Friendship is an action, ongoing.
Lenten Missive #2
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My best friends are gods.
I’m writing this week from the Acela NE regional on its way from Philadelphia to New York at about 6:20AM on Sunday. My friends Maggie and Mia are visiting the city from Paris and I’m making a day trip. Blogging from the train makes me feel like I’m living a different life, not in a “what if I were a Business Bitch consultant reviewing the deck before her Big Presentation” way, but in a “what if the air outside were too polluted to breathe and we all lived in traveling communes based on rail lines” way. I’ve never seen Snowpiercer, and I don’t know anything about it, but I think it takes place on a train kind of like this. In that kind of world, the people on my train matter a lot more to me than in my real life.
Yesterday, the first good day of weather this year, I walked around Philadelphia in shorts. Kelsey and I tried going to a few little shoppy shops, but so did everyone else in South Philly, so we ended up just taking our coffee to a bench in the park where we sat for a while and chatted, mostly about polyamory and about friendship. Neither of us try to be polyamorous, but we do both think a lot about what it takes to have friends and, from my vantage point outside the Poly Community™, those seem to be very similar puzzles to try and solve. I can’t say that Kelsey and I solved either puzzle, but the conversation was valuable all the same.
I mentioned here last week that I’m writing my God, Christ, Holy Spirit final essay this semester about friendship as means of knowing the divine. I still have a lot more to figure out in my framing, but every conversation I have about the topic makes me feel more certain that there’s something theologically fertile here. Allow me to riff on this for a bit…
There’s the surface metaphor, which is that to know what it is to be a friend is a way of cultivating care and love for creation,1 for the world around you. If you’re invested in people and can conceptualize caring about anyone who you aren’t blood related to, you’re more likely to be able to expand that care to other parts of creation to which you are even less connected. So as a simple practice of loving kindness, friendship seems to be a useful training ground for being a person in the world.
But even more deeply, I think friendship does interesting things for us theologically.
We usually expect good theology to explain something about the makeup of the world, about its metaphysics. Friendship is a relationship that exists between a choice and a miracle, that is both created and that creates itself.2 You probably know from your own friendships that you can’t take full responsibility for how the dynamics within unfold, but that you can take some responsibility. You co-create the experience, sometimes explicitly (“Hey, I want to spend more time with you, it’s been a while.”) and sometimes implicitly (Wow, they’ve been really unreachable since they started their new job. I guess I’ll give them space…). The choices you make for yourself, without even thinking of that friend, have consequences for them and for the unit that the two of you are together.
Now apply the analogy to your understanding of God.
Obviously, with a traditional (i.e. classical Western European) sense of God, this doesn’t quite work. That man is not your friend. That man is an old white guy in the clouds who knows if you’re going to hell, but won’t tell you. That old guy is sorry that your entire family fell off the viewing platform at the Grand Canyon, but he promises He has a plan 🫶🏼
This, among many other reasons, is why I’m drawn more and more to a process-relational philosophy and cosmology. I’m still not great at the elevator pitch for this, but the basic difference between a process-relational world and one that is not is that a process-relational philosophy sees everything as being defined by its process of becoming rather than its underlying substance. Annoying as that distinction may seem if you aren’t a theo-philosophy dork, it has significant consequences, not least of which is that the process-relational philosophy probably more accurately describes what you experience, while the more substantialist philosophy describes an experience that sounds… nice?3
I’m going to do some oversimplifying, because my train is almost to Penn Station.
A substantialist philosophy will say that, at core, God is fundamental Goodness and Power and One and many other supreme traits. This naturally prompts you to raise your hand and ask your Sunday school teacher, “Why does God allow bad things to happen if God is supreme Goodness?” and your teacher has to say, “Well, God wants us to have free will, and also God has a bigger plan, and God knows more than you.” And then you say, “Okay, fair, but I’m still really sad about my entire family falling off the viewing platform at the Grand Canyon, is that really fundamentally good?” And your Sunday school teacher has to say, “Um, yes, since God is fundamentally Good and all powerful, there must be a reason that it is Good for your family to fall off the viewing platform at the Grand Canyon.” Not very satisfying and, frankly, suspicious.
A process-relational philosophy will also say that God is perfect harmony and Goodness, two fluctuating processes of becoming. When you raise your hand and ask why God allows bad things to happen, your teacher replies: “Good question: the truth is, most things aren’t bad or good, but we know that many things have very bad impacts; for example, it hurt terribly when your entire family fell off the viewing platform at the Grand Canyon, right?” You would likely nod along, grateful at least that someone said it. Your teacher then might say something like, “Still, I wonder if there is anything we can do that might help, that might bring about some kind of good.” And you work with your teacher to bring about some systemic change, requiring public parks to undergo improvements on a frequent basis using tax dollars that come from the wealthy. And the feeling of being cared for by that teacher also makes you feel good. It doesn’t replace your lost family, but it feels good.
We can now see how this is kind of like how there are some relationships that are called friendships, but that don’t feel like friendships and there are some relationships that are called friendships that consistently and repeatedly show themselves to be friendships. They don’t feel like friendships because they are called friendships, they are called friendships because they feel like friendships.
Thanks for reading this second Sunday of Lent. I know there are some logical gaps here, so please feel free to poke holes and tell me where they are! I didn’t take as long as I might have otherwise, because I wanted to send this out before I went to get breakfast with my friends. Kind of the ultimate “show don’t tell” when you think about it…
More to come soon!
Always a lot of credit goes to the people who have been my teachers, both directly and through their freely shared knowledge, and so many books.
I’ve really come around to the use of the “creation” image. I think, theism or not, that existence is a creation which deserves to be treated with the care that you would show anything created without its consent.
I’m kind of using “friendship” where I could use “relationship,” and I don’t have a well articulated reason for that yet. Something to figure out for my essay.
“Substantialist” here means giving primacy to “substances” to which things happen. In this view, you are you, under all your experiences, and nothing that happens to you and seems to change you is all that important. The underlying substance is what really matters. Appealing in some ways, but I think it doesn’t hold up. I’ll talk more about why at some point.