Tuesday, December 05, 2006

 

Friendship, Revelation and Repentance

A while back, Dan Edelen at Cerulean Sanctum posted some very saddening statistics from Christianity Today. He was talking about friendship, and borrowed from CT in part:
As of 2004, the average American had just two close friends, compared with three in 1985. Those reporting no confidants at all jumped from 10 percent to 25 percent. Even the share of Americans reporting a healthy circle of four or five friends had plunged from 33 percent to just over 15 percent.
Dan then goes on to talk about the pain and cost of isolation. It reminded me of something I wrote a while ago at my first abortive, self-technologied attempt at a blog. Here's part of what I wrote that day, about intimacy:
Think about sexual intimacy for a moment. I don't have a lot of experience with that with anyone but my wife, but in this day and age it is not hard to find those that have a certain breadth of experience and it is not very hard to read about it at all. From the information I have been able to gather, the greatest reluctance in those situations is not the sex, it's the nudity. Why do you think that would be the case? Why is nudity a barrier to sex? Nudity is pretty necessary to sex; I don't know about you but the wife and I find that clothes usually get in the way.

I think the answer is straightforward. Clothing creates an illusion. We can make ourselves look better than we really do look when we are clothed. But when we get naked we find that the object of our lust may not be quite as spectacular as the wonder bra (or sock in the pants) led us to believe. Sexual intimacy requires that we reveal ourselves, including our imperfections, to our partner. Nudity puts at risk our image of perfection, and more importantly puts at risk the desire that image has created in our partner, and thus we risk rejection.

Relational intimacy is the same. The more intimate we become with someone socially, the more we risk their discovery that we are not quite all that we are cracked up to be. The reason that intimacy is in short supply today is not because technology is in the way; it is because people are no longer willing to risk the exposure that intimacy requires.

Why is that? Everybody is imperfect; we all have foibles and problems, why should it be so hard to let others see them? I think it is because when we expose those imperfections to others we expose them to ourselves. The image that is REALLY at risk in intimacy is not the image the other has of us, but the image we have of ourselves. The risk is not that they will reject us, but that we will reject ourselves, or more aptly, we will be forced to confront the issue and try to fix it.

Let me say that again -- THE RISK OF INTIMACY IS NOT THE RISK OF REJECTION BY THE OTHER, IT IS THE RISK OF US HAVING TO CONFRONT AND WORK ON OUR OWN IMPERFECTIONS. Anyone in the psychology business is probably reading this right now and going, "No, Duh!" But I really need to establish that point to get to the real point I want to make.

That confrontation of our own imperfections is what I have called brokeness. Brokeness is the self-revelation that I am a wretch. Repentance, as discussed last week is the acknowledgement of the self-revelation.
Another way to look at this is that isolation is a very real form not only of self-delusion, but of narcicism. Relations with others shape us, grind off the hard, sharp edges - force us to change, at least a little.

The reason there is a church is because exposure to the other leads to repentance, and improvement. And yet we find ourselves increasingly trying to find ways to do church that void those affects, that allow for the continuning self-absorption that is so obviously counter to God's natural order.

We cannot demand this change from the church unless we are willing to take the first step. Go make a firend, and reveal yourself.

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