Sacred Friendships Gathering presenter, Rich Chaffins gave such a simple but powerful analogy when he discovered the deep beauty of the "something more" in friendship.
Life and love are not two dimensional. In just a short illustration of that, he said life and love are not like what he thought the blue sky was when he looked up as a four year old. He just thought the sky was the limit as a four year old. As he grew older, he discovered the sky is just the beginning. You can go on and on and on.
It was such a powerful illustration of the "something more" in friendship. In a materialist cosmos, sex is the highest expression of human connection. But in the Christian cosmos of the Community of Intimacy known as the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, there is "something more" alongside the "something more" in marriage. The Trinity as Paul Wadell says, "reveals that the very life of God is a life of intimate relationship...The Trinity reveals God as a shared life" (Becoming Friends).
This is the something more in friendship between men and women.
"The very purpose of humanity is caught up in the quest for more than." Philip Rolnick
Friends are caught up in the quest for something more. This gives both men and women who are not in romantic attachments robust hope to give themselves in the something more of friendship. So many churches present the something more as two dimensional--as something more only belongs to romance and sex.
It also gives those who are married who desire friendship with the opposite sex an ethic of sacred beauty which honors the sacred in marriage and friendship.
Friendship as it participates in beauty is sacred. It is transcendent. It is not like looking at the sky through the eyes of a four year old meaning it can only go so high.
"Friendship, the gift sustained as relationship, is possible because persons are capable of ever greater participation in the true, good, and beautiful" (Philip Rolnick, Person, Grace, and God).
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