Cross-Sex Friendship Quote of the Week

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September 21, 2009

Cross-Sex Friendship Quote of the Week

I love this quote--it could be a fitting summary of my book:

"Our trust in the Trinity's embrace frees us to love others more fully with triune kinds of love--fostering deep relationships that involve solid friendships without sexual innuendo" From Marva Dawn's new book, In the Beginning, God

September 21, 2009 | Permalink

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I've heard Marva Dawn in person! Excellent speaker! Great quote! I wish more people would "get it". I only want to be married to the love of my life, be committed and faithful to him all of my days, but have both of us enjoy the friends of either/both gender/s who the Lord ordains for us, for the purpose of growing in agape love! Hate when people mess that up with petty jealousies, silly insecurities, stupid innuendos and misperception. I keep saying that we'll get to heaven and the Lord will probably ask us why we put fearful straight jackets on ourselves when He gave us wonderful freedom!

Posted by: Karin | September 22, 2009 at 10:43 PM

Karin,

Amen. Thank you for your wonderful story and witness to ordered beauty and goodness in friendships. I love the straight jacket comment!

Posted by: Dan Brennan | September 23, 2009 at 10:17 AM

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Cross-Sex Friendship Quote of the Week

"Some of the most precious and most spiritually powerful relationships in my life have been friendships with male companions on the way, which held together a clear respect for each person's life context in the world beyond our meeting and an energy that shimmered around the edges of the friendship.... The congregation as a laboratory for loving relationships will celebrate fully the goodness of human sexuality, countering both the culture's obsessive hypersexualizing and the church's habit of putting sex in the corner, shaking a finger at it, and then ignoring it. Extending its sexual repoertoire beyond control, the church can dare to expose the rich connections between eros and spirit, to speak about the erotic dimension of our love affair with God, and to acknowledge and manage more skillfully the tensions and energies men and women discover as they collaborate in ministry." Celia Allison Hahn, Sexual Paradox

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Quotes on Friendship

"Heaven, the essentiality of being, where everything achieves its full authenticity, is already close to us in friendship." Ladislaus Boros
"Few things are as healing and life-giving as is friendship between woman and man, man and woman." Ronald Rolheiser
"A man needs something which is more than friendship and yet is not love as it is generally understood. This something nevertheless a woman only can give." Mark Rutherford
"Few things are likelier to kill a friendship quicker than a careful and strictly adhered-to-theory of what qualities are needed in friend. " Joseph Epstein
"A soul mate doesn't have to be a sex mate." Lisa Gee
"I do not wish to treat friendships daintily, but with the roughest courage. When they are real, they are not glass threads or frostwork, but the solidest things we know." Emerson
"Prayer together is the foundation of redemptive friendships." D. Michael Henderson
"Friendship is the place where forgiveness begins." John Swinton
"Authentic friendship is notoriously different and inescapably risky. True friendships are not relationships we control but adventures we enter into." Paul Wadell
"It is more important who they are as people and only then it is important who they are as dancers." Marcia Haydee
"There is a love that does not desire to possess. It is called friendship. When friendship is the determining force in a relationship, individuals are able to find themselves and a passion for life, not merely lose themselves in love." Mark Vernon
"In this kingdom the distinctions and barriers between male and female were to be broken down...to actualize the potential of any love--in this case a male and female love of friendship--can be to participate in the building of a kingdom of love...spiritual friendships shared by men and women can be eschatological signs." Wendy Wright
"Friendship defies reduction." Mary E Hunt
"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." Eugene Peterson
"The radical power of the best of friendships is that they empower us to break free from the destructive fantasies and ideologies of our culture in order to begin something better." Paul Wadell