"Also, it is common to think that the complementarians in the Mark Driscoll camp disagree with egalitarians on just one specific issue–women as ordained pastors or elders."

The second part to my review on Real Marriage is here.

I reviewed Mark Driscoll's Real Marriage over on Sacred Friendship Gathering. 

What would it take for you to say yes to sexuality and friendship?

What would it take for you to say yes to the life-giving power of sexuality in friendship?

Before I proceed further let’s pause briefly and consider what I mean by friendship. Friendship is a voluntary, nonfamilial, nonromantic relationship between a female and a male in which there is no sex or sexual intimacy. In other paradigms friendships occur with “benefits.” That is a current social practice but that is not my intention in my definition of friendship. I don’t intend any kind of “friendly sex.”

So then, what does it mean for one to say yes to sexuality and friendship? I find myself resisting either-or paradigms. I know I am not the only one who resists these simplistic choices. I am writing this with a goal of reaching out to those who would like to see something different than either-or paradigms on sexuality and friendship.

There is one paradigm which sees any kind of deep passion or intimacy in friendship as conveying there is always something more that’s behind it: a conscious or unconscious sex drive. In this paradigm, deep intimacy which doesn’t result in sexual intimacy is ultimately a frustrated paradigm. This is the result of sexualizing all deep love (think of the popular reaction to Oprah and Gayle King).

The other paradigm is so fearful of integrating sexuality and friendship; it fosters all kinds of boundaries and rules for limiting any sort of deep engagement between the two friends. Side hugs (where hip bones “connect”), no meeting alone with the opposite sex, limited emotional connection, no cultivation of dyadic intimacy, no dinners, no car rides, chaperones must be present, are just some of the many boundaries to limit a meaningful connection between sexuality and friendship. This paradigm involves obsessive boundary-drawing between friends with the approval of their community.

What the two paradigms have in common is genitalizing sexuality and meaningful, close relationships. But what if sexuality is more than just sex? What if sexuality is more than just being sexually active? What if sexuality is more than just frustrated sex drives in relationships?

It could very well be that in this century we will see the positive shift among many Christians embracing sexuality and friendship.

1.  Saying yes means exploring what confusion means when sexuality is present in friendship.

Our hyperromanticized culture has claimed particular habits, actions, behaviors, and passions as mutually exclusive from platonic intimacy in male-female friendships. Dinners at restaurants or homes, going to theatres to watch movies, going out for drinks, walking, skiing, canoeing, physical affection, emotional intensity, and so on are all exclusive markers for robust sexuality in “coupling” relationships.  

What would be the markers for meaningful, intimate platonic friendships? Does romance get a monopoly on the social markers for male-female love?

To explore what robust possibilities are for platonic intimacy could produce confusion for you, your friend, and others. Some Christians have been taught that romantic relationship is the only appropriate place to get in touch with their sexuality. Any movement in which they experience desire to be with or a longing to be with an opposite sex friend could be confusing.

Confusion may be a place of vulnerability and openness but it doesn’t mean you are on a slippery slope into anything is permissible. What if attraction (for example) is a lot more complex than a summons to jump in bed? What if sexuality is a powerful but  not an uncontrollable energy? What if attraction could be channeled to celebrate the gift of sexuality in friendship? What if healthy, deep emotional bonds between the sexes reveal the image of the triune God in friendship and community?

There can be legitimate confusion in exploring authentic, healthy boundaries in each friendship if one is considering the move from an obsessive boundary-setting paradigm to nurturing mutual trust, openness, appropriate vulnerability, delight, affection, and presence with their current friend (s).  

But saying yes to sexuality and friendship does not mean saying yes to mixed signals. What if there are flirtations, jokes, innuendos, and teasing with a sexual tinge present? Ongoing patterns of such communication send signals of mixed motives in the friendship and if married, sends mixed signals to one’s spouse if you are flirting with your friend. Flirting is a form of skirting the edges of sexual possibilities. Exploring confusion in this sense would involve a come to Jesus talk about clear motives in sexuality and friendship.

2. Saying yes means exploring what fears we have of celebrating and honoring the gift of sexuality in friendship.

Saying yes to sexuality and friendship doesn’t mean you are naively closing your eyes to the dangers of infidelity or the possibility of inappropriate sex in friendship. You’re not saying yes to a slippery slope. Saying yes does not mean you are opening yourself to the possibilities to the sexual dynamics of a triangle. This is not a surrender to an out of touch sexuality where you are taken by surprise by your acting out something you didn’t see coming.

In our hyperromantic culture, given the advent of sweeping social changes coupled with the internet, there is the appearance of numerous romantic possibilities/alternatives other than one’s present spouse. But underlying these alternatives is a consumer-driven romantic culture that contradicts any message one hears about needing to “work on your relationship.”  It is this consumer-driven sexuality that magnifies an ongoing hunger for an intense, eternal private romantic experience that is never attainable in marriage.

Saying yes to sexuality and friendship is saying yes to the superabundance of God in monogamous marriage and the superabundance of God in friendship beyond marriage. As Samuel Wells puts it, “Friendship embodies the superabundance of creation in the kingdom.”  In God’s kingdom, the breadth and depth of friendship includes an intensity of love for others beyond marriage.

But there are more fears to explore as we seek to celebrate and honor the life-giving power of authentic and healthy sexuality. The quality, the zest, the pleasure, the goodness, the deep beauty of attending to your sexuality is deeply connected to your spiritual life—celibate, single, or married. All of us have areas in our sexuality (in marriage and in friendships) where we need to grow.

Certain religious systems and faith communities have emphasized so much sexual insecurity, individuals are fearful of receiving, giving, and delighting in their own marriages. Nurturing a greater awareness and openness to who we are in relationship—emotionally, physically, spiritually, intellectually—we are exploring our fears in honoring the life-giving gift of sexuality. Fears keep us away from exploring so many powerful life-giving, connecting possibilities in sexuality and friendship. 

via www.altervideomagazine.com

I so loved this clip of Jean Vanier reflecting on his dear friend, Henri Nouwen. Vanier says that Nouwen "thirsted for friendship." I have a few simple thoughts on thirsting for friendship. Nothing profound. I stand in the presence of two great giants who have embodied beauty and friendship. 

1. I loved the beauty, simplicity, and affection Jean Vanier speaks with talking about his friend, Henri Nouwen.

After he mentions Nouwen's emotional reaction ("He used to get furious" ) after Vanier could not meet him "anytime he needed" Vanier calls him "beautiful," and "he was a beautiful man." Beauty and beautiful have become so gendered and sexualized in our culture. Vanier doesn't hold back when he identifies Nouwen as beautiful. May I say, Vanier expresses such deep beauty in his smile and language toward Nouwen. 

Beyond the use of it in romantic love and marriage, I first started coming across beauty in friendship as I read books on female friendship. Then, I began to see it Catholic men use beauty in describing friends and their male friends. It is rare for me to see it in evangelical literature on male friendship.

2. I love Vanier's deep embrace of Nouwen even in the midst of knowing Nouwen's "thirsting for friendship." 

Vanier is so clear he loved Nouwen and embraced him, even in his deep need to be needed and his thirsting for friendship. Vanier talks about Nouwen's intense thirst for his presence accompanied with Vanier's need to set boundaries (it was impossible for Vanier to meet at any moment, at any surprise request from Nouwen). However this doesn't negate the fact that within this community, Vanier met with Nouwen in an ongoing friendship. Even in this midst of the complex friendship, Vanier embraces Nouwen with such profound love, acceptance, and simplicity. 

3. Deep Friends Need Boundaries Too, in Close Communities.

I would have loved to hear Vanier expound on "idealizing friendship." Certainly there is a temptation to idealize friendship. Nouwen longed and craved for friendship, for embodied touch, for support. He wrestled with loneliness.

On a trip to Latin America, he notes in his journey, "What I am craving is not so much recognition, praise, or admiration as simple friendship. There may be some around me, but I cannot perceive or receive it...I realized the only thing I really wanted was a handshake, an embrace, a kiss, or a smile; I received none."

4. Deep Friendships May Have Complex Boundaries, Profound Love, and Deep Affection.

 I haven't read Nouwen's biographies yet. I would like to at some point. I have read Wesley Hill's book and Hill writes that Nouwen would call friends around the world in the middle of the night and want to talk with them about his intense fear of loneliness. What is remarkable is that according to Hill this happened with repetition and many of his friends endured the calls and embraced him. 

But as Vanier notes Nouwen had a deep thirst to connect with his friends. Friendship never met Nouwen's need for deep, ongoing, permanent, satisfying intimacy.

"Oh Dan - your affection and your care blesses me so much - thank you for loving me so well and lavishly....I love you deeply"

Those are not the words of my wife, Sheila, toward me (although she too expresses passionate, heartfelt, deep language of love to me!). They are words from one of my cross-gender single friends.

Those words of love, wild beauty arising spontaneously from the heart from Sheila toward me would be considered appropriate, beautiful, and deeply affectionate spousal love. Evangelicals would welcome and applaud such language of beauty expressed between husband and wife. 

But the words of wild beauty arising from a single woman and toward a married man who are "just friends?" Can we talk about exploring wild beauty in boundary-shifting friendships?  Although I specifically started out focusing on deep beauty between a single woman and a married man, I am going to broaden this out to human friendship, too. 

I came across the metaphor of "boundary-shifting friends" this week in a book I'm reading: An Uncommon Correspondence: An East-West Conversation of Friendship, Intimacy and Love by Ivy George and Margaret Massoon. It is dedicated "to all those who resist the script." The book is about two friends, one from the West (Margaret Masson), and the other, from the East (Ivy George) and their deep conversation (expressed in letters to each other across the pond) of love, human friendship, intimacy, and romance. 

In my mind, wild beauty and boundary-shifting friends go together. They belong together. They are inseparable. They are deeply connected. As I mention in Sacred Unions, Sacred Passions, it was Eastern Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart who turned me onto this profound observation: beauty crosses boundaries. Hart says, "Beauty defies our distinctions, calls them into question, and manifests what shows itself despite them: God's glory. For the Christian thought, beauty's indifference to the due order of far and near, great and small, absent and present, spiritual and material should indicate the continuity of divine and created glory." 

Delight, ever-deepening delight, beauty,  ever-deepening beauty, and glory mixed in with uneasiness, awkwardness, fears, risk, vulnerability, venture: these have all been part of my awakening to wild beauty in human friendship.

Wild beauty and friendship? Wild beauty in friendship? As a white, middle aged evangelical male with two feet firmly planted within the American evangelical sub-culture for 25 years, I had no grammar, vocabulary, ethics, or authority to put the two together as concepts but also participate and experience them. Awakening to wild beauty in human friendship is no small thing in the evangelical sub-culture. 

But to add a layer of complexity, I was awakening to wild beauty in cross-gender friendship. 

For me to become aware of this glorious beauty was a risk because it so felt like I had to travel through unchartered territory. I wrestled with anxiety, fears, self-doubt, uneasiness, confusion, awkwardness, fears of failure, fears of not getting it right, fears of being alone, and so on. I remember a certain point, where I was talking to a trusted friend, someone I was processing the entire journey with. I was seeking his input as I was taking another step into deeper waters. He said to me, "Dan, you are beyond my personal experience. You've gone where I have not gone. That does not mean you have to stop what you doing." With that, he gave me his thoughts and blessing to continue.

I read this from Hart only after a couple of years of saying "Yes!" to wild beauty: "It is in the delighted vision of what is other than oneself--difference, created by the God who differentiates, pleasing in the eyes of God who takes pleasure--that one is moved to affirm that otherness, to cherish and respond to it."  

There was (and is) the rub. Was this a narcissistic, ego-stroking turn for me or was this a move to taste, cherish, treasure, and respond to wild beauty?  I definitely was so lacking a grammar and authority for beauty early on. I was a baby-boomer, a white evangelical male. The suburban evangelical community in middle-class America has virtually no language of beauty with its excess, bounty, abundance, freedom, yet divine authority and glory. Was I tasting the goodness and beauty of God in this process or was I deluding myself?

In this book mentioned at the beginning of this post, Masson quotes from the poem "Out of the Blue" by Micheal O'Siadhail. " He writes at the end, "Gratuitous, beyond our fathom, both binding and feeing, this love re-invades us, shifts the boundaries of our being." Then she notes of finding such a friend, "whose friendship 'shifts the boundaries of our being.'"

As Masson and George observe later on, we lack a vocabulary for a friendship, for human intimacy in friendship that "shifts the boundaries of our being." As an evangelical, I can easily find many who will readily acknowledge that it is a romantic or married love which shifts (or should shift) the boundaries our being. But friendship love? Beauty in friendship shifting the boundaries of our being? 

Where do evangelicals embrace wild beauty in friendship? Friendship, opposite-sex, or same-sex?  I ask this as someone who has been in the evangelical community for 30 plus years. I haven't left evangelical community because I firmly believe there is a place for wild beauty within evangelical spirituality, sexuality, and community. 

Do you think there is a place for wild beauty in friendship?

One ongoing theme in this blog centers around deep intimacy and physical closeness in friendship. I have particularly focused on cross-gender friendships but I also have looked at friendships beyond male-female love. Saturday, my good friend Jennifer Roach shared a link on my FB wall regarding some simple thoughts from a middle aged Catholic celibate man who enjoys physical affection in friendship with women. He wrote:

"I like holding hands, arms around waists, hugs and light kisses. The best relationship I ever had was a Platonic friendship with a woman who was openly and unconsciously affectionate...Were I ever to marry, I believe it would be with just such a woman."  It's a simple but thoughtful post. 

He laments about how for many men (and some women too) physical affection is not on their radar screen--especially in friendship. 

It reminded me of our deep embrace of post-Freud sexualized assumptions about love, romance, and physical closeness in contemporary America. You see, other cultures not impacted by Freud embrace a variety of expressions of physical intimacy in friendship. On the same planet, different time zone, about 7,000 miles from me, in India, present-day affection between male friends (no sex on the table) include public handholding--interlocking fingers and pressed palms--handholding.

One Indian, commenting on physical affection, "Indian men show no shame in interlocking fingers and pressing palms."  

It's interesting that this writer talked about "no shame." How much have Freudian assumptions about physical closeness shamed men and women from practicing affection in public? In private? 

Here are some old pictures of men in America embracing each other in a different era:

Ponder another one:

 
Pretty close, wouldn't you say? Look at this next one:

John Isbon in his book, Picturing Men: A Century of Male Relationships in EveryDay American Photography has "everyday" common, pictures of physical closeness like these. He writes, "American males, together in pairs and larger groups, once had professional portraits of themselves taken with a revealing frequency, in dramatic contrast to the virtual lack of the practice today. The poses they once commonly struck were even more revealing than the fact that the portrait was taken. With notable nonchalance, they might hold hands, sit on a companion’s lap, share a chair, drape their arms around each other" (italics inserted). This was before Freud and company impacted physical intimacy and friendship. 

Then he writes about how sexualizing affection began to make it's impact as the twentieth century progressed early on: "The contrast between earlier and later poses of men together in photographs is striking, charting an increasing discomfort with closeness to each other’s bodies. The practice of males having their studio portraits taken together, once such a common token of association, was by comparison virtually extinct by the 1930s." 

If you read my post about disputable matters and breastfeeding, Isbon's comments here reveal how much intimate physical affection became problematic in every relationship (parenting and friendship) but the sexual/romantic couple in the early part of the twentieth century. No matter where one turns in reading the history of friendship in America in the first twenty years of last century, one encounters a profound growing discomfort with physical intimacy in friendship. It's no wonder so many of us are uncomfortable about expressing physical closeness (handholding, cuddling, lingering physical touch, shoulder and foot massages, and so on) outside of romance.

I can tell you at least in the evangelical community, contemporary female friendships are far ahead of male friendships expressing physical closeness. In a recent public setting ("public" meaning there were more than two people present) I saw one female friend lavishly express affection/tenderness through a brief shoulder massage, and lingering physical touch (at least 15 minutes) with the other friend just soaking it in. It was beautiful. It was physical tenderness. It wasn't a warmup to foreplay. This reflects the growth and progress in female friendship, post-Freud. Male friendship, even in the evangelical community hasn't fared that well. 

Had I done that in "public" with one of my female friends, I would have to brace myself for the implications of a countercultural or a counternormative response. We could do it, but we better be prepared for a counternormative backlash.

But physical closeness in friendship is returning in dyadic friendships. Intentional choices, intentional practices to deconstruct Freud, to tear down the wall between sexuality and friendship brick by brick are happening. Deep expressions of physical tenderness are not to be sequestered for only romantic relationships or sexual relationships. All affectionate impulses and longings are not, Freudian sex-laden. One can embrace deep feelings, deep emotions, deep tenderness, deep physical affection as love in friendship--not sexualized love.

Where do you find yourself?

In God's world (Christian or non-Christian), God is moving and working in and through friends who are counterFreud, counternormative. To embrace this, means you open yourself up to risk, criticism, difference, and gossip. But it also means you open yourself up to Love greater than cultural rules and limitations.