Friendship and Vulnerability

I have been thinking about solitude and friendship, and how they are very much bound up with each other. Solitude means essentially getting in touch with, being at home with all parts of ourselves, both our strengths and limitations, both our light and shadow. At the same time, it means holding on to an underlying conviction of our sacred worth, even if often we cannot feel that worth of we find it threatened. One way of putting this lived awareness is to say that we become vulnerable to ourselves.

I recall that, many years ago, someone very dear to me said: “I don’t want advice or answers, I just want you to listen.” I think that we are drawn to maintain walls before another when we sense that letting them down can open ourselves to invasion by the judgment of another whose impulse to fix us can override their desire to care for us. We may ourselves also push another to feel the need for defensive walls against us.

Henry Nouwen has said that the real friend is not the person with the answers but the person who sticks it out with you when there are no answers. We might add that the real friend does not need to give answers but to be present to us in a way that helps us and perhaps even challenges us to discover our own answers, or at least our own path from within, and who sustains us to follow that path. Along similar lines, I have said before that we cannot talk someone into anything, into our viewpoint, but we can listen someone into their own truth. I recall giving a talk one time when the people present were really listening, and the thought came to me: “I hope what I am saying is really true, I owe it to the quality of their listening.”

Years ago, I came across a striking article on friendship by a William Sadler, He sees friendship as a form of love that, if genuine, involves sharing one’s life, in the sense of one’s inner aliveness, especially through intimate conversation. But it is a sharing that does not absorb another, but that affirms and sustains the unique identity, integrity, and growth of each person.

I would add that friendship involves sharing our story with another, not only the outer events, but how they are lived and felt from inside. It involves gradually telling and sharing our inner story, our strength and vulnerability. It involves listening to the story of another, receiving their joy and sorrow, with an openness and a depth that reaches deeper than any pain and encompasses that pain in caring hands.

Out of this experience comes the conviction, felt with an undercurrent of gratitude, that it is good to be alive, to be here, to be with you. In this process I discover myself, I discover you, and I glimpse the truth that a similar depth and beauty is present in every human being, no matter how masked or even betrayed. Hence friendship pushes toward solitude as the sinking in of life experience, and towards compassion and social justice as the recognition and honouring of the sacredness of every human being.

May you come always ever closer to being at home with yourself and with others, in such a way that a sense of worth and gratitude may gently envelop any sorrow that burdens your life.

Norman King, January 18, 2021

We spoke previously of the challenge of loneliness and how it can be made more difficult and painful from the isolation that results from the current pandemic. This situation invites us to reach out in whatever ways possible to make contact with one another. It also calls us to recognize that, for a variety of reasons, many people can become more withdrawn and unable to reach out, and need others to reach in to them.

At the same time a counterpart to and response to loneliness is what may be called solitude. We are each a unique person, and there are no carbon copies of any of us. We are also quite complex, with a vast variety of backgrounds, life-situations, experiences, reactions, thoughts, feelings, and much more. We are to a considerable extent a puzzle, a question, a mystery to ourselves, as well as to one another. Solitude, time spent quietly by oneself is a way to journey to and get in touch with our inmost self.

We have also mentioned the contrast between homelessness and homefulness with ourselves. It is easy to live on the outskirts of our lives, immersed in busyness and externals, and endlessly striving to meet the expectations of others or our society. This approach only increases our loneliness, our experience of being an absentee landlord in our own home.

Solitude, distinct from loneliness, is a time of quietness by ourselves. It may be initially uncomfortable, but if we are able to be immersed in life with awareness and openness, that time in our own company can be a time to reflect on our life, our experiences, our relationships, our place in society.

One helpful and yet possibly at first unnerving question is: “Where do you live?” We can ask this question beyond the immediate sense of our street or city location. In a conversation with my son at the age of seven, he spoke of the world inside us in terms of different towns. He spoke of happy town and excitement town and the like, with examples for each. I asked him if there was anything further, and he said that way, way at the back was love town. I suggested to him that as long as we know that there is a love town we will be alright even if we cannot always be there, but are for a time in lonely town or angry town.

This story may helpful for asking in which town we live. Is it lonely town or the town of fear or hostility or anxiety or hope or love. Do we move among different towns, or are we stuck, so to speak, in one of them. In what town would we like to make our home, and how do we get there? What is the deepest place in us, and are we there seldom or often.

If we try to spend some quiet time by ourselves, we may at first feel uncomfortable. We may recognize that we are in fact living most of the time in hurt or fear or angry town. I think that these are part of all our experiences. At the same time, we may also gradually be aware of something in us that is deeper than all of these feelings. It is who we are beneath and beyond and more than these. We may also sense that this is a place of sacredness and worth, even if we are seldom there. And it is our real home.

One writer, Gordon Cosby, extending it beyond experiences of quiet time by ourselves, puts it this way: “In our deepest beings we are all contemplatives. We glimpse what this means in times when we surrendered ourselves to a piece of work and the hours seems as moments. We are contemplatives when we are absorbed by an experience of love, beauty, wonder, grief, or when we are able to be present to something or someone with the totality of ourselves. “

Erich Fromm, in his book on the meaning of love, The Art of Loving, says that our common notion of activity involves doing something external to ourselves. He says that such busyness may come from being driven, whether by anxiety, greed, insecurity and the like. Being truly active means that, whatever we do, including sitting quietly, comes freely from within ourselves, not compelled from without. He later adds that genuine communication with another also depends upon its flowing freely from within.

In Fromm’s words: “Love is possible only if two persons communicate with each other from the centre of their existence, hence if each of them experiences themselves from the centre of their existence. …Even whether there is harmony or conflict, joy or sadness, is secondary to the fundamental fact that two people experience themselves from the centre of their existence, that they are one with each other by being one with themselves, rather than fleeing from themselves.”

We might say that we are truly free when we are at home to our inmost self and can then be truly at home to and even a home for one another. We can speak more of friendship in future reflections but leave things here at this point. May you find your true home within yourselves and live there and from there, and become more and more a home for one another.

Norman King, January 11, 2021

T. S. Eliot has written: The end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

The beginning of a new calendar year, near the beginning of winter also marks the time when the days begin to get longer and we move towards new life, in the sense of the renewal which comes with springtime. For thousands of years, people’s lives had been structured by the rotation of the seasons. It was a time of endings and new beginnings, just as plants and flowers whose endings also release the seeds of new life and growth

Yet as Eliot observes and as The Wizard of Oz expresses, a new beginning is always a return home. Yet that return is at once the same the same and different, because we are also both the same and different. We are changed, however imperceptibly, by the living out of our lives and by the experiences they contain. At the same time, we may move more and more beyond the surface of life, marked by externals and busyness. We may then discover different parts and dimensions of ourselves that have previously remained unknown to us.

The folk tales portray these discoveries of parts of ourselves as meeting with strangers, both helpers and threats. In The Wizard of Oz, the scarecrow, the tin man, and the lion represent the wisdom, love, and courage that is already within us, yet still to be discovered. The good and evil witches represent the creative or life-giving and the destructive or death-dealing forces with us. The challenge is to recognize and be in touch with all these dimensions, without either denying our sacred worth or unleashing harm on ourselves or others.

To return home, to find a new starting place, and make a new beginning, is to become aware of all these dimensions and tendencies and qualities that are part of who we are. It is to become at home with all that we are, both our strengths and our limitations. It is also to find in friendship a place in another’s heart where we can be at once safe and vulnerable, where we can be at home both to ourselves and to one another. It is out of this raw material, so to speak, that we are to fashion our lives into a creative work of art.

On Sunday, I listened to a podcast from the On Being program, accessible on U.S. public radio and on host Krista Tippett’s website: www.onbeing.org. It was an interview with Gaelynn Lea, who has a brittle bone disease that has left her small and in a wheel chair, but able to excel in playing the fiddle held like a cello. She commented that the present commercial society attempts to make people feel inadequate about themselves, so that they will that lead them closer to an artificial ideal. She adds: “And you just make the bar unattainable enough so that people will keep striving after it and never really be satisfied with who they are, so they’ll spend tons of money.”
This approach reflects the thought that we have been given the image of people, of ourselves, as human “havings” rather than human “beings.” As a result, we are always drawn to look outside ourselves, and so never to be at home with ourselves, Always to be homeless in our own lives.

When, with one another’s help, we can come to be at home to all that is within us, and grow into a sense of our sacred worth, that embraces all of us , “warts and all,” we will at times come to be at peace with ourselves and with one another.

The experience of solitude and of friendship are pathways to this homefulness. And it is reflected also in the story of Rumpelstiltzkin. These are topics we may speak about in future weeks. For now, I’ll just mention that Rumpelstiltzkin does express the basic challenge of life: to spin straw into gold. I see its meaning as the challenge accept our lives which may seem brief and passing like straw, and to fashion them into gold, into a lasting work of art, by how we weave our life story. In an age of machinery and possessions, the story utters a profound reminder: “Something living is more precious than all the gold in the world.”

May you come to experience and live more fully the preciousness of your own lives.

Norman King, January 4, 2021