True Friendship: Two Bodies, One Soul

[martasfic]

Originally published at Faith Seeking Understanding. You can comment here or there.

When the Synchroblog admins announced our February topic (cross-gender friendships), I was really excited about it.  February is so often given over to romantic love, it’s downright refreshing to see someone discussing non-romantic love just days before Valentine’s Day. And make no mistake: friendship is a unique and special kind of love that’s at least as important as romantic love. That would have been a worthwhile topic all on its own.

But then the US military approved women’s serving in combat roles, and for some reason the Christian blogosphere (at least those sites I follow) started talking about an old essay John Piper wrote basically saying that women shouldn’t serve in the military, not because men are stronger than women physically, bu because they’re hard-wired by God to protect women:

Suppose, I said, a couple of you students, Jason and Sarah, were walking to McDonald’s after dark. And suppose a man with a knife jumped out of the bushes and threatened you. And suppose Jason knows that Sarah has a black belt in karate and could probably disarm the assailant better than he could. Should he step back and tell her to do it? No. He should step in front of her and be ready to lay down his life to protect her, irrespective of competency. It is written on his soul. That is what manhood does.

I’m honestly not sure why this Piper article came up when it did, as it’s five years old and surely conservative Christians have been saying asinine things about gender and combat in the interim, but for whatever reason, once it took center stage you can imagine the kind of response it got. (Jenny Rae Armstrong was particularly brilliant.) On top of that, the latest Forward Thinking prompt asks what we should tell teenagers about sex, so those blogs I read that weren’t rebuking John Piper were almost all responding to that topic. For a while I could barely go a few hours without stumbling across another post about how women and men were really more alike (or not) than we always thought. The Synchroblog topic started to seem almost prescient.

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Comments

[marta-bee.livejournal.com]

When I first started reading this post I thought the antipathy was toward what I said - that you really hated me that much. Looks like that's not the case. I can live with anger toward Piper. :-) That's usually my first response though I also try to move beyond that since a lot of people actually accept the basis of his opinions (albeit in milder forms). So he seems worth talking about calmly and rationally. Also, worth railing at, but it's my temperament --based on competency, not divine hardwiring-- to go for the calm approach.

I found your comment about the scarcity of friendship really interesting. I think people move around a lot, but the internet and other technologies make it easier than ever to have a real friendship from a distance. I suspect the biggest problem is a fear of being vulnerable, which is at least as much a part of friendship as it is a part of romance. Also we are so busy; we want people to do things with, but not necessarily folks to listen to, or who will really listen to us. So we want something we can't quite lay our finger on. That's why stories about friendship are so crucial, I think. It's really very sad when you think about it.

As odd as this may sound, in some ways philosophy is my love language. That's a big part of why I talk about this stuff. Thanks for hearing me out.

P.S. - I realized I left you off the list of fannish friends. That was intentional, but I didn't mean it as an insult. The list was so female-heavy because fandom is so female, and since I was trying to point out the possibility of friendship across genders, I had to consciously stop myself from listing other women. So it's not that I don't care very much about our friendship, and I hope you didn't take it that way.

[dreamflower]

The internet does help. Actually, I'd say my only real friends right now are my fandom friends on the internet. Except for my husband, everyone I come into contact with in RL falls into what I think of as "friendly acquaintances" or that you might call "useful" or "entertaining" friends.

We've recently joined a small group from our church. I'm hoping that might help to ameliorate the problem by turning church acquaintances into friends--but I don't know. At 60, we are the "babies" of the group, and so far have little in common. But we've just started, so hope still springs.

Re: your PS, it never even occurred to me to take offense, dear! I mean it's nearly impossible to list everyone in something like that. You were "sampling" and that's quite all right with me! LOL!

And sorry you thought I was talking about you at first--I was meaning the link I clicked on!