In his recent book, The Jesuit Guide to (almost) Everything Jesuit priest and author James Martin delves into the topic of friendship. Martin does not gloss over friendship and love. As he notes, living intentionally in community, in friendship can be a source for great joy and grief. Choosing to live with others, choosing to befriend others deeply "requires a great deal of love, patience, and wisdom." He does not glamourize friendship.
Friendship is "the human bond of union." A good goal for friendship, is a "union of hearts and minds."
That is a reverence of friendship, a reverence for friendship people are hungering for in Christian community and beyond. In pop culture and sadly in many contemporary evangelical communities "the human bond of union" might be limited to only relationships involving sex. However, in Christian spirituality there has always been a rich stream embracing friendship as a deep humand bond of union as James Martin points out for example, in Ignatian spirituality.
Understanding "union" as a goal--emotional and cognitive--in friendship is essentially why I chose the rather provocative title, Sacred Unions, Sacred Passions for a book on cross-gender friendship.
1. Union. Marriage is not the only form of love to experience oneness. I encounter so many Christians who have this two-tiered look at deep love/union: marriage is deep love; friendship is an insufficient or inadequate form of love which never rises to the level of marriage. This two-tiered view is especially prominent in the evangelical sub-culture and most noticeable when the conversation includes singles.
Friendship in Christian spirituality may and indeed does serve as an invitation to love, to deep beauty of oneness. Love is a deep, robust, life-giving union in marriage or in friendship.
Friendship does offers us ongoing, progressive, enduring, abiding, and satisfying communion and intimacy. Just as in the journey of communion in marriage, we discover friendship is a form of love in which we choose to receive and give in the dance of ever-deepening intimacy. Communion in love is not something that happens overnight (even though our pop culture says it is achievable in one night of sex).
Martin is aware of this.
2. Freedom. If we are to embrace friendship as a "human bond of union" freedom emerges as a deep paradox of mystery in the presence of union. Union is not absorption. Communion is not about possession. As Martin observes, "For friendship to flourish, neither friendship nor the friend can be seen as an object to be possessed. One of the best gifts to give a friend is freedom." Martin adds, "Clinginess smothers friendship and repels the most generous of friends."
Freedom with a growing flourishing friendship-union (and marriage) at one level, is a freedom for another to change. Martin quotes a married friend who suggests, "Probably the biggest killer of marriages is the lack of freedom to grow and change."
But this is also true for friendship.
The gift of freedom in a flourishing friendship union means several things:
1. Freedom for the friend to not meet you.
At some very real relational points, you will be vulnerable, you will be desirous, you will be passionate for your friend to meet you. For numerous reasons, your friend may not meet you. The invitation and desire for intimacy cannot be forced or manipulated. You cannot approach your friend in love with an outcome already determined in advance. It's the surest way to undermine intimacy and smother the relationship or friend. Love has to move beyond our projection of insecurity.
2. Freedom for the friend to change.
One of the most paradoxical things about deep, flourishing intimacy, is love that comes with the gift of freedom for your friend to change. As Martin wisely notes, it isn't love to force the person to be who he or she was years ago. Love is not something that is static.
3. Freedom to be stretched, to grow, and to change. Friendship intimacy can transform and change us....powerfully for our good and the good of the friendship and the kingdom. Any genuine meaning of intimacy includes the freedom to allow our friends to shape us, to dwell, yes, in us, to move into our relational embodied space. Freedom in this sense means opening ourselves in approrpriate vulnerability to allow our friend's beauty and goodness to touch us, to draw out of us goodness, beauty, life, and love.
"Friendship intimacy can transform and change us....powerfully for our good and the good of the friendship and the kingdom." So thankful for godly friends of either gender the Lord has sent to walk alongside in my faith journey - sometimes as iron sharpens iron, lol!
Posted by: Karin | July 09, 2011 at 10:43 PM