Author Archives: Sarah and Lindsey

Limitations of Language and the Challenge of Being Human

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Figuring out how to be a human is surprisingly difficult at times. Our lives are marked by seasons of discovery and inventiveness as we journey through our lifespans. There is no telling how our lives will change, especially if somewhere along the way we commit ourselves to following Christ. As St. Irenaeus once said, “The glory of God is man fully alive.” As Christians, we find ourselves in places where we strive to unite ourselves fully to Christ, discover who God created us to be, and do the things God would have us to do during our earthly pilgrimages. God, in infinite majesty and greatness, has crafted every single human being as a unique person.

Only God can know the full depths of what it means for a specific person to become fully alive. God alone is the Creator. God, in mercy, has created humans to be relational entities where we do our best to walk alongside one another while we follow Christ. To say that being a human is necessarily mysterious concedes that God alone has full knowledge of what this means exactly.

The mystery of the human person has been present since creation. Genesis 1 establishes that all people have been created in the image of God where gender, sexuality, our relationships with other humans, and our relationships with all of creation are part of the mystery of being human:

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” And God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the heavens and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.” And it was so.

Entire libraries could be filled with writings by humans puzzling through the nature of this narrative in Genesis. Becoming the person God has created one to be is the lifelong task of every Christian where each person must figure out how to be faithful within his or her uniquely individual set of circumstances.

There is potential for transformation every time a person enters his or her prayer corner to encounter God. Solitude has an important place in our spiritual journey. In solitude, God can meet us in our most vulnerable places and open to us new vistas of possibility. God meets us in solitude to convict us, to console us, to encourage us, to comfort us, and to guide us. God often enters into our lives when we least expect it because God, in wisdom, deems it to be the proper time.

Sharing with other people what God reveals to us in solitude can be a challenging process, especially amid cultural expectations that place particular ways of being as higher than others. Cultural tropes abound. Everyone should be married and have children. Doctors and lawyers have the most respectable professions. If you have the capability to earn a lot of money, then you’re selling yourself short if you work at a lower paying job. We seek God’s voice amid the cultural clamor that cries loudly, “Walk this way!”

There are many writers on the internet who decry the cultural clamor around gender and sexuality. We have argued that it’s critically important for every person to have space to discern his or her specific vocation. Others believe that the cultural clamor exists because the world has been remade by people who describe themselves using LGBTQ language. Recently, one has written in reference to us and our blog:

They consciously have chosen not to refer to themselves as a “chaste lesbian couple” because only one of them views herself as a lesbian. The other member of the couple hasn’t decided yet what her sexual identity is. She seems to believe that “Choosing A Letter Is Complicated.”

The author of this piece takes Lindsey’s unwillingness to associate with a specific letter of the LGBT alphabet as a signal that Lindsey hasn’t made a decision about sexual identity and is confused. The author operates under the assumption that LGBT people are seeking to adorn themselves which whatever en vogue description feels right. However, we need to consider the purpose of language. People use language in an effort to communicate something about our own experiences. Language about being human is necessarily limited because we are all scratching at the surface of profound mystery. In solitude, God has shown Lindsey how different facets of who Lindsey is work together in Lindsey’s celibate vocation. Some facets Lindsey chooses to discuss publicly while other facets Lindsey chooses to discuss privately with close friends and Lindsey’s spiritual director. Discerning how to best communicate one’s experience of sexuality and gender, and finding that a complicated task, is not the same as shopping at a boutique. Sexuality and gender are a part of the mystery of being human; we’re not going to have perfect language to communicate what God is showing us about ourselves at all times.

God also has a way of challenging Christians to swim against various cultural currents. We both work as teachers and have encountered plenty of people who believe that “Those who can’t do, teach.” If one is part of a cultural context where a teaching career is viewed as a consolation prize for completing university while being incapable of becoming a doctor, lawyer, or engineer, teachers are bound to find ourselves on the receiving end of negative and ignorant comments from others based upon what broader society assumes about the profession. It doesn’t matter how much one excels at teaching or senses a deep and abiding sense of peace when pursuing a teaching vocation: there will always be people who are absolutely convinced that teaching is a second-rate career and will continue to make erroneous statements about teachers as a whole. Similarly, in conservative Christian traditions, there will always be people who prefer to avoid acknowledging the mysteriousness of human sexuality and insist that nothing good can possibly come from using language other than “man” and “woman” to discuss the complex issue of sexual orientation. Just as it is easier to dismiss teachers as humans of lesser intelligence than it is to have a real conversation about the vocation of teaching, it’s easier to write off celibate Christians who use LGBT language than to consider the possibility that none of us know as much about God’s design as we would like to think we do. It’s also easier to take cheap shots at a person who stumbles over the limitations of language than to make an honest attempt at journeying alongside that person.

Every Christian is a work in progress. All of us are doing our best to discern who and what God is calling us to be, and each of us has different needs as we walk with Christ each day and work out our salvation. Considering that nobody walking this earth today is God, said journey ought to be undertaken with patience, humility, and charity toward others, which necessarily includes willingness to extend grace in conversation. The two of us are not perfect that this. We pray about it, and we work on it day by day. Our hope is that in time, the tenor of conversation about LGBT language will change for the better. But that can only happen if every person involved becomes willing to admit that being human is complicated, and that none of us will have God or ourselves figured out in this lifetime.

Comment Policy: Please remember that we, and all others commenting on this blog, are people. Practice kindness. Practice generosity. Practice asking questions. Practice showing love. Practice being human. If your comment is rude, it will be deleted. If you are constantly negative, argumentative, or bullish, you will not be able to comment anymore. We are the sole moderators of the combox.

Lent, a Time of Pilgrimage

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Today, many Christians around the world are marking the start of Lent by observing Ash Wednesday. Ash Wednesday is Western in its liturgical origins. Eastern rite Christians start Lent by observing Forgiveness Sunday. No matter your liturgical heritage, Lent is a time of pilgrimage.

Every year, we approach Lent by considering what it means for us to journey towards Easter. Where are we now? Where might God be calling us next? Is Lent this year a time of moving or a time of staying still? No two Lenten seasons are ever the same. Yet, the two of us always experience Lent as a fertile time for spiritual growth.

For us, Lent is about being in a community where we prepare ourselves to encounter Easter. We look for ways to strengthen our shared spiritual life and dive more deeply into a community’s spiritual life. Lent has a rhythm of prayer, fasting, and alms giving. We discuss how we want to pray together and whether we want to commit to attending additional church services during the Lenten season. We love how Lent affords us more opportunities to gather with our broader church family. Living and eating together means that we typically take on the same fasting rule as much as we are able. Additionally, our church observes a collective fasting rule for when we eat together. We’ve belonged to many churches that take time to eat together during Lent, and we cherish how eating food together creates atmospheres of fellowship. Alms giving means different things to various people. Typically we choose to take on elements of shared service together.

Lent is also a time where we pray prayers that almost seem too big to pray at other times of year. We are preparing to encounter Christ in his passion, death, and resurrection. Who can predict what God will do? We pray for the grace to see our own sinfulness clearly, to align our lives more fully with how God intends us to live, and to proclaim the good news of Christ joyously. The rhythm of Lent gives us time and space to encounter God glorified while simultaneously searching our hearts.

This year, we find ourselves approaching Lent feeling a bit overwhelmed by possibilities. We have committed to attending a new local parish. We have adopted an adorable chocolate lab, Gemma, in hopes of training her to be a balance dog for Sarah. We are sitting on a mountain of prayer requests known fully by God alone. And we’re listening, hoping, and pleading to see what comes next. Lent has arrived once again. Where will we be when we proclaim the joy of the Resurrection?

Lent has many of those “thin places” where God seems quicker to act than we could possibly imagine. While it is a season of penance and acknowledgement of our mortality, it is also a season that brings excitement in unusual ways. We enter into Lent not knowing what bits of mystery God will help us to see more clearly. Even when neither of us expects it, we learn that God enters into our lives quietly and softly. Undertaking our Lenten efforts in community means that we open ourselves to see other people and ourselves in new light. We find that we’re more ready to listen to other people’s spiritual journeys and perhaps even take on a spiritual discipline that first strikes as as the antithesis of our spirituality. God can use the Lenten season to teach us lessons that we didn’t even know we needed to learn. Our Lenten efforts can help us leave time behind and tread upon holy ground. Lent is a time where communal and personal practices blur. One mark of a good Lent is when everyone in the community can point to specific places of personal spiritual growth.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on the Lenten pilgrimage. No matter what Lent looks like for you this specific season, we’re happy to pray for you. May Christ go with you, guiding and directing your steps.

Comment Policy: Please remember that we, and all others commenting on this blog, are people. Practice kindness. Practice generosity. Practice asking questions. Practice showing love. Practice being human. If your comment is rude, it will be deleted. If you are constantly negative, argumentative, or bullish, you will not be able to comment anymore. We are the sole moderators of the combox.

Can radical hospitality have limitations?

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A reflection by Sarah

Radical hospitality seems to be a hallmark of celibate communities (e.g. monasteries). Every celibate community we have visited has guest housing. (Perhaps that’s one of the reasons why we could visit them….. they’re committed to hospitality.) For us, in our home, the practice of radical hospitality means always being willing to host a guest. Whether the guest stays overnight in our apartment, joins us for a meal, or travels with us for a ride home, the guest is a welcome person. When we meet new people, we prayerfully consider how we might be some conduit of blessing for them. So far, God’s been pretty awesome to show up in our limited efforts.

That’s a quote from one of our earliest blog posts in which we made an initial attempt at defining celibacy as a vocation. If you’ve been following our posts for a while now, you’ve probably seen that our understanding of celibacy and its various components has evolved significantly within the past year. I hope that this growth never stops, and I’m grateful to be learning more and more about what God is calling me to as time goes on. I’m especially grateful that God has been showing Lindsey and me new ways that we can extend hospitality to others.

Today, I’m writing not because of anything bold or profound that I’ve discovered, but instead because of confusion and conviction. Over the past several weeks, I’ve been thinking a lot about certain people who used to be part of my life but are no longer. More specifically, I’m thinking of family members, former friends, and acquaintances who are not in my life at present because I have chosen to remove them from my life. Several examples come to mind. There’s a family member who misinterpreted something I said on Facebook, unfriended me, and sent a long and dramatic letter in the same envelope as my birthday card to explain her decision. When I confronted her about this, she lashed out and neither of us has spoken to the other since. There’s an ex-girlfriend who slept around with a variety of people in two different cities while we were together, who has made a habit of contacting me once every few months to throw an insult or accusation my way. There’s a man I haven’t seen or heard from in years — my high school boyfriend, who I’m sure has no interest in ever hearing from me again because of the emotional hurt both of us inflicted upon each other when we were younger and far less mature.  There’s the friend from college whom I have avoided intentionally since graduation because of her insistence every time we interacted that I “just don’t have enough faith” that God could make me straight. There’s the girl from my second grade class whom I lashed out at for excluding me from a jump rope game at recess. I have a clear memory of shouting at her, “I’m glad you’re moving to a new school next year! I don’t like you anyway!”

If I truly believe that hospitality is part of the Christian vocation and that radical hospitality is  a basic building block of a celibate Christian way of life, how am I to live that value in interactions with people whose company I enjoy about as much as a root canal? What about people who have been out of my life for varying lengths of time not because they have chosen to be, but because I have chosen to keep them away from me? I’m torn when it comes to these questions. I believe that sometimes, it is morally justifiable to cut people out of one’s life. In certain cases, not doing so results in decreased mental health and causes one to become an open target for manipulation, gaslighting, and other forms of emotionally, physically, or spiritually abusive behavior. At other times, the most Christian approach to dealing with a person one considers difficult is to keep trying, pray about it, and watch for signs that the situation might be improving. A couple of the personal situations I listed above are less difficult to discern than others. There’s almost nothing I can do to make amends to my second grade classmate. Her name is an incredibly common one, and it doesn’t seem reasonable that God would be asking me to send an apology message over Facebook to all 3,000 women who have that name. Her name might not even be the same as it was 1991. It seems a bit more reasonable that God might be asking me to get back in touch with Mr. High School Sweetheart to say, “I’m sorry that I hurt you.” But what about the instances in which my anger toward a person is justifiable, and while I bear him or her no ill will I have determined that it is best if we do not interact with each other?

What does it mean to live radical hospitality with respect to someone I recognize as an image of God, but still see as a toxic person? Really, I have no idea. Is it even possible to live radical hospitality while knowing full well that there are people I would never allow into my apartment under any circumstance? Am I just kidding myself when I say that I desire to live a radically hospitable way of life if, deep down, I hope that God never sees fit for my ex-girlfriend to show up on my doorstep with a need for someone to show her hospitality? Should I be praying that God will soften my heart toward these people? But what if hardness of heart isn’t the problem and my lack of hospitality toward certain people is rooted in important concerns about safety? Or does it even matter what the root of my confusion is? How can radical hospitality be radical if it excludes even one person?

As with most dilemmas of this sort, it seems the best place to begin wrestling with these questions is the historic Christian tradition. How have celibates lived radical hospitality throughout the ages? What did it mean to them? Did those saints who lived celibate vocations ever place limitations on their extension of hospitality to others? As I’ve been mining the tradition for answers, I continue coming up confused. St. Brigid of Ireland was one of the most generous human beings I can think of, giving nearly every bit of food she had to the poor and welcoming travelers from everywhere into the monastery she founded. I wonder if there is anyone she would have turned away, or if she did would that decision be an example of her holiness? Or her human fallibility?

The Scriptures also have much to say about hospitality. 1 Peter 4:9 reminds us to be hospitable to each other without complaining. Hebrews 13:2 admonishes us not to fail in showing hospitality to unfamiliar people because “by this some have entertained angels without knowing it.” In Luke 14, Jesus tells one of his many parables to help us understand the kingdom of God, instructing us to show hospitality to the marginalized. Who am I to suggest that certain people should obviously be excluded from the very small banquet table in my own dining room?

I don’t have a conclusion for this post. This is an area of my spirituality where there is a clear need for growth. Maybe there is a fine line between being inhospitable to someone and holding oneself back out of healthy concern for the safety and wellbeing of both parties. Maybe there isn’t a line at all. I welcome any feedback. And as Lent approaches, please pray for me, a sinner.

Comment Policy: Please remember that we, and all others commenting on this blog, are people. Practice kindness. Practice generosity. Practice asking questions. Practice showing love. Practice being human. If your comment is rude, it will be deleted. If you are constantly negative, argumentative, or bullish, you will not be able to comment anymore. We are the sole moderators of the combox.

Life at the Edge of Schism

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A reflection by Lindsey

I’m blessed to know a large number of Christians passionate about loving LGBT people. While most of my friends in this category would feel comfortable describing themselves as LGBT, I also know many straight Christians who care about having thoughtful conversations as well as Christians who would rather say that they have struggled or currently struggle with same-sex attraction. Over the years, it’s been interesting to see what kind of topics tend to ignite spirited conversations. My Facebook feed is a great place for every sort of news item on the intersection between LGBT people and Evangelical churches. As it stands, I was well-positioned to see the opening of a new church called Blue Ocean Faith Ann Arbor.

Normally I wouldn’t be writing a reflection about the opening of a new church, but the story of Blue Ocean Faith Ann Arbor connects with a surprising number of places on my own spiritual journey. Ann Arbor first bleeped across my radar when I noticed then-Vineyard pastor Ken Wilson talking about a new approach to discussing LGBT people in the church. The blurb caught my attention, and I immediately reached out to Ken because I was so impressed to see a Vineyard pastor making a public declaration that LGBT people should be “welcomed and wanted” by local churches. We reviewed A Letter to My Congregation a few months later while I held my breath wondering what would happen in the Vineyard Church as a whole. The response of most Vineyard churches to questions of homosexuality has been to offer Living Waters programs, arguably one of the best known “healing” programs for people “struggling with unwanted same-sex attraction.” When I saw the announcement for Blue Ocean Faith Ann Arbor, I realized that something had happened. Indeed, Ken’s position on pastoral care for LGBT people had lead to another schism in the church.

As far as I can tell, the Ann Arbor story goes something like this: Ken Wilson had been talking and writing about responding to the shifting pastoral care needs of LGBT people in his congregation. Vineyard USA had tended towards silence on the issue. But then Ken published A Letter to My Congregation. Vineyard USA responded to the book with an 90-page position paper entitled “Pastoring LGBT Persons” that does, to its credit, use LGBT language and refers to LGBT people as persons. The Executive Team of Vineyard USA wrote a letter to the Ann Arbor Vineyard basically asking the church to agree publicly with the position paper in order to remain affiliated with the organization. What seems to have happened is that the Ann Arbor Vineyard now has 1 pastor and the newly established Blue Ocean Faith Ann Arbor has 2 pastors, ostensibly dividing the existing community. Additionally, there are other churches that have jettisoned their affiliation with the Vineyard movement in the wake of the position paper.

The Ann Arbor story hits closer to home than our readers might realize. While I’ve never lived in Michigan, I was a member of the Cambridge Vineyard Church when I attended university in Boston from 2001 to 2005. It’s safe to say that a lot has happened in the intervening decade, both in my life and in Evangelical Christianity. I learned so much about following Jesus and trying to do church with other people while at the Cambridge Vineyard. It was difficult to leave Boston after graduation, but God had other plans. I remember choosing the Cambridge Vineyard halfway through my freshman year because it looked like it was a place willing to have some honest conversations about homosexuality. (The other church I had been attending at that time viewed almost any problem as an opportunity to exorcise demons, which totally freaked me out.) I hadn’t even started coming out to myself, so I had a metric ton of questions. Being at the Cambridge Vineyard gave me reassurance that I could build my faith on the idea of trying to give my life fully to following Jesus. It certainly wasn’t a perfect church community. Needless to say, I was rather pleasantly surprised when I learned that Dave Schmelzer (who was the lead pastor of the Cambridge Vineyard during my time there) is actively working to help Blue Ocean Faith churches.

I’ve spent the last few days reading deeper into what happened at the Ann Arbor Vineyard. In many ways, it feels like a story that might have happened at any church I’ve attended. It’s way too easy to see myself in the story. Coming to faith in Evangelical communities, I’ve always wondered if my life had the potential to cause a scandal that would rock any group I was a part of. In college, I got involved in ex-gay ministries because I viewed my questions about sexual orientation and gender identity as a kind of ticking time-bomb that would eventually explode and destroy my faith community. It’s been an uphill battle to figure out how to think about my own queer experience as anything other than a liability.

So much of the challenge has been encountering church leaders who always felt the need to warn me about impropriety. Truth be told, I couldn’t imagine a person with lower risk factors than myself for living a “scandalous” lifestyle marked by partying and free-wheeling sexuality. When I was in high school, I was the kid who always buttoned the top button and tucked in my shirt. I had no interest in showing skin and still experience regular frustration with shopping for clothes that fit right. I don’t know what would have happened if I had been in an Evangelical church where the leaders committed to helping me follow Christ in an atmosphere of generous spaciousness around questions of who I loved and how to love these people best.

Much of my journey has involved carving out a sense of generous spaciousness for myself. I’ve made the argument time and time again, “Human beings have meaningful relationships with other human beings because that is a part of what it means to be created in the image of a triune God.” When I started to say that all humans have meaningful relationships with other people, I discovered ways to live in rich friendships where the word friend failed to capture the mystery of those relationships. Meeting Sarah showed me how things look and feel different when two people fall into an organic pattern of relating with one another. I’ve been blessed to have some wonderful spiritual directors who have been able to walk with me on my journey. When it comes to the particulars of my relationship with Sarah, we take joy in the fact that we’re figuring things out as we go along.

I don’t know how a compassionate Evangelical pastor would respond to my life with Sarah. I could see this hypothetical pastor asking himself or herself whether it made sense for me to marry Sarah even with our commitment to celibacy. After all, many Evangelical pastors I’ve met over the years would say that in marriage two people seek God’s blessing upon their relationship and formalize their promises to one another in the presence of witnesses. I could see this pastor asking Sarah and me a ton of questions about how we’ve struggled to navigate different facets of health care access. I wonder how this pastor would encourage the two of us to share our commonly held prayer requests with our faith community. I really have no idea how I would handle talking with a pastor who had these sorts of questions, but I do know that it’s an amazing surprise whenever a person decides to let me know that he or she cares about walking with me along my journey. But I wonder if this hypothetical pastor would feel like he or she was teetering at the edge of a schism for even asking thoughtful questions about our relationship and any pastoral needs that might arise when two people are in such a relationship.

Many Evangelical churches do not have any tradition of celibacy lived in community. I wonder if a compassionate Evangelical pastor would investigate different ways Christians have shared life together over the years. Would he or she stumble upon skete monasticism? If so, would this hypothetical pastor feel like he or she could help us discern our vocation as a community of two? Would this pastor perceive that his or her only option would be to pray with us on the condition that all three of us never said a word to anyone else?

Living in community creates some interesting tension points. I’m rather used to feeling like I live at the edge of schism. I’ve been counseled more times than I can imagine to live in silence, to keep quiet, and to stay out of sight lest the issue erupt. That’s part of what it means to be closeted. But I wonder how much longer people can fit into the closet when trying to provide faithful pastoral care to LGBT Christians. I’ve seen families who have gone into hiding with their loved ones. I’m sure there are many pastors who have taken the route of “I will pray with you, but please don’t tell anyone else that I’m journeying alongside of you.” The whole situation reminds me of playing “Sardines” as a youth group kid. After a while, the game turns comical because all of the youth are trying to hide in exactly the same spot. There’s no hiding anymore.

How is it that any, and seemingly all, conversations about providing pastoral care for LGBT people happen at the edge of schism? Lord have mercy.

Comment Policy: Please remember that we, and all others commenting on this blog, are people. Practice kindness. Practice generosity. Practice asking questions. Practice showing love. Practice being human. If your comment is rude, it will be deleted. If you are constantly negative, argumentative, or bullish, you will not be able to comment anymore. We are the sole moderators of the combox.

“Is sexual attraction a requirement for a relationship to be more than friendship?”

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Today, we are responding to another thoughtful question from a reader:

“I’ve seen the stuff written about celibate same-sex relationships recently and I have questions for you two. When people get married they are usually attracted to each other. When people are in relationships and aren’t married, aren’t they also attracted to each other? Why be in a relationship with someone if you aren’t sexually attracted? Wouldn’t that be more of a friendship? Is sexual attraction a requirement for a relationship to be more than friendship? It sounds like you don’t think so.”

We’ve been responding to this question and others like it for months now in comments, so it’s probably the right time to address this in a full post.

First, it’s important to clarify what a person means when asserting that a particular relationship is “more than friendship.” This phrase could be interpreted in at least two ways: either as “greater or more significant than friendship” or “more than the reductionist understanding of ‘friendship’ that has come to determine the word’s meaning for most modern westerners.” The two of us would not say that our relationship is greater or more significant than friendship. After all, our relationship began as we grew closer in friendship to one another, and we still consider ourselves friends. However, we prefer not to use the friendship model for describing our relationship. Both of us have a strong distaste for categorizing things that involve a high degree of mystery, and we don’t see any need to define our relationship using one word in particular to the exclusion of all others. We tend to stay away from friendship language in general because neither of us feels that it suits our situation, and we do not sense, as some other celibates do, that reclaiming the term “friendship” is part of our vocation. While our relationship is not greater than friendship, we understand it as different from friendship. It’s difficult to discuss exactly how if most people focus on whether we are “just friends” or a “sexless marriage” as though those are the only two ways of describing an arrangement between two celibate people who share life and have made lifelong personal commitments to each other. The phrase “just friends” contributes not only to the devaluing of friendship, but also to the devaluing of alternate approaches for discussing relationships outside the marriage/friendship binary.

Now to an assumption present in this reader’s question. The claim that people who are married are usually attracted to their partners is probably not testable considering cross-cultural differences in what leads people to marry. The fact that levels of sexual attraction to one’s partner can vary throughout the course of a relationship leads us to question the idea that all people in paired relationships experience sexual attraction to one another. Why be in a relationship with someone if there isn’t sexual attraction? There are many possible reasons: spiritual growth, intellectual attraction, the desire for non-sexual companionship that reaches beyond what western society considers “friendship,” financial stability, learning how to be less selfish and more compassionate, and so on. We consider it a problem that so many people today have made sexual attraction the ideal focus for seeking a partner. This mindset devalues other parts of the mystery of attraction. If you replaced “sexual” in the title of this post with “intellectual,” “spiritual,” “emotional,” or just plain “mysterious,” would you be inclined to ask the same question?

Attraction is mysterious and has a various dimensions. Who could possibly identify all of the reasons why one feels compelled to strike up conversations with a stranger or deepen relationships with specific people? People are relational. But it’s rather uncommon to find any person with whom one falls into an organic pattern of relating. These people really stand out in one’s relational circle, and it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly who, what, why, when, where, and how. As we’ve thought about our closest relationships, we have seen that some defy categorization to the point of being almost laughable. As an experiment, try thinking about your best friend. We would wager that you thought of several people from many different places across your lifespan. Now try thinking about people with whom you have a commitment to be present through thick and thin. Once again, it’s likely you called to mind several people from different spheres in your life. Who would you talk to at work if you were facing a crisis? Where would you hang out to enjoy your Friday night? Who has your back whenever you need your support? How have you kept up with people even as life circumstances have changed? One of the reasons why we’re generally averse to taking the approach of reclaiming “friendship” is that we consider many of our friends in this category as a part of our “family of choice.” When people commit to being present in all things, they change the character of their friendships. 

Some readers might say, “But being present through thick and thin is a vow that married people make to one another.” We say, “Yes, that’s true. We would hate for any two people to get married without committing to sharing life together earnestly. Nonetheless, marriage isn’t the only relationship defined by commitment.” People make all sorts of commitments. We commit to working in particular workplaces and gathering with specific groups of people. Local churches exist because Christians commit to gathering as a community. One of the ways we can tell if a person is truly committed to a particular local church is if that person remains even after times of significant change. Attraction precedes any question of commitment. How can we make an authentic commitment to anything unless we first take notice of it? There’s a point at which we connect so deeply to other people and places that it’s difficult to see ourselves as simply “two individuals.” That’s why we can speak of becoming a “member” (quite literally, a body part) of a church. And sometimes the word “friendship” fails to capture the beauty and mystery of particular relationships.

Ultimately, using the word “friendship” to describe every close relationship that isn’t marriage or a genetic or adoptive relation devalues both the concept of friendship and the idea that there are possibly more kinds of close relationships. We’re generally agreeable to thinking about how close relationships take on the character of being family. Yet trying to force fit so much into the friendship box seems more an effort to satisfy those disquieted by celibate partnerships than to have meaningful conversation about the mysterious gift of human relationships.

Comment Policy: Please remember that we, and all others commenting on this blog, are people. Practice kindness. Practice generosity. Practice asking questions. Practice showing love. Practice being human. If your comment is rude, it will be deleted. If you are constantly negative, argumentative, or bullish, you will not be able to comment anymore. We are the sole moderators of the combox.