friendship

Beauty in the Midst of Tension

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Copyright 2013 Gregg Webb

Copyright © 2013 by Gregg Webb

We are people who enjoy comfort. It is easy to exist within a bubble where our ideas and world-views are only confirmed and never challenged. We are prone to shy away from opportunities for our own growth by allowing possible friends to remain strangers. Ideological differences are allowed to define and enforce separation often under the guise of safety.

My own experience has shown that this bubble is not truly “safe.” It is far too easily ruptured when an uninvited co-worker, family member or classmate who would otherwise be an ideological object becomes a real person. When this happens I am forced to grapple with the tension that relationship creates in my life. I must embrace a biblical calling to be “all things to all people” and by doing so understand my own convictions. It is only through relationship with others that my own understanding and faith can be fully deepened and formed.

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The Story that Led Me Here

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It all started in the first grade: my deep affinity for stories. For as long as I can remember, I’ve made sense of the complexities of the human experience through stories. I found solace in my suffering by resonating with others’ stories. I found answers to some of life’s big questions in the context of stories. And I’ve made an ongoing decision to allow my own story to fuse into the greater one that’s been whispered through the Scriptures, through the historical Church, through the God who came to dwell among us to invite us into His giant story of restoration.

It’s within the context of that beautiful story of redemption that I make sense of my experience as a woman who likes women and loves Jesus. I declared to myself that I was gay when I was fourteen years old, and then to my family at the age of seventeen. Shortly after coming out, I was taken to an ex-gay ministry where I spent a decade learning about the way of Christ with some incredible people that I treasure to this day. I found a community who loved Jesus and extended endless grace to me, a community I desperately needed as a confused teenager trying to make sense of a chaotic existence.

During my decade with Exodus, I grew to love Christ more than anything else in the world. God’s giant story of redemption was the foundation of every teaching, every piece of advice, every reason behind every step I was encouraged to take at every point in my process. But inherent in the redemption they proclaimed was an assumption that redemption entailed a shift in my orientation—a shift from gay to straight. So I stopped my old habits, confessed every attraction, shadowed straight girls, dated cute guys, and stopped calling myself gay because as a man thinketh, so he is. But I was still a girl who liked girls. I was still gay.​

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Why I Need Celibate Gay Christians

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I was forced out of the closet by a phone call. A dear friend had confessed that she was struggling with attraction for a woman, but was trying to not act upon it because of her Christian faith. Our other two friends on the phone strongly recommended she accept her sexual identity rather than let her sexual practices be dictated by her religious beliefs. I—the once militant atheist—came to her defense and said she should let her conscience be her guide. If she believed her religion that deeply, then she should try to her best to adhere to it and we shouldn’t admonish her for prioritizing her religion over her sexual inclinations. This, of course, stunned them and I was forced to come out of the closet as someone interested in Christianity. I confessed that I had started doing Bible studies and attending church. These were the friends least surprised when I was baptized a few months later.

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On “Higher” Vocations and the “Marital Paradigm”

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Back when Joshua Gonnerman and I were students at Thomas Aquinas College, from 2005-2009, we were in an environment where the combination of geographical remoteness, Dominican community, and school-wide common study meant that any and every sort of intellectual conversation could take place. One would walk into the Commons and (I am perhaps underexaggerating here) and hear conversations abounding about anything, from Roman history according to Tacitus and Suetonius, to the political philosophy of the American Founding Fathers, to the question of how it is that angels may be said to move according to Aquinas.

There were a few “hot topics” every year that tended to repeat themselves, and one of them was the question of vocational order. This arose from a careful distinction Aquinas made in the Summa, but one which, left unclarified by those giving it only a partial reading, tended to give students heartburn. There is an order among the different states of life in the Church, one defined by both the weight of the sacrifice one makes to be in that state, and also by the juridical order of the Church herself. Because one makes a complete sacrifice of oneself, a holocaust, in entering religious life, Aquinas says that (objectively speaking) religious life is the highest form of life. In this he follows St. Paul, who says in 1 Corinthians 7 that he would that all would remain celibate, but that God calls some to marriage. (Of course, the way he puts this is a legendary bone of contention for those attempting to “justify” marriage as a high vocation. I tend to think he vindicated this, though, by his famous “husbands, love your wives” injunction at the beginning of the same chapter.)

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Souls Knit Together

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Justin Taylor points to an excerpt from an article by Michael A. G. Haykin, the Patristics scholar, on biblical images for friendship:

The Bible uses two consistent images in its representation of friendship.

The first is that of the knitting of souls together.

Deuteronomy provides the earliest mention in this regard when it speaks of a ‘friend who is as your own soul’ (Deut. 13:6), that is, one who is a companion of one’s innermost thoughts and feelings.  Prominent in this reflection on friendship is the concept of intimacy.  It is well illustrated by Jonathan and David’s friendship.  For example, in 1 Samuel 18:1 we read that the ‘soul of Jonathan was knit to the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul.’  This reflection on the meaning of friendship bears with it ideas of strong emotional attachment and loyalty.  Not surprisingly, the term ‘friend’ naturally became another name for believers or brothers and sisters in the Lord (see 3 John 14).

The second image that the Bible uses to represent friendship is the face-to-face encounter.  This is literally the image used for Moses’ relationship to God.  In the tabernacle God spoke to Moses ‘face to face, as a man speaks to his friend’ (Exod. 33:11; see also Num. 12:8).  The face-to-face image implies a conversation, a sharing of confidences and consequently a meeting of minds, goals and direction.  In the New Testament, we find a similar idea expressed in 2 John 12, where the Elder tells his readers that he wants to speak to them ‘face to face.’ One of the benefits of such face-to-face encounters between friends is the heightened insight that such times of friendship produce. As the famous saying in Proverbs 27:17 puts it, ‘Iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another.’

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On Coming Out

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In my experience, the best predictor of emotional health for an LGBT person is generally how many people he or she has come out to.  This effect is most dramatic between someone who is completely closeted and someone who is out to a few friends.  To make sure it’s clear what I mean, to “come out,” short for “come out of the closet,” is simply to disclose one’s romantic or sexual feelings, regardless of one’s behavior or convictions. If a person is “closeted,” his or her sexuality is a secret, and if he or she is “out,” it has been disclosed.  Neither term is all-encompassing; it is common to be out in some contexts but closeted in others.

Most of us are initially closeted as a result of fear. We are afraid that people might shun us if they knew about our sexuality. Those of us who are Christians often fear that we will be judged not to be if we come out. Our fear is often rational – I know people who have lost positions of leadership or employment upon coming out, and some have lost friends or been disowned by family. However, I think the risk is also overblown for a lot of us – I haven’t really faced any of these negative reactions myself.  Nonetheless, rational or not, the fear is extremely real.  I think of my own experience.  Long before I actually came out to anyone, I had the sense that I needed to do so.  Around the fall of 2004, I finally decided that I wasn’t going to take my secret to the grave.  However, I didn’t actually build up the courage to share until the summer of 2005, after my brother initiated a deep conversation about some other things.  Even once I decided the time was right, it took about half an hour to get the words out of my mouth.  Coming out the next few times remained similarly difficult, although it has slowly become easier with time and practice.

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Friendship and “Hooking Up” in College

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In my last post, I mentioned the frequently heard claim that friendship plays a diminished role in contemporary Western culture because we have elevated romantic love unduly. Here’s Paul O’Callaghan: “We live in a society that exalts erotic love as the supreme fulfillment available to human beings. How can friendship compete with the sizzle of sex in the arena of public attention?”

Growing up in a conservative evangelical subculture and later attending an evangelical Christian college—where the phrase “ring by spring” was repeated not entirely tongue in cheek—I’m sympathetic to this claim. From my vantage point, it does seem that romantic love, with its promise that each partner will “complete” the other and be the other’s “best friend,” has displaced or minimized other forms of love in a way that’s problematic, not least within historic Christian theology itself. So when I read books with subtitles like “Why Celibacy Must Be Reinvented in Today’s Church,” I’m inclined to agree.

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Morally Exemplary Friendships

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We often hear that friendship is undervalued today because it’s been eclipsed by romantic love. If marriage (or simply sexual partnerships of one sort or another) are the places to experience true love, then friendship gets demoted. But in his book The Feast of Friendship Paul O’Callaghan suggests another reason friendship may be relegated to secondary status: it has no obvious moral appeal. Making his case by contrast, O’Callaghan points to the widespread adulation for someone like Mother Teresa, whose form of love—unconditional, indiscriminate charity—for Calcutta’s poor was acclaimed even by those who didn’t share her religious commitments. And in the same week that Mother Teresa died, the world also mourned Princess Diana, not least for her humanitarian work.

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Three kinds of friendship

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In his treatise On Spiritual Friendship, Aelred of Rievaulx, a 12th-century Cistercian abbot, insists that we need to test our beliefs about friendship with Scripture. The treatise is a series of dialogues in which three monks join Aelred to examine their ideas about friendship in light of their Christian faith.

One of the most important passages in the treatise is the discussion of the three kinds of friendship—carnal, worldly, and spiritual—found in Book I, paragraphs 33-49. (This division of different kinds of friendship is not original to Aelred: Aristotle drew similar distinctions in the Nicomachean Ethics, Book 8, chapters 2-6.)

We might think that Aelred is talking about kinds of friendship in the same way that we think of planes, trains, and automobiles as three different kinds of transport vehicles. Although a car is very different from a plane, and both are very different from a train, each is a legitimate kind of vehicle.

This is not Aelred’s idea, however. He thinks that only spiritual friendship represents a true form of friendship. Carnal and worldly friendship are not real friendship, although many think they are. In speaking of different kinds of friendship, then, Aelred means to distinguish between true friendship and two different kinds of false friendship.

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Why don’t we talk about friendship more?

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I realize that, at this blog, that’s a somewhat silly question. But over at Fare Forward, Jordan Monge raises the question with regard to the broader Christian culture:

Friendship often is given short shrift in our culture. As every child knows, the Disney movie ends with the princess marrying her prince charming and not by her forming a lifelong platonic friendship. Where marriage is so significant it demands a wedding ceremony more expensive than a car, friendship is mundane, meriting less deliberate investment and certainly no formal declarations of mutual love and admiration. You could buy a library’s worth of self-help books about cultivating a better marriage, but there is little formal thought devoted to becoming a better friend or what friendship ought to look like.

It hasn’t always been this way. Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero authored works on friendship. In the Eastern Orthodox tradition, there is a ceremony called adelphopoiesis, which is literally translated as “brother-making.” Norwegian, Chinese, and Native American cultures were known to have had ceremonies to honor blood brothers. It’s ironic that, among Christians, we’ve privileged marriage so much highly over friendship despite the fact that our founder Jesus Christ was a man who never married but did invest quite deliberately in 12 friends.

Check out the whole thing.