Ideals of Spiritual Friendship - Intimacy

Intimacy

When people long for friendships that are more meaningful, they want someone with whom they can be known with the freedom and honesty I have described. And they want to know the other person in the same deep ways. In short, they want intimacy. Jesus’ offer of friendship is an offer of intimacy. He wants to share our lives and share our experience. Most remarkably, he invites us to share his life and his experience.

Consider how astounding it was that Jesus shared his anguish in the garden of Gethsemane with his disciples (Mat 26:36-46). First, note that he didn’t go to the garden alone. We might assume that his friendship with his Father would have been enough and that he would simply share his feelings with him in prayer. But no, he took three of his disciples when he went to this garden to deal with what he knew to be his imminent arrest and crucifixion. Listen, then, to what he shared with them in the garden. The honesty and intimacy of the conversation is remarkable. He told them that his soul was bursting within him, overwhelmed with sorrow. And he told them he was close to not being able to take it any longer; he was at the point of death. Then he asked them to keep watch with him – to share his experience.

Intimacy is shared experience. Jesus shared his experience with those who were his closest friends. And he invited them to accompany him as he walked through this experience. Intimacy can be experienced in a variety of forms. Two people are vocationally intimate when they share work experiences, recreationally intimate when they share experiences of play, intellectually intimate when they share intellectual experiences, emotionally intimate when they share emotional experiences, and spiritually intimate when they share spiritual experiences.

Spheres of intimacy reinforce each other. Friends who share intellectual discoveries become more deeply engaged with each other, for example, if they also share experiences that are political, spiritual or aesthetic. Dynamic spiritual friendships yearn for shared experience in a growing number of areas of life.

Like many other forms of relationships, friendships tend not to remain static. They evolve or devolve – grow or shrink. If a friendship deepens over time, intimacy increases in depth and breadth. In fact, growth in intimacy is one of the best measures of growth in a friendship. In contrast, a sure sign of a dying friendship is a decrease of intimacy.

Spiritual friends share with each other at the level of their soul. This doesn’t mean they talk about only serious, personal or spiritual matters. However, if they never share at this level, the relationship is not worthy of being called a spiritual – or soul – friendship. Soul refers to the whole person, with particular attention to one’s inner life. Soul intimacy therefore is built on sharing the inner self. Sharing at the level of their souls means that friends’ intimacy is not restricted to experiences with the external world.

Friends who enjoy soul intimacy never settle for gossip or simple information exchange. Instead they use the data of events as springboards for the sharing of feelings, perceptions, values, ideas and opinions. The conversations of such friends are never merely about what happened in their lives or the world, but move from this to how they experience, react to and understand what happened. Dialogue continually moves from the surface to the depths, from the external to the internal. This is the crucial distinctive dialogue in spiritual friendships.

Spiritual intimacy demands this attentiveness to the inner world. Soul conversations invite inclusion of the spiritual dimension of life when they pay attention to inner experience, not simply the external world. Our spirituality is most clearly expressed in the deep longings that enliven us. Longings, in contrast to mere desires, come from our depths. Longings reflect spirit bubbling up to the surface – when we might theologically describe as a response of spirit to Spirit. Attending to the spiritual is attending to these stirrings in our depths.

Spiritual intimacy involves sharing these longings. It also involves sharing other aspects of inner experience neglected in more superficial exchanges – anxieties, hopes, concerns, dreams (both metaphorical and literal), preoccupations and ruminations. Things that might be counted as trivial are valued and shared because of this attentiveness to the inner world.

Most important, however, spiritual intimacy involves sharing our experience of God. I might tell my friend about a recent period of spiritual dryness in which God seemed absent. Or I might express gratitude associated with an answer to prayer. Or I might share an unusually strong sense of spiritual hunger. This is not the same as discussing theology, church politics or even the Sunday sermon. Genuine spiritual intimacy involves sharing my experience, not simply my ideas. One component of this shared experience will usually be my experience of God.

The intimacy that exists between spiritual friends is a togetherness that honors separateness. I must never view my friend as an extension of myself – my property, my processions or someone who exists for me. This is the basis of the non possessiveness that should characterize spiritual friendships. Without an honoring of the separateness of each person, the intimacy of friendship is destructively symbiotic.

Honoring separateness removes some of the obligation that exists in other relationships. Friends own nothing to each other except love. They are separate, autonomous people. Children and parents own the other a great number of things. Similarly, core obligations define the marital relationship. Friends have fewer formal obligations, Apart from love, they own each other nothing. If they give more than they own, this is a gift of grace.

Possessiveness always betrays a destructive dynamic in any relationship. The fruit of possessiveness is jealousy. Jealousy is as destructive in friendship as it is in marriage. Possessiveness, and the related dynamics of control and manipulation, always reflects an absence of respect for the separateness and autonomy of the other person.

It is important to remember that even the most intimate friendship can’t eliminate the strangeness that exists between any two people. The friend always remain partly stranger. It is naïve to assume that two people can ever know each other completely. Real friendships acknowledge the mystery of the other person – a mystery that can at times delight and at other times disappoint. But it is this strangeness, this separateness, that keeps passion alive in a friendship.

Space always nourishes genuine friendship. A healthy friendship thus honors the space in the relationship. Each gives the other lots of room for friends, interests and experiences that form no part of the shared experience of the friendship. Such separateness is based on the awareness that my friend’s life is not my life. His journey may connect to mine in some important ways, but because he is separate from me, his calling and journey are his own. As noted by Thomas Moore, “The soul ….. needs flight as much as it needs embrace.” Although we walk side by side, at times hand in hand, we walk two separate and distinct paths. True friends never lose sight of this fact.