Dan J. Brennan

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.”

Vulnerability, Friendship, and Leadership: Some Random Thoughts

“Vulnerability begets vulnerability; courage is contagious” writes Brené Brown in her newest book, Daring Greatly: How the Courage to be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead. I am sure many of my readers already know this but Brown is known for her others books, The Gifts of Imperfection, and I Thought It Was Just Me.

Her new book arrived last week in the mail.

What is vulnerability? Is it weakness? Is it connected to our failures? Is it letting it all hang out with boundaryless connections from a place of unmet needs? 

"Friendships are Marriages of the Souls"

"Friendships are marriages of the soul, and of fortunes and interests, and counsels."  Jeremy Taylor

Andrew Marin, Friendship, and the GLBT Community

There are some powerful conversion stories emerging out of the conversation in  Christian communities and GLBT communities.  Sara Miles' powerful story in Take This Bread does not fit into any neat traditional categories of sexuality and conversion. Well, it would have if she became straight. But she hasn't. On the other hand, there is, just as powerful, the journey of Melinda Selmys who leaves her lesbian lover of seven years to embrace the Roman Catholic faith (Sexual Authenticity: An Intimate Reflection on Homosexuality and the Catholic Church).

I am still mulling over Andrew Marin's book, Love is an Orientation. It is so challenging and refreshing in the midst of debates and heated rhetoric on both sides.  I believe sexuality and Christian friendship is going to be an ongoing conversation in the 21st century. Longtime readers of my blog will know my passion for close, intimate, flourishing male-female friendships. I also believe Christian friendship and the GLBT community will be an ongoing conversation.

The Double Bind: Transparency/Secrecy

Close cross-sex friendships may discover the double bind of transparency and secrecy--especially in some evangelical communities.  Whenever these cultural binds take place, social complexity or relational depth is challenged.  Double binds always attempt to force the relationship into false dichotomies.  Either this or that, but one can't be in the deep middle between the either/or. 

For male-female friendships, one often hears about the need to practice the friendship out in the open.  This popular counsel is especially helpful for those who are married.  On the other hand, if the friends intentionally practice transparency within their community they risk facing social disapproval and suspicion--and a backlash if they don't conform to powerful stereotypes in the evangelical community.   The backlash reinforces the pressure to conform to current evangelical fashions defining morality (the Colorado Springs variety, maybe).  The fact of the matter is that healthy, good, flourishing, intimate male-female friendships are counterstereotypical: they challenge many deeply-held prescriptive stereotypes that some Christians embrace concerning men, women, gender, faith, friendship, community, and social order.  

Is there hope for progress?

Cross-Sex Friendship Quote of the Week

I love this quote.  This is from an ordained monk, Guibert of Gembloux and his friendship with Hildegard of Bingen.  Although ordained, he opened his life, ministry, and heart to her.  Also, his language reveals an intimate bonding that was nonromantic but yet deeply passionate.  At many layers, this friendship goes beyond the shallow When Harry Met Sally dialogue, beyond simplistic gender roles, beyond sex-segregation.

"I live with her in the beauty of peace and of all delight and sweetness, I am directed by her counsels, supported by her prayers. I press forward by her merits, I am upheld by her kindnesses and daily I enjoy conversation with her."

Guibert of Gembloux regarding Hildegard of Bingen

Singled Out: Singles, Friendship, and Marriage Pt. 8

So, one of the reasons why I like this book so much is that the authors take a serious look at celibacy and friendship.  In order to do this, they were forced to do the same thing I had to do when I began researching spiritual friendship between the sexes: they had to go outside the Protestant tradition for any kind of serious treatment of friendship. 

Singled Out: Why Celibacy Must Be Reinvented in Today's Church

Singled Out: Deconstructing Evangelical Romantic Idealism

 

When I started to write a book on cross-gender friendship, I knew one of the things I had to do was attempt to deconstruct the romantic idealism usually embedded in the evangelical language and practice of "one flesh."   Colon and Field in their new book, Singled Out: Why Celibacy Must Be Reinvented in Today's Church observe that we often "find ourselves confrontedly repeatedly with the messages that affirm the value of marriage over almost everything else." 

 

Moving Beyond Evangelical Sexual Fundamentalism

Although Colon and Field do not describe it in these terms, what they address in their Lust and Avoidance chapter is a certain kind of evangelical sexual fundamentalism that reduces all sexuality and sexual drive to eros and genital fulfillment.  Not all evangelicals are sexual "fundamentalists" but many evangelical communities embrace it. 

This is something to really ponder:

"If you look at the messages singles receive regarding relationships between men and women, is it any wonder that we have so much trouble connecting, even as friends?  When Christian singles are repeatedly warned to avoid all temptation from the opposite sex, how are they supposed to get to know each other, let alone develop a relationship deep enough to lead to marriage?"

Singled Out: Popular Culture and Positive Views of Celibacy

Although we live in a sex-obsessed culture, in the secular world there happens to be positive portrayals of celibacy and chapter two focuses on these examples.  The authors remind us that, in response to the sexual revolution psychologist Gabrielle Brown believed that sexuality "is a conscious, voluntary behavior which is learned, rather than an instinct over which one has no choice."   This challenges the idea as sex as a biological imperative.  Her ideas line up with what many Christian have believed for over two thousand years.  Brown thought that "abstinence is a response on the outside to what's going on, and celibacy is a response from the inside."