Singled Out

“... The term friend is going to be the key in understanding what it means ’to be me’ (...)

We find ourselves friends with people not for what they can do for us but simply for who they are. And if we suspect we are singled out for someone’s friendship because of what we can do for that person - social prestige, economic advantage, etc. - we are apt, and rightly so, to resent it.”

From Eugene Peterson’s “As Kingfishers Catch Fire"

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Dear Alex,

I have not planned to write but sometimes the unexpected comes so here I go.

A friend of thrill or terror. Friend of hungry ghosts. Invisible friends. When you feel ugly or trivial, where is your friend?

Yesterday I received something I did not deserve for the second time this year: card and present from someone I have been training for the past several weeks. The tag on the gift bag reads, "My dear preceptor". More of her words unfurl among pink wrapping tissues: "I cannot thank you enough... You are the first to give me..."

These porous words - I wish I could say I deserve them. I would like to think I have been a model mentor, street preacher or perhaps even remotely a friend for the one whom I barely know and who has just gifted me with more recognition than I could bear.

But I simply have not earned her words, and I am not the modest type. In fact, her thoughts in ink compel me to confront the beasts of violence, rage and greed within me.

The portrait of friendship is paradoxically perplexing. How does the line detour and arch from stranger to friend, learner to teacher, nomad to owner, rogue to steward? Who is better poised than a friend to help another breach the wall, scale down a canyon, snip the cord and dream on ridges?

To journey with one is to invite self into an asylum. I want to know and trust you but I am a foreigner to myself. You hope to bridge when hope is abridged. A virtually impossible mission is asked of us to venture beyond our personal universe, letting go of our uni-verse of self-centeredness, in our relating with others. We are honest about our dishonesty. None of us deserves the cruelty or the grace. Nobody feels any pain.

The incongruences between who we think we are and how we live out our identities in privilege or poverty magnify the hollowness within our multitudes of contradictions apart from our greatest Friend. We have amassed legions of friends with likes on Facebook. The wine is brimming, our iTunes serenading. Yet depression rates linked with mental health continue to surge worldwide, most rapidly among the youngest and oldest. In this niche of abundance, we seem to be the craziest, saddest bunch in history.

"I cannot thank you enough..." The first of her words haunts me now. They are more aptly mine for her.

Yours, Kate

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Dear Kate,

But we do single out our friends, don't we?

We give them nickname, make them special, celebrate their birthday and wedding and more, make sure due attention is paid to the special--and very specific--relationship that is between us.

Singled out for what purpose? I think that is the key.

We single out our friend Jesus too--on Christmas, as a harmless little child who stands in to represent us in our vulnerability, and on Easter, his cross a synecdoche to speak for our suffering, both to the effect of giving us some kind of benefit: "peace and joy" and "salvation from our sins."

This last paragraph should end with a question mark.

Jesus, our friend, does he still speak to us today, a new word every morning?  Or do we single him out to box him in a manger, raise him up to pin him on wood?

The cattle are lowing
The poor baby wakes
But little Lord Jesus
No crying he makes

I am not too sure about that.  I am not too sure this is the full picture of "peace and joy."

An "unprecedented, abhorrent" mosque shootings just happened in New Zealand.  So far 49 dead and just as many injured.  The city where this happened is called Christchurch.  Church of Christ, there, home to Jesus, broken.

Meanwhile in our life our little Lord Jesus still makes no crying.  I am not too sure about that.

I go back to the key insight from Rowan Williams.  As Jesus' follower we are willing to give more and more space for the life of others to come alive, in us or around us, only because Jesus creates the space for us to give.  Jesus frees us from the addiction to pin people down for our own benefits, and the desire to be pinned down to get accepted.  This freedom is generative, always creating, ever visionary.

Jesus Christ beckons us … to be born.
Our identities as men go from one birth to another.
And from birth to birth, we’ll each end up
bringing to the world the child of God that we are.

Yours, Alex