Space Enough, and Time

In Monday’s post, I used Ephraim Radner’s thoughts on singleness in the church from A Time to Keep to consider three obstacles to friendship in contemporary culture.  Today I’d like to spend a few paragraphs talking about “the frequencies of friendship.”

It can be difficult to tell whether friendship is “easy” for people or not.  Some people, extroverts in particular, seem to navigate rooms and relationships easily.  Introverts, on the other hand, seem perfectly content with peace, quiet, a good book, and maybe a good show to binge.  I’ve felt the draw of both, really.  There have been seasons of my life where I was an “organizer,” trying to bring people together for this or that social event.  And I’ve been the guy accused of having a “cave” and of requiring “Tony Time.”  Life, I would argue, is not that simple.  Or it’s that simple if you reduce people to something manageable (and therefore usable).

Friendship, it turns out, is hard work.  And I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not the best at it.  And some of that, I think, is rooted in my singleness.  I think a lot of single people feel stretched between what can feel like the demands of a fickle social life and the sober consistency of a quieter, more solitary life.  If you embrace one, you can lose the other.  If you try for both, you end up with neither.  Either way, the presence of others is vital.

So let’s think of friendship as something that exists with two baseline “frequencies.”  To think well about these frequencies (and how other people might express need and gift in such contexts) might be to make some way forward in understanding friendship.

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The first frequency of friendship has to do with the “contact time” and “rhythm” of friendship.  Different people have different needs when it comes to being with others.  One must assume that a key benefit of marriage is the commitment to be with someone (for better or worse and all).  Using the language of “orbits” from Monday’s post, this looks like someone you actually share the same orbit with.  This exists most easily (for better or for worse, some might say) in marriage and the nuclear family.  I can’t help but think that “contact time” in the classroom creates a kind of familiarity that can look like a kind of friendship (though obviously not a friendship of equals).  It can be difficult to think and talk about “contact time” or “rhythm” in friendship without ultimately talking about some kind of commitment, be it spoken or unspoken.  This can look like a weekly meal or a commitment to see one new movie a month or even a seat at an event or meeting.  One could call this the frequency of lives.

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The second frequency of friendship has to do with sharing a similar view of the world and how best to move through it.  You get a sense of this when C. S. Lewis speaks in The Four Loves of “the moment two men are friends [because] they have in some degree drawn apart together from the herd.”  Unlike lovers, Lewis asserts, friends are “side by side, absorbed in some common interest.”  This common interest, regardless of how simple or complex, points to a way of seeing the world, of ordering some kind of importance with relation to things.   Like Lewis, Radner points to the ancient Greeks for a sense of this particular frequency of friendship.  Aristotle, Radner asserts, saw a particularly good kind of friendship as “liking someone because of their good character” where “each partner seeks the welfare of the other based on the same character and values.”  Friends are “equals” then when these friends experience a “growing and sharing in common virtue.”  This, Radner reminds the reader, stands opposed to a strictly utilitarian approach to friendship.  This particular frequency of friendship is something like what Alan Jacobs argues in How to Think: that a certain kind of camaraderie can come from believing the same things, but a different and more generative connection is made with those who think in the same way (even if they disagree about the specifics).  So whether in thinking or growing in virtue or simply sharing a common but personal interest, this frequency hints at the sharing of common values and perspectives, a common way of understanding and engaging the world.  This could be called the frequency of loves.

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All of this is meaningless, I suppose, for those who don’t have to think much about friendship (and I have to assume that those people do exist).  But for those of us who, for whatever reason, find ourselves trying to make sense of life in light of the Great Transition or simply in what my college political science professor called the vicissitudes of life and who are looking for whatever handle we can find in a constantly shifting relational landscape, maybe this is something (if only an amateur recasting of things said more eloquently by others).

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I do think that for those Christian communities who speak of doing “life together,” these two frequencies have to come into play, even if they overlap infrequently.  I would also argue that at some point, the frequency of loves has to form the frequencies of lives intentionally.  This is especially true since Christians believe that Jesus is just as much “the Way” as He is the Truth and the Life.

(image from youtube.com)

Last week I spent a number of posts attempting to “lay some groundwork” for thinking about the life of the single adult in the Christian church using the lens of Ephraim Radner’s A Time to Keep.  Now that I’m “ready” to talk specifics about friendship, I feel  like Frodo in Mount Doom: I’m reticent to drop the Ring and get on with things.  But friendship can be a slow climb against falling rocks in our contemporary culture, so one should talk about it with care (particularly when addressing the single/married dynamic, which can be rife with implications of guilt and frustration).

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One “falling rock” that Radner addresses is how friendship has been one of the key victims of the Great Transition (which means it’s also probably a significant cure for what ails us).  Whether its Bowling Alone or the current Psychology Today cover story on our lonely culture, something is off in our culture when it comes to relationships and belonging in general.    From A Time to Keep:

Recovering the special task of singleness is important in our own day because of the way that creaturely diversity has been subverted through Western society’s radical reordering of friendship itself  . . . Friendships have, in fact, been starkly severed from their traditional place in the creaturely, and hence sexual, lives of persons, in the sense of being essential and ongoing aspects of human flourishing.  In contemporary Western societies, friendships are often ranged over and against sexuality, the latter something that is acted out constantly, profligately, cheaply, and hungrily, tied to fleeting moments and the spilling of money; the former, hard, uncertain, precious, regretted.

Radner points to things like the “bromance” or the necessary role of friends in finding either actual love or a farcical fulfilling of lust (with friendship all-but-discarded in the end).  Which is not to say that the two are mutually exclusive (that married people and single people can’t be friends).   It should challenge us to ask questions about the frequencies of friendship (something I’ll get to in a later post) and how friendship can exist (and hopefully thrive) in a world full of more immediate and seemingly important relational needs.  It reminds me of a scene from How I Met Your Mother where Lily joins Ted and Marshall on a road trip, which is something that Ted and Marshall are quite known for.  Add Lily into the mix and everything changes, as if both realities couldn’t somehow co-exist.

The weird reality concerning the perceived flippancy of friendship and the seriousness of romantic love are the result of a culture that maybe has lost a “true north” sense for either kind of relationship.  Or maybe we just see this dynamic as an acceptable loss.

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The Great Transition has radically frustrated the slow climb of friendship in a second way.  Radner asserts:

Geographic mobility has crucially subverted friendship, repeatedly separating individuals at various points in generational growth; but so has the breakdown of long-term family cohabitation.  The relation between the two is interesting but well-developed in human history: men and women’s friendships have historically been linked to the networks of stable families and shared needs of children and work.

You can get a sense of this in how people talk about their groups of friends (myself included).  Childhood, high school, and college friends can be based on both time and location, depending on how much one has moved around.  You might work somewhere a good distance away from home (with an easy commute thanks to the interstate).  The same can be true for church friends, particularly with the rise of larger, pseudo-mega churches.  There are also “real life” and “online” friendships in contemporary culture.

One could argue that technology has both frayed and strengthened the ties that bind.  Frayed them by giving us the mobility.  Strengthened them by giving us communication opportunities that (some see as) keeping people closer together than ever.  Beyond that, it helps us find “online” communities to make up for what might be “missing” in day-to-day activities.  Even still, every few months there seems to another voice added to the chorus saying that social media is actually making us lonelier.

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Beyond these two concerns, I would add a third “falling rock” to the mix: people and families with wide orbits and overly-busy centers.  A great deal of overlap exists between the two, but I’d like to look at each briefly.

I remember being younger and having different groups of friends that would rarely, if ever, overlap.  In fact, I can remember a handful of times where different circles met, and it was kind of awkward.  That’s because each group often has its own language and norms.  Many people today have very wide circles of relationships.  I think of them like planetary orbits, really.  For some families, perhaps those with newborns, the orbit is pretty small for practical reasons.  For some with larger “orbits,” though, it might take a month to “get around” to seeing everyone on their unspoken lists.  I remember well an older friend of mine who often scheduled things like coffee a month out.  On one level, it felt like a great privilege to “make the list.”  At the same time, such distance between conversations looks more like reporting more than a friendly relationship.

At the same time, and this is particularly true of families with children, the difficulty can look more like having overly-busy “centers”.  This isn’t so much about relationships as it is about responsibilities, which makes it less like orbits at a distance and more like  immediate gravity.  This is the “household economy” consisting of the demands made on spouses and children, whether its music lessons or church committee responsibilities, grocery shopping or simply trying to carve out some time so the family can be a family (and who can argue with that?).    The struggle of the overly-busy center (to use another analogy) is like a sturdy cell wall, where nothing outside of what helps the plant survive gets through.  The temptation here (and perhaps with the wide orbit scenario) is to take a “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” mentality, which could be more damaging in the long run.

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Two final-for-now quotes from Radner.

First: “Friendships that are solely utilitarian or pleasure giving, by contrast [to Aristotle’s insistence that friendship be an exercise in virtue], are ultimately perverted.”  This is a particular danger for our very utilitarian culture.

Second: “friendship’s cultivation is indeed a “responsibility” to be taken up, pursued, ordered, and cultivated.”

More on both of these things later.

Yesterday I made some headway in articulating some thoughts about church and community through the lens of Ephraim Radner’s A Time to Keep (and that the culmination of some sporadic posts over the last month or so).  At the root is something about connection and community and what that looks like in our contemporary context, particularly for a single guy.

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Every now and then, leaders at my church like to bring out Scot McKnight’s A Fellowship of Differents, particularly McKnight’s definition of love as a rugged commitment to be with and for another person unto godliness.  Like any good parishioner, I bought a digital copy of the book so I could get a better sense of what McKnight was trying to say.  What I found, at the beginning of the book, was something else equally interesting: the question of what category of person might be “invisible” members of the church.  That, of course, could be parsed in multiple ways along multiple metrics and identity lines.  On a political level, this is at the root of what has come to be known as identity politics.  In most churches today, definitely those on the larger end, few if any “traditional” groups are invisible: infants, children, youth, young adults, singles, married couples, the divorced, the widowed, empty nesters, senior adults all seem to get their niche.  I have, in times past, been a beneficiary of these distinctions and understand why many churches find them beneficial at best and necessary at worst.  If nothing else, the basic spine of these groupings lines up with the “arc of life” articulated by Radner in A Time to Keep.  Surely, at least in an “arc of life” sense, there are no “invisibles.”

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Radner rightly asserts that for most people throughout history, traversing the “arc of life” involves family.  We are born into one.  With marriage we bear others into a new one.  Much is found and lost and found again during the traversal, but the journey-with-family is something common to most people.  With the “Great Transition,” that journey has gotten somewhat scrambled (look for any number of statistics concerning marriage, children, and singleness).  And whether they realize it or not, most Christian churches have made the task of restoring and maintaining the vehicle of marriage and family for traversing the arc of life primary (and rightly so, on some level).  The life of the family, or the life of families, by default becomes the point of “parish life.” What that does, though, is put unmarried people in a particularly interesting (and often difficult) place.  On some deep level, any single not part of a “singles ministry” could be “the invisible” in any given church culture, only visible when someone is needed to complete a task or fill a necessary-but-empty slot in the program.  Some classic Caedmon’s lyrics come to mind:

I fear maybe this is all just a game
And our friends and our families all play
To harness the young
And give some comfort to the old

And so we throw our lots in for those who don’t know how to throw theirs in for us.  We struggle to refrain from becoming a version of the older brother in the parable, trying to maintain a sense of delight when all we sense is duty.    We submit to the authority of leaders who do not know how to walk with us, all the while believing that the proclamation and implications of the Gospel are for all people, even if we only get what feels like the scraps.  Or we walk away with the unspoken understanding that the indivisibility of the church relies too much on the invisibility of some.

The dark comedy of all this for me is that I really don’t want my singleness to be the most important thing about me.  It is a significant lens, but it isn’t everything.  “You can always ‘fit in the church’ in other ways,” someone might say.  But at some point it can and should be addressed.  Language and time have to be either found or made to talk about it so that it can, then, be put in its proper place.

It is an act of grace, then, that Radner dedicates one chapter of A Time to Keep to the question of “the vocation of singleness.”  And what he has to say is both simple and profound (and quite honestly, life-giving).  But, as with the book in general (and this post specifically), it takes Radner some time to get to the good stuff.

(image from amazon.com)