Friendship Issue (Fall Issue 8)
Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art...It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.
C.S. Lewis
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In Memoriam of the Community House Brother Moving Out
By Derek Hiemstra
“What’s up, short stuff?” I’d ask as he walked in the door.
“What’s up, tall stuff?” he’d reply.
It was stupid.
Sometimes we’d change it up:
“What’s up, big guy?” I’d say.
“What’s up, small guy?” he’d reply.
I’m still looking for the death and resurrection, or the incarnation, or the trinity, agape, or the kingdom of God in my front hallway. I know that’s unrelated but I’ve got my eyes open.
Adrian is a brick-layer, and he looks like it. Sturdy, stolid. Dark brown hair in a mohawk, dark full beard. Often, he’d wear a light blue shirt with a white, handwritten script on it. The shirt read, “Y’all need Jesus” on the front, and he claims that some friends of his bought it for him as a joke. Maybe we don’t need one, but I like to think everyone should enjoy an Adrian now and then.
Just for the solidity of it. Adrian and I went for a run one afternoon in Pacific Spirit Park. And that’s just one fun thing he does. He also covered my rent once (I paid him back in full, thank you) and he thought out loud in front of me that if I sold my body on Craigslist it could help me make rent next time. He’s the kinda guy who shows up.
Not to mention this man was constantly in my way in the kitchen. Sometimes I think he was cooking, but other times it could have been to start arguments. Maybe “start” isn’t exactly the phrase, but don’t “float an idea” in front of Adrian unless you are prepared to have it plucked out of mid-air and wrestled with. A particular favourite we had was education. “Look,” Adrian would say, “all kids should have to go to public school. It’s the best evangelism. You need to be friends with the people around you. No one’s going to know Christians if they never show up. Christian kids or homeschooled kids all turn out weird, and so exclusive. Like they’re better than other people.”
Did I mention we all need Jesus? Adrian told me so.
The man was consistently improving us without consulting us. One day, after he’d been at our house for only a couple of months, he was elected the house leader; declared by apostolic succession. We did not realize this meant we’d be voting on house improvements, building bins for firewood, cleaning out our attic and garage, rearranging the kitchen, taking notes on the house issues to fix. Was that part friendship? I’m not sure. But our house is in better shape and we have a better sense of how to organize and navigate issues. Firmly, with conviction.
Adrian suffered like the average pastor suffered; he didn’t choose the people who he encountered, he just encountered them. This year was rough. The community ties with Regent suffered. School was put on hold, re-done at home. Our living room couches remember a lot of useless hours, nonsense conversation, or worse, put-downs and negative self-talk, negative god-talk, negative air. The house, on occasion, feeling like a sanitorium, a clinic. What’s anyone supposed to do when I say sternly, with conviction, that I don’t trust God? Especially the God they are obedient to, the one they love, who loves all those around them, who moves in their life. They could only shake their head, no? Unfortunately, some of the magic of Adrian is that he shook his head, and he showed up the next day, and had the same conversation. And some of the tragedy is the respect I lost and never recovered in his eyes. He does forgive; but if so, he’s not working with a blank slate the next day.
The best memories aren’t memories of rendering each other speechless with over-the-top verbal sparring, or any intense spiritual moments of prayer, the best memories are less memories and more a collection of a predisposition, an openness. The place I can best envision Adrian is in our backyard, around our firepit. Enclosed by tall bushes and small trees, a cement pad under a steel frame, with various multi-coloured plastic chairs.
“Have you ever tried this?” Adrian asks, handing over a clear liquid with blueberries in it.
“What exactly?” I ask, pulling up a chair.
“Try it, it’s good.”
A little bit of Adrian is a good idea.
But we all need Jesus.
On Friendship and Hospitality
By Rachel Hart
I’ve been incredibly fortunate in my time at Regent to have meaningful, intimate friendships. From bellyache laughter making it hard to breathe, to open arms and doors at all hours, to shared grief, holding silence and tears when feelings are greater than words—I’m so grateful for these friends and pray to keep them through eternity. Because I cherish these friendships, I’m taking a minute to name what I’ve found to be an inhospitable context for disagreement. In my time at Regent I’ve experienced a shift in the culture of students around what one ‘can’ or ‘cannot’ disagree with. I haven’t experienced this in a classroom, but in conversations with friends.
You’ve already heard calls for unity in an increasingly polarized world. But at Regent we need to practice our friendships better. What concerns me about my experience is that it’s not unique to me. I don’t mind being the odd bird out when it comes to disagreeing opinions. What I do mind is that I’ve felt silenced before sharing that opinion. And I know I’m not alone in this. In some conversations within friendships, I have felt unable to offer a disagreeing viewpoint, because it’s assumed my opinions are in agreement, and I listen silently while those who hold a contrasting opinion are belittled. There seem to be certain topics that can’t be challenged, whether it’s creationism vs theistic evolution, women’s ordination, the role of the Church in relationship to government, etc. Thus, I have not felt the freedom to offer differing points of view because I haven’t wanted to be mocked as well.
I’m saddened by my experience, because I know I’ve done the same to others, and I want to do better. That means recognizing that I don’t have the sum knowledge of Truth and my opinions can and should be challenged in pursuit of it. One of the reasons it’s been so hard for me and others to voice a differing opinion is that it’s difficult to know how to disagree well. In conversations with friends, when disagreeing opinions are silenced, both parties are hurt. Our friendships aren’t as healthy as they could be. One party has done harm without realizing, while the other party hurts and does not feel safe to express that. We must ask ourselves, “Am I being a good friend?” In asking that, I challenge myself to dignify the person I disagree with.
I want to do better, to love better. I want to engage with other people who disagree with me better. It comes back to the theme of friendship intertwined with hospitality. We love to talk about what hospitality looks like, especially in terms of the church as an open space for people to be welcomed into. However, this begins with hospitality in our relationships. As a Christ follower, I am invited into a kenotic descent, lowering my pride so others feel welcome in my presence. I seek to understand, not to be understood. If I disagree with someone, I want them to know that I love them before they know my opinion. Maya Angelou rightly said, “At the end of the day people won’t remember what you said or did, they will remember how you made them feel.”
I’m not great at this. I’ve offended more people than I wish I had. I’m grateful for the friends who have called me out when I’ve been unkind and unloving. I always want to allow intellectual honesty in all my conversations. I want hospitable space for ideas that I disagree with. Regent tells us to come with our questions. And I want this to be true for all of our questions, not to promote an atmosphere where certain questions are “not allowed.” Passivity is not unity.
I don’t think there’s one magic solution, but I can offer suggestions of what I’m trying to become better at doing. One is to acknowledge Christ in our midst. An embodied practice is to make a cross over my lips with my thumb, as a physical prayer for Christ to be present in my words. St Aelred of Rievaulx in Spiritual Friendship describes a call for honest conversation: “Here we are, you and I, and I hope that Christ makes a third with us. No one can interrupt us now... So come now, dearest friend, reveal your heart and speak your mind.” Remembering that we are collectively striving after Truth together is another way to keep our disagreements within friendships charitable. I need you and you need me for both of us to see Truth better. In disagreement, I want to make sure I have taken the time to understand your opinion so well that I could express it back to you and you would feel seen and understood.
May you be kind in your attitude, but unwavering in your conviction.
And may you always be filled with compassion for the person in front of you.
Friendship After Love
By Ella Wheeler Wilcox
After the fierce midsummer all ablaze
Has burned itself to ashes, and expires
In the intensity of its own fires,
There come the mellow, mild, St. Martin days
Crowned with the calm of peace, but sad with haze.
So after Love has led us, till he tires
Of his own throes, and torments, and desires,
Comes large-eyed friendship: with a restful gaze,
He beckons us to follow, and across
Cool verdant vales we wander free from care.
Is it a touch of frost lies in the air?
Why are we haunted with a sense of loss?
We do not wish the pain back, or the heat;
And yet, and yet, these days are incomplete.
Particular Friends
By Steven Gomez
In a corner of my bookshelf, stacked to save space, is a series of books by Patrick O’Brian. They don’t have a collective title, usually being referred to simply as the Aubrey-Maturin series after the names of the two lead characters. Set in the very early 1800s and spanning some sixteen years, the books follow the adventures of Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin, a captain and surgeon in the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars and the golden age of sail.
Jack is large and loud. Stephen is thin and introspective. Jack can navigate a 28-gun frigate through the eye of a needle, and is described more than once as a creature “nine-tenths marine,” but by land he’s a simpleton who gets himself hopelessly entangled in get-rich-quick schemes and debt. Stephen can never climb into a ship without falling into the sea, but he is also one of Britain’s best intelligence agents as well as a keen naturalist. Jack is a patriotic Englishman with a near-fanatic sense of duty. Stephen is a former Irish rebel with a Catalan mother, disillusioned with republicanism and loyal only to individuals.
Despite these differences, the charm of the books is based completely on the deep and long-lasting companionship between the two men. Each describes the other as his “particular friend” (such a felicitous, Regency-era expression). For Jack and Stephen, the thing which connects them most fully is music; Jack plays the violin and Stephen the cello. During their voyages, evenings after dinner usually find them in the captain’s cabin either playing a Boccherini sonata or improvising on their own themes, conversing wordlessly as particular friends are wont to do.
This kind of intimacy between men is rare in fiction, and likely even rarer in real life. It is a genuine intimacy, the kind born from opening minds and hearts to one another. But in our culture the word ‘intimacy’ is reserved for romantic, sexual relationships—so men can’t be intimate without homoerotic undertones. Critics always pick apart Shakespeare’s sonnets on the assumption he must be gay since no man would speak to another like that. Some readers of Sherlock Holmes and John Watson speculate endlessly on the same grounds; two men living together for so long? (The running gag in the BBC series Sherlock is that people assume John is gay even after he marries a woman.)
The sexualization of intimacy is a strange phenomenon but also understandable. We are speaking, after all, of closeness and union; it’s little wonder that sexual love is often seen as the summit of that closeness. But what if it weren’t the only summit? What if, having scaled that mountain, we looked around and noticed that there were others—that what had seemed like such a lofty and solitary peak was in fact only part of a vast range of relationships? Some of us have perhaps experienced exactly that; the realization that we cannot survive on just one relationship alone, and that despite what so many spiritual guides would like to believe, we need friends as much as we need God. And yet we still go on thinking that sex is the highest form and expression of intimacy.
Other people have spoken much more eloquently than I on the need to decentralize sexuality in our view of relationships. And if there’s one thing a pandemic-induced social isolation has taught me it’s that I long for more than one kind of intimacy. I crave deep friendships; even the people who are ostensibly my closest friends don’t feel as close as they once did. There’s no forcing such a thing, it seems, which is probably for the best. A contrived relationship of any kind would be no relationship, but a façade.
Reading Patrick O’Brian’s books is certainly a remarkable picture of an era (he was an entirely period-accurate historical novelist), but what keeps me coming back is the portrait he paints of male friendship; without contrivance, without making a statement, the books calmly reject any notion that men cannot be intimate apart from sexuality. And it is a beautiful thing. Jack and Stephen meet under such a cloud of animosity that they nearly fight a duel. But the discord quickly grows into counterpoise, a different harmony from that of lovers. The kind of music that can only be played by particular friends.
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