A Friendship in Letters
OUR LETTERS HAVE BEEN SHUTTLING BACK AND FORTH FOR A YEAR AND A HALF NOW, KEEPING THE TIME THAT WE’RE APART.
There’s a very old way of thinking about friendship, and it’s won me over. It can be put simply: the best kind of friendship is loving your friend as yourself, and together pursuing whatever is good. Within that simplicity, though, lies the daring claim that friendship is a unique kind of love, with its own emotions and expressions. Recognizing this, C.S. Lewis devotes one quarter of his The Four Loves (1960) to friendship (alongside “affection,” “eros,” and “charity”), and his assessment then is still true:
To the Ancients, Friendship seemed the happiest and most fully human of all loves; the crown of life and the school of virtue. The modern world, in comparison, ignores it.
Unlike Lewis, we can no longer properly imagine different kinds of affectionate love for another person. One of our culture’s problems is that our stories about “friendship” so often serve as set-ups for stories about “being in love” (Lewis’s “eros”). Picture a wedding reception: “Today I married my best friend!” gushes the bride. The guests let out a collective “awww,” while the now dethroned maid of honour politely applauds her usurper.
By contrast, the old ideal to which I’m drawn sees friendship as a different sort of thing altogether, an end in itself. It makes a radical break with classical and contemporary ideas that friendship is gender-exclusive—the Greeks thought that only men had the strength of character to be perfect friends, while Hollywood tends to see male-female friendships as the opening act of Friends with Benefits. It is also a break with the social media model of casually collecting “friends” and “followers,” because a deep friendship takes mutual commitment and sacrifice. This is friendship that can be chosen, built, and lasting, even lasting into eternity.
It is no coincidence that loneliness has risen to the point of an epidemic in our society, or that single people in the modern church so often feel overlooked or disconnected. Both the church and the city need to relearn how to approach friendship as a spiritual discipline, a matter of the heart as much as a source of enjoyment.
I know love for my family, love for my wife, love for my neighbours. While this piece is a reflection on the value of “giving time” to letter-writing, it is also my story about learning to practice another kind of love: for a friend.
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Anne and I met on the second day of a three-day conference. The conference was being held in a pleasant, generic hotel in a city strange to me, and that evening I stood in front of the full-length mirror contemplating whether I needed to go down to the reception at all. I knew no one—but the registration cost and the plane tickets and the hotel fees were so I could be here and participate, so, in the end, I went down. It was as crowded as I expected, and the only people who noticed me were a few other grad students who had heard my paper earlier. One of them soon left; the other stayed and we talked. Leaning on a railing overlooking the hotel atrium, we discovered a series of shared loves: science fiction, close-knit families, devotional poetry, the Psalms, and Christ.
As other attendees said their good-byes to each other and left, we resisted. There was more to say, but it was also that our conversation seemed like a beginning of some kind. We both knew that to make a friendship despite the time and space that separated our cities would take commitment. “Let’s be pen-pals,” I suggested, and Anne tried the word approvingly, “Yes, let’s be pen-pals.” Our letters have been shuttling back and forth for a year and a half now, weaving a special kind of friendship that takes its character from how friends keep the time we’re apart.
Good afternoon, Joel!
And what a gray, rainy afternoon it has been in Chicago—a steady drizzle rattling the panes, gusts of wind wrenching the yellowed leaves from the trees, no sun anywhere. A lovely afternoon, all told, for staying inside with a pot of lapsang souchong tea and lots of books.
Before going our separate ways, Anne and I agreed to start reading books together and discussing them through our letters. This has led to sustained, thoughtful discussions about family, faith and academia, practicing hospitality in our church communities, and much more. It’s remarkable, though, how many of our letters are framed first by a place. Descriptions of what is around us as we write are more than pleasant icebreakers, because in them we invite each other into an experience of our place. Reading the letter above, for instance, I picture my friend sitting indoors on a rainy day with a pot of tea and a stack of books, beginning the next thread of our conversation. Anne’s description of “a steady drizzle rattling the panes” engages the imagination and senses with the sights, sounds, and affect of her surroundings, and the rest of her letter plays over the contemplative white noise of a rainy day.
At the core of true friendship lies a dialogue of invitation and response: Will you talk with me? Will you meet up for coffee? Will you pray for me? Letters ask us to put aside our own place for a moment, overcome the distance, and be there too.
Dear Anne,
The honour falls to me to write our first letter of 2019! It’s going to be a relatively shorter one, since we’re currently in between book topics, and my goal is to write this in one sitting tonight, Friday (stay tuned to find out if I succeed). The next few days are going to be incredibly busy: the new term starts on Monday ...
More than a year of letter-writing friendship has brought us together across time as well as space. Traditionally one headlines a letter with both location and date as if anchoring it there and then, but the overall effect can be to diminish those distances. Marking time together puts lives on the same calendar, living in shared rhythms of calling, family, and liturgy. Knowing where and when a letter was written also lets the reader locate it as a specific experience, filling out the picture of where the writer is and what they are thinking and feeling. After all, that’s often the point of a personal letter: to express oneself to a friend.
On some level, “self-expression” implies to me a kind of overflowing of self, a freedom enjoyed by reaching out into the world like a plant growing towards the sun—occasionally self-serving, but not necessarily a bad thing. Letter-writing is good for the self, but at its best when self-expression is motivated by grace and care for another. I want to redefine the way that letters are an “expression” of self by borrowing from coffee culture: thoughtful writing to a friend is more espresso than expression, not an overflowing but an artful “pressing out” of something essential and intimate. That distillation of thought and experience, even in an account of the everyday, forms a precious imprint of our character meant to be given to someone else. As I suggested earlier, the giving associated with friendship does not compete with or subtract from other relationships—in fact, it multiplies the joy of them.
An exciting event in my last week was Joshua’s first attempt at sign language: we’ve been modelling a number of basic signs for him for months, hoping that he’ll pick up on things like “bath,” “eat,” “sleep,” “read,” and “more.” It was “more” that stuck first, though he recognizes all the others, and to our great delight his first use of “more” was not at dinner (that was second), but during reading time!
The attitude of giving of ourselves to another person is a Christ-like one, and is also central to the long tradition of discourse about true friendship. When Jesus defined the greatest human love as “to give up one’s life for a friend” (I’m paraphrasing John 15:13) he was speaking in terms familiar to an ancient Mediterranean audience, because classical literature is full of model friendships whose worth is proven by what one friend is willing to give the other. My point is not that each of us needs to sacrifice ourselves in a competition for the title of “Best ‘Best Friend,’” but that a willingness to give of who we are is foundational to building truly good friendships. Expressing our inner lives and telling the stories that shape us, we articulate a sense of what makes us who we are; letters are a means of entrusting that self to another person.
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Letter-writing seems to surrender any pretense of two friends being exactly present to each other, and instead leans into the fact of that distance between us. Neighbours can rely on being in the same place at the same time to bridge the distance between two people and their experiences, but in their letters absent friends make that distance meaningful by embracing it. Anne and I often refer to upcoming weekdays or holidays, but in all of our letters we offer each other a glimpse into our experience of the now. We can’t take a shared time for granted, so we work to place the invitation and response of friendship in specific times, and this habit of beginning with the day of writing grows into reflections on living in the present moment.
I’m writing this in front of our Christmas tree, a three-foot-high affair that we’ve put on top of the table in our living room ... I’m finding that, without the rhythms of teaching, it’s hard to build cycles of rest and business for myself, and so I’ve been intentional this week about allowing myself an easier pace for “winter break.”
We centre ourselves by how we choose to inhabit time. Letters form the pulse of a friendship by keeping these beats, all the more so since in a deliberate letter-writing practice, what’s written is designed to be kept. That takes trust. As an epistolary friendship builds over time, its store of memories and conversations records the passage of time and shapes something valuable out of it, “keeping time” in letters that become a manifestation of the friendship they carry. The time that is “kept” in letters is beautifully and precariously held by the relationship between two friends; paradoxically, we “keep” time in this way by sending it to each other.
Think about the idioms our culture uses to talk about time: we “spend” or “take” time to do something well, “put time into” an important project, or volunteer by “giving of” our time. Each of these figures of speech are nuanced metaphors for how we act through the passage of time, but whether we use them to respect someone else’s effort (“thank you for taking the time to do this!”) or complain about a lack of respect for our own (“do you know how much time I spent on that?”), they all share the premise that time is a valuable resource. Thoughtful letter-writing takes a lot of it. Letters even call attention to that fact, marking and focusing the passage of time through the events of our lives; what I find remarkable is how letters harness this time as a resource for friendship, marking it in order to give it away.
I think that while we certainly haven’t exhausted the topic of friendship, as we embark on the second year of being writing friends, it’s a timely moment to turn our focus to another theme. Do you have anything that’s been on your mind that we could explore together? Or perhaps there’s a book you’re interested in that we could read together? Let me know: the helm is yours.
Your friend, Joel
The time that goes into writing a letter makes the letter itself an expression of care and commitment. We rely on those we love, and the assumption of a letter is usually that there will be a reply.
It looks a bit like give-and-take, but despite our talk about time as having value, sending and receiving letters is unlike any commercial exchange. What we’re getting has no transferable value, and, in fact, is something precious that may never be visible to anyone but ourselves. Here is the intersection of letters and friendship: both at their best as gifts to be given, expressions of ourselves focused on another person’s good.
I met Anne in person for the second time earlier this year. The occasion was another academic conference, but this time we were old friends. The conference was held in Toronto, and after it ended, Anne and her husband joined my wife, our son, and me for dinner—the points of connection built in our letters opening out to create more interactions of grace and generosity. The evening began with introductions, continued with food and laughter, and concluded with heartfelt invitations for the future. This is the unique love of friendship at work, love that leads to a shared table and invites other loves to experience its joy.
Text: Joel Faber
Photography: Luke Cleland