Abstract
Wesley Hill teaches Biblical Studies, and his doctorate from Durham University has recently been published as Paul and the Trinity: Persons, Relations, and the Pauline Letters (Eerdmans, 2015). But he is better known as the author of Washed and Waiting: Reflections on Christian Faithfulness and Homosexuality (Zondervan, 2010), a moving autobiographical and theological reflection on his journey as a celibate gay Christian, and as one of the leading writers at http://spiritualfriendship.org/, a blog which takes its title from a treatise of Aelred of Rievaulx (1110–1167) which itself richly repays reading today. In this book of the same title, Hill follows up Washed and Waiting, arguing that homosexuality brings with it a particular vocation to friendship, and exploring through a luxuriant range of sources some ways in which this might be expressed and nourished in the church (although no responsible review can fail to chide Hill for indulging himself with a quirky ‘Essay on Sources’ instead of the tried-and-tested convenience of footnotes and a bibliography).
Hill commences Part 1 with an analysis of why friendship today seems so insipid. He identifies as the culprits a post-Freudian fear that same-sex friendship must be secretly or subconsciously sexual, and a postmodern construal of freedom as lack of encumbrance which inhibits commitment to others. And if friendship is insipid, no wonder the classic Christian sexual ethic comes across as consigning gay people to a life of loneliness, devoid of particular commitments. Against this, Hill posits Aelred’s vision of friendship as a committed, public relationship like marriage or kinship. What Hill is yearning for isn’t a weekly night out or people with whom to go on holiday: ‘We need people who know what time our plane lands … We need the assurance that … a few people will stay with us … We need people for whom we can care’ (p. 42). Just like marriage, depth in friendship requires the security of commitment (p. 91)—hence, Hill argues, if celibate gay Christians are to experience intimacy, some kind of structured commitment and obligation will be necessary.
Of course, friendships can become self-absorbed, just like marriages. But in today’s context, Hill argues, loneliness is by far the greater danger (p. 41). Against the warnings of luminaries like Samuel Johnson, Karl Barth and Søren Kierkegaard that friendship can dilute the biblical summons to love others without discrimination, Hill presses the claim (successfully, I think) that such universal love is served, rather than diluted, by the particularity of friendship. He makes good use of a stirring passage from John Henry Newman, who takes the witness of the incarnate life of Christ as proof that ‘the best preparation for loving the world at large … is to cultivate an intimate friendship and affection’ (p. 54).
There is much to profit from here. On the one hand, Hill shows that a celibate life is by no means a lonely one. Yet he is right not to shy away from the fact that, in a culture in which romantic partnerships are the norm, singleness today has a particular pain to it. His call for friendship to be once again a matter for covenant and commitment must be heeded: if we are to take the risk of ‘entrusting our heart and all its contents’ (p. 32, a phrase of Aelred’s) to another, we need to know that they will stay close to us and not carry our heart off elsewhere.
Hill’s apologia for friendship concluded, in Part 2 he explores its nature. A key question is whether ‘friendship is something completely separable from romantic or erotic love’ (p. 67). In this dichotomy, romance is possessive and passionate, friendship cool and rational. As evidence, Hill adduces C. S. Lewis’s argument in The Four Loves that ‘friends are always standing shoulder to shoulder, and never yearning to behold each other’s faces’ (p. 77). Again, this culturally highly situated depiction of friendship leaves the gay Christian without passion and excitement, and Hill is surely right to name the contrast as false. His solution is to rebalance the equation by recognising an element of romance in the chaste same-sex friendship: as a gay person, he ‘can’t very well … expect that romantic, erotic feelings won’t, somehow, be involved in that pursuit’ (p. 76).
If we take this as an honest description of Hill’s own situation, no doubt this is fair enough. Moreover, there must be some sense in which the romantic desires of gay Christians can be met and fulfilled in this life without recourse to sexual sin. But romantic desires, just like sexual ones, need to be refined and transformed. Taken as a normative claim for same-sex-oriented persons, the idea that friendship involves romantic and erotic feelings is therefore much more problematic. Indeed, elsewhere Hill alludes to close friendships between himself and married opposite-sex couples. Presumably he does not think that romantic and erotic feelings (even if chastely expressed) are appropriate to such relationships. Hill is therefore right to insist that friendship is face-to-face as well as side-by-side. But it seems to me that to suggest a note of romance is inherent to this face-to-face encounter is to capitulate precisely to the tyrannous idolatry of the romantic which he so rightly criticises with respect to marriage. The Incarnation, Newman’s starting point, readily furnishes a pattern for intimacy which is personal and passionate without being romantic and erotic.
One source of this difficulty is Hill’s acceptance of an overly romantic/erotic account of marriage, which means that he needs to romanticise/eroticise friendship in order for it to keep pace. This is pastorally troubling, since friendship which models itself on marriage will never truly be fulfilling qua friendship. And in reality, romance and sexual desire and fulfilment within marriage are episodic rather than unremitting. They are themselves set within the larger context of marriage as friendship. Rather than regarding friendship as a species of romantic relationship, I would argue that it is better to view marriage as a particular species of friendship (as Aelred does—indeed, Aelred regards marriage as an inferior form of friendship, because it is grounded in carnal rather than spiritual desire—whereas hopefully today we are better at recognising the ways in which marriage can also be a locus for mutual discipleship and therefore spiritual friendship too). If the fundamental form of intimacy is friendship (and not sex or romance), and marriage is but one species of friendship, then the basic intimacy which is available to married people is available to unmarried people too, without needing to borrow from marriage.
The other source of this trouble is the claim I mentioned earlier, namely that ‘being gay [might] itself constitute a call’ to friendship (p. 75), or, as Hill puts it later, involve a genius for it (p. 80). This seems arbitrary. If a claim to a special vocation for the celibate gay person to friendship must be made, it must surely be because they are celibate, rather than because they are gay. Treating a same-sex orientation as an ontological reality could let both other single and married Christians off the hook, whereas elsewhere Hill makes the apt point that friendship is for all these, and, in particular, that married people—both as individuals and as couples—can and should play their part in forming deep bonds with single people. (He seems to assume such an ontology: ‘being gay colors everything about me’ [p. 80]—but should it? My own experience suggests that this is not necessarily an inherent feature of the gay experience, which is a diverse phenomenon.)
What is certainly and wonderfully true is that Hill has discovered a particular genius for friendship and thus a vocation to inspire and teach others about it—as this book so richly does. While I question whether this is the particular preserve of same-sex-oriented persons, none of this diminishes the great value of Hill’s work in demonstrating that, generally, friendship is far from being practised adequately or frequently enough, and in offering, as he does in his final chapters, wise and practical counsel as to how this could be improved.