Sunday, 23 October 2011

Faith Dance

Faith Dance

The Wild Beauty of Boundary-Shifting Friendships

Posted: 22 Oct 2011 03:02 PM PDT

"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?

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