote from is as fresh and relevant as if the words came hot off the press this past week.  This is from The Shelter of Each Other by psychologist Mary Pipher.  For those of you who have read this book already, well, consider I am catching up. :-)

"I am advocating that we can reframe much of what has been called codependency...

Emotional Intimacy and Men: Friendship and Community

Ellen Goodman and Patricia O'Brien in their best selling book, I Know Just What You Mean: The Power of Friendship in Women's Lives ask, "Why do men and women, on the topic of friendship, puzzle each other so much?  Let us start with the obvious: women do friendship differently than men.  Among women, friendship is conducted face-to-face.  But as Carolyn Heilburn once wrote, "Male friends do not always face each other: they stand side by side, facing the world'  While women tend to be together, men tend to do together."   Men they write, ask women, "What on earth do you have to say to each other?"  Women say to men: "You spent all day together on the golf course and never told him you were worried about your job?"  They observe "All the patterns that men and women learn in childhood are deeply ingrained--even today.  Same-sex friendships become the comfort zone where both sexes look for solace or understanding."   

There is the masculine definition of friendship from C.S. Lewis.  According to Lewis, only lovers gaze at each other face-to-face.  Friends, according to Lewis, walk side by side with common interests bonding them.  When it comes to emotional intimacy in friendships, Goodman and O'Brien think men's friendships are missing emotional intimacy.  Both of them conclude men's connections even if they are real, would be insufficient for both of them.

I would agree. 

Although I like conversations over sports and activities, I am oriented to pursue emotional intimacy in my friendships with men and women.  It would seem friendship would be lacking if emotional intimacy was not present in good friendships. 

I discovered with great joy this past year Brian Patrick McGuire's Friendship  and Community:

Contemporary women who don't believe emotional intimacy or language of the heart are possible with men, would be stunned by reading this book!  Give this book to a contemporary male, and they're likely to not even recognize their masculine gender in these past personal friendships.  I remember having a conversation with a Christian scholar over intimate expression of these friendships, and he just rolled his eyes, and I got an interesting reaction from him.  This post could easily fit under the series: Relational Spirituality: You can never have too much of a good connection.   In some Christian family ministries, this language might be considered R-rated, or universally appropo between husband and wife only.

Eugene Peterson on Friendship and Spiritual Formation

Eugene Peterson's  Leap Over a Wall: Earthly Spirituality for Everyday People is a book about the story and life of David.  One of Peterson's chapters is on the friendship of David and Jonathan. 

He writes, "Friendship forms.  Friendship is a much underestimated aspect of spirituality.  It's every bit as significant as prayer and fasting.  Like the sacramental use of water and bread and wine, friendship takes what is common in human experience and turns it into something holy."

Relational Spirituality: "You Can Never Have Too Much of a Good Connection" Pt 2

Something for you to think about as you consider relational spirituality:

"What I want to stress about the Three is not that they are related to one another (which, to modern ears at any rate, seems to imply some kind of independent existences that presuppose all relations), but that they participate in one another to such a degree that any attempt to understand them as independent existences is undermined.  The contemporary emphasis on God's 'relationality' has, at best, issued in an appeal for human beings to recognize the degree to which they are 'in relation' to one another.  By contrast, the focus on participation suggests that human beings are called to understand themselves, not as 'individuals' who may (or may not) choose to enter into relationships, but rather as mutually indwelling and indwelt, and to such a degree that--echoing the mutual indwelling of the Three--all pretentions to wholly independent existence are abolished" ("Participation as a Trinitarian Virtue:  Challenging the Current 'Relational' Consensus" by David Cunningham).