Faith Dance

Cross-Gender Friendships: Gifts Outside the Box

I've mentioned most of the these 10 gifts in various posts here and there on Faith Dance throughout the years in my friendship with Jennifer Ould. These are gifts I've given her for her birthday or Christmas. When you are free in your friendship from the romantic myth story and the danger story, it is a great blessing to be able to give gifts to your cross-gender friend that fits them. I hope this encourages you and empowers you to think outside the box of the romantic myth-danger story.

Mark Driscoll & Real Marriage Pt. 2: The Romantic Myth and the Danger Story

"Also, it is common to think that the complementarians in the Mark Driscoll camp disagree with egalitarians on just one specific issue–women as ordained pastors or elders."

 

The second part to my review on Real Marriage is here.

 

Review: Mark Driscoll's Real Marriage

I reviewed Mark Driscoll's Real Marriage over on Sacred Friendship Gathering. 

When Jesus Met Mary: Exploring Friendship Between Men and Women

Sex or...segregation?  Romance or danger? Are those the only two paths for men and women?  At this gathering we seek to explore a third way between men and women, within the context of the beauty, goodness and redemptive love of friendship.

Gather together with us, Kathy Escobar, Jim Henderson, Meredith Efken, John Armstrong, Katie Driver, and Dan Brennan for an important conversation on spiritual friendships between men and women. 

When Jesus met Mary in the garden, friendship--not marriage, not family, not community, but male-female friendship--was the first relationship highlighted and attended to by the risen Christ at the dawn of the new creation according to John. Come and join us for a special time of men and women gathering together to explore the story of friendship moving beyond fears, skepticism, myths, and stereotypes. 

Join us for this a time for authentic, deep conversation between men and women who want believe Jesus has called us to a third way.

For more info: http://sacredfriendshipgathering.com/

Join the Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/events/227759470633542/

 

 

 

Friendship Behind Closed Doors

I love, I love to hear stories of friendships between men and women who trusted each other to practice ordinary close friendship in one or the other's home.  Just a small excerpt from Friends for Journey by Madeleine L'Engle & Luci Shaw. This is in the context of cross-gender friendships. Luci had been invited by Richard Foster to come to Friends University as a visiting scholar. A fellow named Harold Fickett gave Luci the keys to his place when she arrived in Wichita and suggested to her that on her free evenings she was welcome to come and study at his place instead of enduring solitude. She ended up taking him up on his offer. She and Harold became close friends:

"There was a good deal of prayer together, of sharing wounds and losses, and celebrating gains. We saw many movies together, listened to music, cooked gourmet meals for each other. There was a lot of book talk and God talk." 

Unclean: One of My Top Books of the Year

Richard Beck's Unclean: Meditations on Purity, Hospitality, and Mortality

is definitely one of my top books of the year--especially as one considers it from the angle of deep friendships between men and women. I blogged a little about it here and Richard interacted with my blog piece, here . 

Richard thoughtfully interacted with the theory of "healthy boundaries" from an insider's perspective (social psychology). I greatly admired his boldness as Richard clearly articulated his doubts about healthy boundaries both in his book and in his blog. 

Looking Forward: Celebrating 10 Years of Cross-Gender Friendship

Looking forward into the next year: in 2012 Jennifer Ould and I will be celebrating ten years of friendship. Jennifer has celebrated Christmas with her family in North Carolina this week and is coming back to Chicago tonight. I can't wait to see her tonight. I've missed her the past 8 days. 

There is a sense in which I our friendship has flourished and survived in spite of the surrounding evangelical sub-culture instead of because of it. Our friendship bond has surpassed the stereotypical language to describe typical male-female friendship. We're not lovers. But we are more than "just friends." Jennifer is more than "just a friend" to me.

For example, we share a deep prayer companionship. We both can and have shared our deepest selves with the other in our prayer intimacy praying through fears, despair, pain, loss, doubt, weakness, crisis, our own sins, and the sins of others against us. We have been intentional, rhythmic, and liturgical as we have prayed for each other. In the past couple of years, we've prayed for and with each other daily. 

So we are more than "just friends." But we both have, for better or for worse, stayed in evangelical communities and self-identify currently as evangelicals. Which makes 10 years of friendship something to really celebrate!

We do have some special things planned to celebrate. We'll be at the Sacred Friendship Gathering in April. We plan on taking a road trip together to the Wild Goose in June. 

Saying Yes to Sexuality and Friendship Pt 1

What would it take for you to say yes to sexuality and friendship?

What would it take for you to say yes to the life-giving power of sexuality in friendship?

Before I proceed further let’s pause briefly and consider what I mean by friendship. Friendship is a voluntary, nonfamilial, nonromantic relationship between a female and a male in which there is no sex or sexual intimacy. In other paradigms friendships occur with “benefits.” That is a current social practice but that is not my intention in my definition of friendship. I don’t intend any kind of “friendly sex.”

So then, what does it mean for one to say yes to sexuality and friendship? I find myself resisting either-or paradigms. I know I am not the only one who resists these simplistic choices. I am writing this with a goal of reaching out to those who would like to see something different than either-or paradigms on sexuality and friendship.

A Flourishing Cross-Gender Friendship

"In our friendship, there has been mutual growing trust, deepening conversation, and mutual risk to explore different boundaries than calculated distance."

My post over on Sacred Friendships Project blog: 

 

Thirsting For Friendship: Jean Vanier Reflecting on Henri Nouwen

via www.altervideomagazine.com

I so loved this clip of Jean Vanier reflecting on his dear friend, Henri Nouwen. Vanier says that Nouwen "thirsted for friendship." I have a few simple thoughts on thirsting for friendship. Nothing profound. I stand in the presence of two great giants who have embodied beauty and friendship. 

Reclaiming Beauty from Our Sexualized Culture

Her.menuetics from Christianity Today has posted a blog from Enuma Okoro on "We're Just Friends. No, Really."  I was so enouraged by Enuma. With great courage, she claimed the language of beauty for her cross-gender friendship with Andrew: " I believe my friendship with Andrew...is also beautiful for its own sake, without thought of its broader utility." 

Beauty of course, has been ransacked by Hollywood, by romantic comedies, by our hypersexualized culture.  

I am so grateful to meet fellow Christians not held captive to our sexualized culture. We may be small in number in the evangelical community, but beauty between men and women is far deeper and broader than what we've seen on comedy movies. 

With great courage, Enuma steps into the evangelical mainstream and declares her non-romantic friendship with a man to be "beautiful." Why should romance and sex have all the beauty between men and women? 

She is a boundary-shifting friend. 

 

The Wild Beauty of Boundary-Shifting Friendships

"Oh Dan - your affection and your care blesses me so much - thank you for loving me so well and lavishly....I love you deeply"

Those are not the words of my wife, Sheila, toward me (although she too expresses passionate, heartfelt, deep language of love to me!). They are words from one of my cross-gender single friends.

Those words of love, wild beauty arising spontaneously from the heart from Sheila toward me would be considered appropriate, beautiful, and deeply affectionate spousal love. Evangelicals would welcome and applaud such language of beauty expressed between husband and wife. 

But the words of wild beauty arising from a single woman and toward a married man who are "just friends?" Can we talk about exploring wild beauty in boundary-shifting friendships?  Although I specifically started out focusing on deep beauty between a single woman and a married man, I am going to broaden this out to human friendship, too. 

3 Cross-Gender Friends and a Wedding

"Those who witness a wedding ceremony are privileged to draw near to a concrete, loving union of two Christians--a community of disciples--that gives a taste of the spiritual communion among all Christians united in Christ." Julie Hanlon Rubio, Catholic theologian

"Those of us who have experienced the abundant being that can come from a deep personal relationship with a person of the opposite sex would never speak of our relationship as 'just.' Calling these relationships 'just' friend is not only misleading; it trivializes the relationship in a way that seems sacrilege." John Scudder & Anne Bishop

Three of my closest and dearest cgfs, Jennifer Ould, Susanne Osborne, and Jennifer Roach were all at  my son Jonathan's wedding and reception.  I've been wanting to write on this for a couple of weeks but I've been at a loss of words. 

Review of Deep Secrets: Beyond Gender Stereotypes and Straitjackets in Friendship

Gender stereotypes and straitjackets. They are embedded cultural blocks to friendship intimacy in modern America and in our faith communities. William Pollack, a Harvard psychologist calls it a "gender straitjacket" when boys are socialized to either a false view of masculinity or a very narrow masculinity. In one article, he states, "We are scared to death if a boy moves out of that, he won't grow up to be a real healthy man."

Gendered stereotypes blocking friendship are notions like emotionally intimate, vulnerable friendships are for girls/women or gay men. In evangelical communities where romantic relationships are on a pedestal and friendships are inferior, gendered stereotypes and straitjackets are common.  

Deep, intimate, passionate friendships are romantic relationships or in some circles, tolerated in female friendships. According to gendered stereotypes, women are wired for face-to-face friendships while men are wired for "side-by-side." Keeping in accordance with gendered stereotyped scripts, evangelical women are encouraged to act "masculine" (as in "side-by-side," distant, calculated, and reserved) in their friendships with men who are not romantic partners or potential dates. 

In her groundbreaking book, Deep Secrets: Boy's Friendships and the Crisis of Connection, professor of applied psychology, Niobe Way reveals the results of her twenty-year study on teenage boys and friendships. The secret is now out with her book: early and middle adolescent boys are a lot more like girls when it comes to intimate friendships. Way gives us eyes to see intimate, vulnerable, intense, even passionate friendships among teenage boys. 

Cross-Gender Friend or Fiancée: Friendship or Eros?

One of the questions posed to me frequently focuses on discerning the difference between a close cross-gender friend and a potential marital partner. 

With deliberate focus, I've appealed to singles in Sacred Unions, Sacred Passions while I was critical of the romantic myth.  This myth includes the belief that there is a perfect partner for us, a perfect match in which sexualized intimacy is realized in marital bliss with unrivaled happiness forever and ever. All other relationships are peripheral to the ideal romantic couple's idealized absorption in each other. Okay, lest someone think I am exaggerating, popular songs express so much of this idealization: "Ain't no mountain high enough," "You will always be my endless love," and so on.

The "right person" is central to romantic ideology. According to the romantic myth, perfect union is finding the perfect match, the "right person." You find the right person through chemistry, then add intimacy, and abracadabra, you both will be sexually, spiritually and emotionally fulfilled forever and ever. In the myth, "Love and sexuality are fused together in the ideology of romance" (Kathy Werking). 

Friendship, Sexuality, and Physical Closeness

One ongoing theme in this blog centers around deep intimacy and physical closeness in friendship. I have particularly focused on cross-gender friendships but I also have looked at friendships beyond male-female love. Saturday, my good friend Jennifer Roach shared a link on my FB wall regarding some simple thoughts from a middle aged Catholic celibate man who enjoys physical affection in friendship with women. He wrote:

"I like holding hands, arms around waists, hugs and light kisses. The best relationship I ever had was a Platonic friendship with a woman who was openly and unconsciously affectionate...Were I ever to marry, I believe it would be with just such a woman."  It's a simple but thoughtful post. 

He laments about how for many men (and some women too) physical affection is not on their radar screen--especially in friendship. 

It reminded me of our deep embrace of post-Freud sexualized assumptions about love, romance, and physical closeness in contemporary America. You see, other cultures not impacted by Freud embrace a variety of expressions of physical intimacy in friendship. On the same planet, different time zone, about 7,000 miles from me, in India, present-day affection between male friends (no sex on the table) include public handholding--interlocking fingers and pressed palms--handholding.

One Indian, commenting on physical affection, "Indian men show no shame in interlocking fingers and pressing palms."  

Evangelical Attitudes Toward Marriage and Cross-Gender Friendships are Changing

It wasn't that long ago when you could not find a book by a mainstream evangelical publisher to acknowledge the goodness and beauty of transmarital, intimate cross-gender friendships. Go back twenty years, twenty-five, and thirty years and you will not find anything like that in books on marriage. But society and evangelical views of women have changed rapidly in the last 30 years. 

And the attitudes toward close, cross-gender friendships are changing, too. Are You Waiting for "The One"?: Cultivating Realistic, Positive Expectations for Christian Marriage by Margaret Kim Peterson and Dwight Peterson is a refreshingly new book published by IVP. While IVP turned down my book proposal, they reveal the changing attitudes toward cross-gender friendship in this book aimed at those who are young adults and preparing marriage. Not only is the book to be commended for supporting cgfs, it promotes romantic realism rather than romantic idealism. I maintain this has immense implications in cgfs before they ever get married and then after they are married.