Made for People: Why we drift into loneliness and how to fight for a life of friendship

Book Review (Justin Whitmel Earley)

“Seumas,” you say, “another book on friendship?”

“Yes,” I say, “but I think this is a pretty decent one for its publishing niche and target market.”

Earley's book begins with the premise that we are fundamentally made for relationship, and this is baked into the creation account of Genesis 2, while our (i.e. American) society is experiencing a loneliness epidemic. Earley defines loneliness as "the feeling of being a person who used to have friends" For Earley, it's "the hidden pain of being surrounded by people but known by none of them" that is the problem to be solved, and it's solved by friendships. Not just by you and God doing life solo, not by marriage, but by friendships.¹

The gospel has an answer for this, as it does for everything:

"The friendship of Jesus means that one way to summarize the gospel is this: Jesus knows you fully and loves you anyway." p.25²

I think this way of applying the gospel is "applying the gospel in the key of [X]". And in the key of friendship, this is perfect. This is also a great way of defining friendship: “A friend is someone who knows you fully and loves you anyway.” p.25

So what Earley is going to pitch to us in this book, he calls "covenant friendship". I don't really love that name for two reasons. Firstly, like "covenant marriage" vs "regular marriage", I think it's a not particularly helpful way of creating two tiers of relationship no one's buying. Secondly, I'm resistant to importing "covenant" language into everything. But what he means is friendship in a fully-orbed sense. He’s pushing or calling or inviting us to a richer and deeper and more committed form of friendship.³

And what he offers in this book are ten arts and habits that build friendship into something truly wonderful: Vulnerability, Honesty, Covenant, Forgiveness, Invitation, Geography, Time, Communication, Memory, Worship. I'm going to write briefly about each of these ten.

Vulnerability is "the art of living without secrets and the habit of confession". It's very interesting that Earley starts here, but if we take his definition of "knows you fully and loves you anyway", then it's being known that is foundational and fundamental for friendships. As I've said, being known is what we crave, but also what we fear, which is why we want to be known in love.

To be fully known without being fully loved is to be exposed. (And to be loved without being fully known is really to be hidden.) But to be fully known and still be fully loved, that is the beginning of worship. p.46

My only hesitation is that Earley's pitch here seems all or nothing. Either someone is a friend and knows absolutely everything, or they aren't. I think there's a place for degrees of intimacy, that aren't hiding, they are just about gradual revealing. We grow in intimacy with friends as we grow in sharing the truth about ourselves, and we grow in trust as we experience the grace that loves us even though we are sinners.

Honesty is in many ways the counterpart to the vulnerability of the first habit, because its the habits of rebuke and encouragement. I appreciate the way Earley pairs these. A friend cares enough, loves enough, that they will not just leave you alone, but is prepared to tell you the things about you that could be better - because they want you to be the best version of yourself and they see something of that. Encouragement in some ways is harder for us, if only because it's more awkward!

With encouragement, we are often afraid of the intimacy that follows. What we feel after offering genuine encouragement is usually best described as awkwardness. But on a deeper level, I believe what we are unused to, and thus scared of, is love itself. We don’t know what to do with nonsexual love, which makes us bad at friendship. (p.62)

Naming the good we see in others and encouraging them to keep pursuing it. I like the way he gives some conversational pointers on how to do both of these well.

What Earley calls "covenant", I think I'd just call "fidelity". But I'm on board with his fundamental premise here. And that's that there is a power and a spirituality to making (and keeping) promises, and this has a place in the forming of friendships. Sure, not all friendships will last the distance, not all friendships need to be on this higher plane. But there's a place and a way to name the goodness of committed friendships in which we promise to remain a friend to another through all the difficulties of life.

[Promise-making] is an act of faith. This is why we need more—not less—promising in friendships. But when we avoid making promises in friendship, we do the opposite. We implicitly say that we’d rather have options than commitment." (p.81-82)

Fidelity in friendships, or forming committed friendships, or covenant ones, if we give in to Earley's language, is awkward. He knows it's awkward. Because it's a swimming against the current. But the current of our culture is towards isolation and loneliness. Instead, what if we explicitly were prepared to name and commit to friendships, for the long haul, and live into and live out of those promises? We'd end up with much deeper, richer friendships is what.

Forgiveness. A few quotations will suffice here:

No one can hurt us more than our friends can. Which means that you cannot practice real friendship without practicing real forgiveness. Constantly. p.103

Relationships cannot exist without forgiveness. Either we forgive or we fall apart; there is no middle ground. Given that all good friends will eventually hurt you, if you do not practice forgiveness, you will either be stuck in a cycle of endless resentment or never have a true friendship at all. p.106

Invitation: Friendship is, Earley says, a powerful and wonderful thing. Which is why it's capacity to harm us is also great.

One of the most awful powers we have is the power to exclude someone from friendship. Being kept out of relationship is one of the deepest pains you can experience. Sensing that others have friendships that you are not welcome in can hurt in a way that makes you forget all the ones you are welcome in. p.125

In this section I think Earley treads a careful and wise line. He recognizes that friendship is always, by definition, a choice to include some. That is, while I'm being a friend over here, I can't also be over there with someone else. However, we also make choices to include, or exclude, and we should always be seeking to include. There's a point in here that echoes Volf for me - if good gifts terminate in us, we pervert them. But if God's generosity to us, extends to generosity to others, we become conduits of blessing. Friendship is like this too - we are to seek to invite others in, with gracious and generous hospitality to friendship. We ought always be invited people in.

Geography

It was actually Alan Noble who convinced me of this idea, that at some point it's better to stop looking to move where you can work, and figure out what work needs to be done where you are.

To get autobiographical: when we returned from Mongolia in 2014, we decided to return to our previous church and location in Sydney, as a relatively workable solution to be close enough to university, work, and a familiar community. I assumed we'd stay for a couple of years, I'd finish a PhD, and then we'd return overseas or I'd find a job. God did not so ordain. Of the friends I thought we were returning to, all of them left within a couple of years. An academic job did not materialise. The idea of doing 1-year stints all across the globe held no appeal. Moving was discussed several times.

At some point we moved from a position of "well, we're just stuck here for now" to "we're choosing to stay and we're not leaving unless we have to." That, for me anyway, accompanied a mindset shift. To commit to locality, to a church, and to whoever God put in our life to be friends (or not). It has come with costs, it hasn't been easy, and I wouldn't even say we've (yet?) reaped the benefits of that choice. But we're committed to staying put, because geography and longevity are ingredients to friendship that are very hard to 'swap' for alternatives. Roots are worth putting down, because that's how you grow into tall trees.

The last three chapters I have much shorter notes, because I think the material becomes perhaps less profound?

Time: Set a schedule for regular time with friends. You won't regret it.

Communication. This chapter is about technology, and it's nothing you wouldn't read elsewhere, about wise use of technology, just applied to friendships. But it's still good.

Memories. Make deliberate memories with friends. High peaks are important just like the everyday stuff. Be intentional. And be awkward enough to tell friends that you love them.

Some concluding thoughts

I think my best way forward here is to offer a comparison with other books I’ve read, and tease out their distinctives. What I loved most about Austin’s book on friendship is that it was surprising. It gave me novel ideas, like the theological centrality of friendship, that friendships can be eternal, whereas marriage is not; exploding the idea that David and Jonathon were friends; and the importance of Job’s friends. McLaughlin’s book on friendship seems very, I hate to say it, pedestrian? It didn’t surprise me, it just felt like what a mainstream evangelical would write after sitting down and reflecting on some New Testament passages. It wasn’t bad for all that, it just didn’t ‘pop’ for me. Earley’s book is neither of these. Instead, it emerges out of some of his prior work, and the framework of virtues and habits that he’s employed elsewhere. It’s more like a manual for doing friendship better, as well as an envisioning of those better friendships. Yes, you read of some of the great covenant friendship-ing in Earley’s life, and so you get a sense for “friendship could be something deeper and greater, and here’s some of the tools to cultivate it”.

1. So here’s a theological conundrum for you: is God enough if you live in a cave in the Egyptian wilderness? Let’s call it ‘the Antony test’. And the answer has to be yes, right? Like, if God is sufficient, he is sufficient for people who experience profound loneliness. Lost in the Siberian tundra for weeks, subject to solitary confinement in a prison, etc.. At the same time, I think we can safely conclude that those aren’t the normal conditions for human flourishing, that God designed human beings for social relations, and those relations aren’t typically met by God alone, nor by marriage alone.

2. If you’re me, you think “Gee, that sounds a bit like Keller”, and that’s because it is Keller, as Earley’s footnotes tell you.

3. Which I think is great. Here’s an interesting post about the decline about friendship in America, and the point about the decrease in the quality of friendship is an important one. We feel less committed to our friends, owe them less, and discard them more easily.