This is a thought-provoking, provocative point by Christine Downing on reconsidering our responsibility to the truth to occasion, to the moment, to the context, to one's own story, to communion, to the greater sense of oneness in God's story, when one "encounters" the other (potential opposite sex friend or ongoing friend). The title of the chapter this quote is found in is called "All Real Living is Meeting" (i.e. Buber).
"I should like us to consider anew what we would mean by responsibility in heterosexual encounters, i.e. in friendships between men and women alongside of marriage. For I believe that the conventional rules of behavior do not always allow us to be responsible to that which encounters us, as a contextual ethic would do. Where the context is taken into account, responses are directed by situations and persons and not be abstract and therefore legalistic considerations. The most illuminating articulation of the situational understanding of morality with which I am familiar is Dietrich Bonhoeffer's essay, 'What is Meant by Telling the Truth?' He says that being truthful means being true to the occasion and the relationship, finding the right word for the particular other whom we address and for the situation we share...To be ethical, responsible, means being sensitive to the other and to our common situation, means finding the right expression for this personal relationship. By 'right expression' I mean to include the language of the body as well as the tongue; we seek to find the appropriate gesture as well as the right word in the strictly verbal sense. We aim to be faithful to the particular situation, to become conscious of its particularity, of what distinguishes this Between from all others."
Christine Downing, Preludes: Essays on the Ludic Imagination, 1961-1981
This is essentially the line of thought I took in my book against those who want to apply rules instead of relationships as we encounter cross-gender friendships, particularly if we are married. I focused more on the personal-impersonal lanaguage (for Buber it would be, I -Thou). I am deeply encouraged to see theologian Christine Downing reflect on this within the context of marriage and cross-gender friendship.
Downing is fully aware of the dangers. She goes on to add that yes, this is what it means to take on responsibility in relationships and she refers to Gabriel Marcel's phrase, "creative fidelity" (one of my earlier draft chapters in SUSP was named "creative fidelity).
1. The pathway out of the romantic myth in marriage is understanding where marriage and friendship fits within the greater context of love in God's story.
The truth is, one doesn't have any support within Scripture to have one's spouse as your only close or deep cross-gender friend. Downing later comments: "We have substituted for fidelity a totalitarian claim and no longer seem to know the difference."
2. Getting comfortable in our skin in our cross-gender friendships means coming to a sense of meeting the other with all that we are.
"All real living is meeting." The meeting of another (both in marriage and in friendship) is living for the truth in the relationship. This is about presence, being present with each other. Oprah is claimed to have said, "Being truly present is heaven!"
When we are able to be present there is a deep quality in the "meeting" and this is such a concrete expression of where embodied spirituality and sexuality intersect. In meeting members of the opposite-sex so many evangelicals are conditioned and warned to avoid any real meaningful connection unless they are free for romantic trajectory.
So Christians are encouraged to put their walls up, save their hearts for romantic relationships (either as a single waiting for to "fall in love" or as married). So many Christians are conditioned to not "meet" and pursue truth with their body language in the presence of a member of the opposite sex.
As with Christine Downing, I say it is time to think anew about our responsibility to relationships, to authentic, life-giving relationships between men and women.
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