Space Enough, and Time

Over the last few weeks, I’ve tried to articulate some thoughts about church and community.   I started by looking at some quotes from authors like Walker Percy and C. S. Lewis.  Eventually I landed on and spent some time with Ephraim Radner, particularly his work in A Time to Keep on single adults in church.  And while there is much more to say about the topic, I thought I’d try to bring some kind of conclusion together, if only for the time being.  I’d like to do that through the images of gift and economy.

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The simple fact is that people in community are ultimately economic beings.  Families have it (each member with a particular task or chore based on any of a number of factors).  Churches have it (each member takes on some particular role based on gifts, talents, calling, or need).  And workplaces have it (where particular places are filled through the hiring process).  And so we are utilitarian instrumentalists: we work together for the greater good, all too often reducing one another to function.  But when we function properly, the community is considered healthy.

But what should be done with those who do not fit this community-as-economy reality?  And in a church culture where the needs always outnumber the members, how do we maintain some sense of community that is not predominately utilitarian or instrumentalist?  And what do we do when, because of our overuse of people as resources, we find that the economy is no longer viable (and perhaps then realize that the instrumentalized economy is not the point of it all)?  Don’t get me wrong: the biblical story is full of people being called to take up responsible roles in the larger body, to work as a form of contribution.  But that is not the only, or even dominant, image that Jesus and the New Testament writers give for the church.  And what hope is there for the “seeker” when so much of the economy is based on using those who have “found” and thus in some kind of settled disposition?

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One thing I really liked about Radner’s articulation of the single celibate in church life is that they have something unique-to-them to “bring to the table” that comes from their own experience of “naming and wandering.”  But that doesn’t seem to be the way things work in a church community.  Sure, you can add a little bit of personal flavor to the way you teach your Sunday school class, but that’s about all the variety that many churches can handle.  And then, when you do, you can imagine many church members nodding their heads and saying, “There goes old so-and-so, doing what they always do.  Why can’t they just try and fit in a little better?”

Christians in community ought not have to choose between the gift and the economy.  Just because a single adult doesn’t bring a spouse or child into the worship service doesn’t mean that they enter the sanctuary empty handed.  The challenge, perhaps, is to help them see the significance of what they bring with them, even if it’s more abstract and awkward.  And while the time must come for them to reach into the community and “take their place,” that should be done with a sense that singles need just as much caring for as everyone else in the congregation, because their load is heavy, too.

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Talking about such things without sounding like a whiner is difficult.  For those that see the church program as synonymous with “the kingdom” and the work of God, anyone who calls that program into question looks like a rebel or malcontent.  To consider someone stingy because they do not give what we ask (even though they have a real gift needing to be shared) is presumptuous. To ask singles to fend for themselves while unquestionably towing a party line that praises the economy over the gift is spiritually dangerous for everyone involved.  That we are not wise enough to know what to do about such matters will hurt us all in the long run.

One could easily assume, based on my reflections over the last couple of weeks, that the plight of the single, celibate adult is the bulk of Ephraim Radner’s point in A Time to Keep.  That couldn’t be farther from the truth.  What Radner does well is follow the thread of the single adult making sense of faith in light of the Great Transition for a chapter or two in a way that treats the body of Christ with a dignity not often found in discussions of church culture.  And so, while the thread of the single adult remains as the book comes to a close, the real thrust if things is on the place of “working and eating” in the context of church community.

It turns out that there’s a lot at stake in eating.

One eats in order to survive; one eats together for the same reason and out of the same dynamic . . . food is our life in the material fashion . . . Hence, food marks the first and basic level at which societies engage in self-repair, and it is just where churches have most frequently expressed their ministries: soup kitchens, basement meals, celebrations, and, of course, particular liturgical actions.

That last phrase, of course, is a strong arrow point in the direction of the Lord’s Supper.  Radner brings the Johannine recounting of the Last Supper into play in a way that can help us understand how language brings out the role of food in community.

In the same way, “I have called you friends,” says Jesus to the disciples at the Last Supper (John 15:5).  The language of friendship here is aimed at just this creaturely gathering at the meal.  Among the most potent terms of friendship are those related to sharing bread, as in Psalm 43:9, quoted by Jesus in John 13:18: love “betrayed” most deeply is the love of one with whom bread has been broken.  It is what in English we call a “companion,” or literally, “one with whom we share bread.”  Companions are common bread eaters.  Hence the eucharistic meal moves from the disciples back to the common table, to a community, to married life, to family; it stretches back to genealogy, to generation, to survival.  And all of these are gathered into the probative reach of friendship in Christ.  This is our creaturehood as it is given, fallen and otherwise.  This life we live as just these creatures is how God does what God does and is God.  For “this is my body, given for you . . . .”

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In the end, for Radner, both working and eating are ways of being mindful of the Psalmist’s request: teach us to count our days so that we can apply our hearts to wisdom (Ps. 90:12).  And eating brings both work and friendship together.

If anything, that’s been one of the odd tensions of getting older and finding community rooted in both working and eating.  When I was younger, I think the friends and I had the eating part down quite well.  And there was enough overlap with daily life that the two felt connected (even if we weren’t always “doing ministry” together).  There was a healthy personalization of work because of the fellowship around the table.  Now, farther down the road, there’s lots of working and still some eating, but the overlap feels less.  Sometimes, in what are really blessed moments for me, I get to sit around the table with others and there’s a real sense of “in things together” that still catches me by surprise.  Other times, there is eating for the sake of the program, a kind of instrumentalization of fellowship that can be okay in the short term but dangerous in the long.  What Radner does as he brings A Time to Keep to a close is he rightly elevates these seemingly mundane things to remind us of the high and holy stakes of our daily lives together.

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I think I’ve got one final post to bring up in the vein of single adults, the church, and the place of friendship and work in the overlap.  More on that tomorrow.

In a posthumous collection of his writings titled Spiritual Formation, Henri Nouwen wrote of how we perceive people more often as characters than as individuals.  To see others as characters is ultimately to see them as people “to use as we need or want.”  Nouwen build off that with something easily connected to the role of the single and celibate adult in the church:

A teacher is more than a teacher, and computer technicians and auto mechanics are more than their functions.  A person is more than his or her character or figure.  If you relate to me only as someone who can do something for you or whom you can use for your own purposes, then I am not going to show my best self to you.  I am going to become defensive, suspicious, a little careful, and I may hide my true feelings and opinions.

As I read that one morning during spring break, I found a paragraph that helped me make sense of the difficulty that I have being a single and celibate adult trying to be a part of community where a certain kind of practicality and function dominate the conversation.  And I have to confess to being guilty of this approach myself.  It is a dark and diminished version, I think, of what Ephraim Radner asserts about single adults in the life of the church in A Time to Keep.

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After a lengthy discussion of friendship in general and friendship through the lens of the single person in particular, Radner moves on to the topic of work and the single adult.  There’s a good chance, of course, that spotting a single adult working in the church means finding someone working hard to fill in the gaps that can’t be met by those who are married with children.  Earlier in my time at one church, I found myself at various times teaching Sunday school, serving as a greeter, serving on personnel committee, serving on a pastor search committee, serving on the discipleship committee, and doing it mostly without any immediate peer group.  Such things are a joy and an honor to do, don’t get me wrong.  But such activities are matters of meeting program and institutional needs, which can often leave people in a weird state when the momentum dies.

Radner asserts that “the central element of our calling as creatures is to engage in the growth of affection: to love God and neighbor.”  Most Christians can connect those two things with committee work in something less than three easy moves.  “Friendship,” Radner continues, “is rightly seen as the most crystallized form of affection, such that “friendship with God” itself became a vision of redemption in writers like Irenaeus and long after.”  This friendship, when coupled with the freedom the single adult experiences, allows the single adult to “bring gifts of particularity” to the broader church community that the dynamics of marriage and family life might not allow.  Radner concludes: “friendship’s deeper impulse and movement is the discovery of delight.  The single person’s gift, as single rather than married, is epitomized in bringing friendship into the kids of the generative (family-based) community.”  Radner sees this happening primarily through means of “working and eating.”

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With working, Radner connects the task of the single adult to the task of Adam in the Garden prior to Eve.

In the end, though, it is praise that marks the growth of such singling out of things, through their naming.  If our movement toward such naming is blocked, overlooked, lost, or forgotten, then always there must be those who are caught in the woods alone, for a period, in a certain solitude, where they begin to hear the clamor of the world, otherwise lost in the trudging, or sometimes frantic reactivity of survival.  The work of the single person is to give names to creatures that God has made. Jesus walks alone, on order to know the name of every sheep that is his (Matt. 18:12; John 10:3).

From there, Radner has much to say about work.  He sees it, of course, as something affected by the Great Transition, as something that too often leads to a kind of death and not a particular kind of life.  The important thing to note, at least for me, is that he does not define the work of the single adult in community life as simply meeting the needs of a particular program.  To call it something like naming is to call everyone in the church community to something better (and something quite different from what seems to be the norm for many churches).  It is more than seeing them as characters who simply need to get “plugged in” in a way that is really a kind of institutional “plugging of a leak.” If that’s all it is, and there is evidence of that kind of reality over the long haul, then maybe that particular ship should sink.

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As I finish this late Tuesday night, I’m thinking I’ve got two more posts to work out using Radner’s A Time to Keep: one about eating and the other a kind of summary-challenge for myself as much as for anyone else (the working titles are “What You Bring to the Table” and “The Dangers of Rejecting Gifts”).  From there I’d like to spend a little more time with Nouwen, particularly his work on spiritual direction and formation.  By then the next batch of new episodes of The Flash should have some previews for me to post, too.

It was Frederick Buechner who first introduced me to the idea that theology is, on some level, always autobiographical.  This is not to dismiss the orthodox body of truth at all but to emphasize the fact that theological truth refracted through the individual brings out something significant and particular to the mix.

So what of a theology of the single adult and the church?  Over the last few weeks I’ve tried to work through some of Ephraim Radner’s thoughts on the “vocation of singleness” from A Time to Keep, his survey of “theology, mortality, and the shape of human life.”  I would like to “wrap up’ (not really possible) his thoughts on friendship as something particular to singles before looking at his thoughts on work.

I mention the autobiographical nature of theology because my thoughts on friendship have taken on a different nuance now that I’m a little older and further along what Radner calls “the arc of life.”  As blessed as I have been during my time in Honolulu (and before that in Texas and Tennessee), the pursuit of lasting friendship has been a real struggle.  Part of that has been an expectation issue.  The greater part of it, though, has been an “ordering” issue . . . an “everything in its place” disposition that holds on loosely while holding on properly.

For me, a big part of the struggle has been the battle between the concrete and the abstract.  There has been an almost insurmountable growth of a kind of “intangibility” to my life the older I’ve gotten as a single adult.  It’s a kind of “out of sight, out of mind” reality that things like social media only amplifies for me (there’s that weird prostitution of promotion that can come from posting about your life . . . and yet it also makes you a little more real to those you love far and wide).  The “equal and opposite reaction” to this reality is what blogger Eve Tushnet has called an “isolation” that leads to “the slow crafting and hardening of a private world.”  It can be a kind of double damnation (and with no language to speak your way out of it).

So what role, if any, can friendship for and with the single adult play in this kind of abstract-but-hardened privacy?  Well, Radner asserts that “the reality of friendship is one that provides a ground for other relations; it is not only a parallel or alternative to these relations.”  He asserts that “the affective aspect of friendship—love—is divinely significant in its own right” and that, as such, has possibilities for the cure that ails us when it comes to our understanding of relationships of all kinds during and after the Great Transition.  He goes on to say that

friendship’s cultivation is indeed a “responsibility” to be taken up, pursued, ordered, and cultivated.  From the pastoral side of things, we can assuredly say that the church must teach people how to be friends, because it is a significant aspect of every relationship.

It is the particularity of the single adult that results from the blessing-and-curse individuality that makes friendship with singles significant for the church, even if he calls the integration of the single into church life “a grating but also a formative process.”  Radner adds:

Friendships constantly press against these edges of distinctions, and the resistance all of us experience in this is often the hardest to bear within the communal dynamics of genealogy—families, cooperatives, politics.  The sexually partnered existence that constitutes marriage and moves into family quickly subsumes, and often avoids, this grating character, except when the challenges of mortality slink through the cracks.  The single person here is the sound of every person’s movement across the ground and needs to be heard and in any case eventually will be.  It is hard to remember one’s spouse’s individuality.  But we must, but this is the impulse of our affection.  Yet creaturely existence often involves the juggling, lost balance, and dropping of affection necessarily linked with generation, so that friendship itself loses its way within the community of generative existence—but for its constant kindling and challenge by single persons through the press of their friendships within the unconscious flow and forgetfulness of ordered community.

Friendships are cultivated with all the care and dangerous fragility of any sustenance agriculture.  There is the careful time of discerning and planting—and here wisdom and experience can bring only success—and not a little luck.  There is the giving over of oneself in loyalty, the breaking up by betrayal, the hard and welcome corrections and growth, the difficult learning and respecting of limits as in all things, and long-standing reaping and replenishing.  Friendship is a life’s work.  It can, furthermore, be deformed, as with many friendships we know that become privatized and possessive, tyrannical and oppressive. So too, of course, can the “collective” demands of survival itself.  The friendship, however, that is marked by whatever confluence of location, shared acts, doing, and attention will ever uncover more and more of “just this person” in “just this time and place.”

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Near the end of his articulation of friendship as part of the single person’s vocation, Radner asserts that “friendships are for the sake of others, however.  Thus, the friendships of single people are to be cultivated, protected, honored, and then brought in to the whole, the ordered life of families, wherein others may learn from them.”

Reading this, one would be led to think that friendship with singles is a big deal.  But it’s a difficult or tricky thing, which Radner wisely points out.  That wisdom and experience are somehow necessary seems a bit absurd, as most of us think that friendships probably just happen (as that is often our experience in certain social settings like school).  But he’s right, correct in a way that I can see now that I’m farther down the road.  Reading this, it makes more sense why married people find it easier to be friends with other marrieds: the particularity of the individual is subsumed enough so that maybe not that much is asked.  But a single with all of that time and attention to give?  That can be a total minefield.

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I find myself asking some questions of friendship and this line of thinking.

1. Why does it seem like single people have a difficult time befriending one another?
2. Why does it seem like Jesus just isn’t enough for a basis in Christian friendship (what I call a “brothers-in-crisis vs. a brothers-in-Christ mentality”)?
3. What do you do with technology that helps make friendship more of a possibility while also producing more potential pitfalls?
4. How can people grow in friendship when there seem to be so few living examples of healthy friendship with older people?
5. How do you nurture friendship well in a world that is post-Great Transition?

I think the concept of “rightly ordered” is vital to having a healthy concept and practice of friendship.  I think that many of us who have been around for a while and who have a “concrete private world” that leaves us in a place of abstraction, we wonder where, if anywhere, we actually belong.  The conversation requires space enough and time to have it out.  Most people, I fear, don’t have enough of either.

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Okay.  Next time it’s all about work and the single adult in the context of the church community.

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.