I’ve got a new blog post up at Fare Forward on friendship. A preview:
This weekend, I was blessed to have the opportunity to hear Wesley Hill, the author of Washed and Waiting, speak at Harvard on spiritual friendship and sexuality. One of the challenges he posed sprung from his reading of St. Aelred of Rievaulx’s reflection Spiritual Friendship. He noted, “there aren’t a lot of similar treatises [on friendship] that we could point to in today’s church. Why is that? Could we be part of rewriting them ourselves? Could we be part of living into them ourselves and recovering them? Taking a book like that and dusting it off the shelf and enlivening it with our own practice in the church today?”
To see my thoughts on why we lack treatises on friendship and why we should fix this problem, read the rest at: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/fareforward/2013/04/why-dont-we-talk-about-friendship-more/
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That Jesus did not get married and yet invested in making 12 friends does not seem ironic to me. Those 12 friends (excluding Judas) were to be the founders of the church which is the bride of Christ. Just a thought that struck me as I was reading your article.
It’s not ironic that he did it. It’s ironic that IN LIGHT of that, the church privileges marriage so much higher than celibacy.