The Wonder Report: April 30, 2021

Along for the Ride

Apr 30, 2021

Hello again! We made it to another Friday. I’m so glad you’ve decided to join me for this week’s Wonder Report. In fact, having you along on this wonder-chasing journey is what I want to write about today.

In the eighth chapter of his book, On the Road with Saint Augustine: A Real-World Spirituality for the Restless Heart, James K. A. Smith begins, “Road movies are always buddy movies: the Blues Brothers, Thelma and Louise, Wendy and Lucy, Billy and Wyatt easy-riding across American, the entire family crammed into their VW van in Little Miss Sunshine.”

The first decade of my life after college, though, was less about one long journey with a partner in crime, and more like the xenia of The Odyssey, hosts who welcomed Odysseus along his journey, providing more or less the kind of friendship the traveling warrior needed. I moved often, across state lines even, and rarely stayed in one job or city more than a year or two. The list of people I call friends from that season is long, though few have continued along with me to subsequent destinations. I think of them now as “my friends in Georgia,” or “the group I hung out with at Covenant Presbyterian,” or “Bible study friends.”

But over the years, I’ve also found a few Thelmas to my Louise, a few buddies for the road, friends who are more like family and ideally equipped for the journey I’m on.

“We hit the road to find ourselves but we hardly ever do it alone. The paradox is that the voyage of discovery—the search for authenticity—is mine, and yet the search almost always seems to be shared. Becoming authentic is how we’re alone together. Our individualism remains oddly communal. ‘I’m off to find myself,’ we exclaim. ‘Wanna come?’”

I recently took an assessment to determine my enneagram style. If you aren’t familiar with it, the enneagram is a way of thinking about the human psyche which is principally understood and taught as a typology of nine interconnected personality types. People who know me well will not be surprised to learn that I am a 4w3, which means I’m a person who values authenticity and efficiency.

Holding authenticity as a value is something that leads to all kinds of interesting behaviors: it means my closets need to be as tidy as the rest of the house (or conversely, the rest of the house only as tidy as the closets); it means I often overexplain myself for fear of leaving out a detail or coming off as insincere; it also means I feel deeply hurt when people misunderstand me or accuse me of being shallow.

Sometimes, my need to be authentic comes to me so intensely that I separate myself from the crowd and its influence; I decide to travel alone to be sure my true self doesn’t get wrapped up into group think or divided into one camp or another. As Smith puts it, summarizing German philosopher Martin Heidegger, “authenticity, then, always looks like an emergence from ‘them,’ a refusal of conformity, because inauthenticity is, by definition, a failure to resist the domination of Others, the the tyranny of the ‘they.’ Others constitute an existential threat” to the self. Clearly Heidegger also was an Enneagram 4. 😊

One example of how I do this is my on again, off again, on again relationship with social media, where my continuous struggle to be my true self without giving into the “existential threats” of algorithms, game theory, and mob mentality pushes me to consider leaving again almost daily. I’ve also struggled (more as young person than now) to stay in groups or remain in jobs if I felt pulled in a direction that was contrary to my true self. The constant moving and job changing of my 20s and early 30s, then, is another example.

But I like the question that Smith poses about half-way through the chapter: “What if authenticity [especially the kind that keeps me on the road, self-protecting] is the source of our loneliness? And what if the opposite of loneliness is finding ourselves together [on the journey together]? What if friends [and even communities] aren’t threats or competitors but gifts?”

According to Smith’s account, Augustine also struggled to not be swept up into losing himself to a group of friends. “Friendship can be a dangerous enemy,” Augustine once wrote. But he also grew to see the value of friendship, that friendship could even be a “conduit of grace.” Maybe most importantly, he came to see that friendship was not simply a threat to authenticity, but a tool to attain it, especially when people kept “showing up in Augustine’s life, refusing to let him remain where he is, prodding and prompting him to answer the call” of God on his life.

As I’ve gotten older and (hopefully!) matured, this is what I’ve found in my own true friends of the road, those that are not merely hosts along the way but fellow travelers whose journey overlaps with mine. They don’t merely welcome me and send me on my way when my authentic self feels threatened. They look deeper inside me and show me the authentic self I don’t fully know myself.

“Alone I would not have done it,” Augustine insisted repeatedly when he was describing a scene from his youth when his friends convinced him to steal some pears. But it’s a refrain he could also apply later to his conversion, to his journey toward God. "I couldn’t be happy without friends,” he said later in his life.

Proverbs 18:24 says, “A person of too many friends comes to ruin, but there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother.” And maybe this is part of the answer to our problem of authenticity. Maybe we can’t be our true selves with too many people. But we can’t be our true selves with too few people, either.

I like what Augustine says in his Rule of Life, established in the monastic community he led during his time as bishop. “Whenever you go out, walk together, and when you reach your destination, stay together.”

May it be so for us all.

Forget-Me-Nots in my front yard, one of my favorite spring blooms

Wonder Challenge

What if friends aren’t threats or competitors but gifts?

Friendship is a sticky wicket for those of us in the 21st century. Even the word “friend” has been co-opted by social media, and many of us have far too many “friends” to feel as lonely as we do. And of course there’s the issue of our authentic selves, and whether or not our friends help us feel more or less like the people we are destined to become.

Here’s the challenge: Consider your friends. Make a list if you need to. Who are the friends who have “shown up in your life, refusing to let you remain where you are, prodding and prompting you to answer the call” of God on your life? Write a letter to one of those friends, and thank them for helping you become who God has made you to be.

This and That

Here are a few articles, essays, and more to give you hope, to make you think, to grow your faith, and as always, to help root you in love.

1. On Good Parties by Tara Isabella Burton for Breaking Ground. This interesting essay talks about the difference between Good Parties and Bad Parties, making a case that parties, and especially fun and even silly parties, are an important practice in helping us make and maintain friendships with people from throughout our lives.

From the essay: “This sense of the carnival, in turn, helps us know one another more deeply. This is not because, as Erving Goffman might have it, we are always playing roles—that we are different people in the boardroom and at the bar, and that there is no inherent self. Nor is it because there is some primordial or authentic self that is somehow stymied by the ordinary course of social relations—that we can only be, or see, our ‘true’ selves outside of more formalized social contexts. Rather, it is because, at a gathering of friends, a miniature polis of people united by no fact other than friendship, be it of personal affection or shared affinity toward some good (and it is in practice all but impossible to separate the two), we are able to most carefully turn our faculties of attention to those we love. Because a party has no telos other than itself, no productive goal or clear outcome, it allows us to pay closer attention to those we love, as they are; it allows us, in turn, to be vulnerable to those who love us. When we celebrate joyfully with one another, in this liminal space, we are also seeing those we love as they really are.”

2. Friendship is a place of sacrifice—and sanctification by Eve Tushnet for America. One of the things I appreciated most about this essay was its treatment of friendship as the important, but neglected, institution that it is. She writes about a very close friendship between two women, a relationship called a “Big Friendship” in the book they write together. But often, their Big Friendship gets shoved to the side because there’s little designated space for such a friendship in our contemporary society.

From the essay: “Sow and Friedman were there for one another through mourning and chronic illness. The love and understanding they offered one another helped them learn what to look for in romantic relationships. They had keys to each other’s apartments. They were each other’s emergency contact.

“Much of the language they had for this inextricability was borrowed from romantic partnerships: ‘We gave wedding gifts jointly, signed, “Love, the Sow-Friedmans.”’ Partly this is just because many forms of love resemble one another. Sow and Friedman even had their own limerence, the early period of obsessive infatuation that the lovestruck sometimes suffer. But partly we struggle for ways to explain the depth of a ‘big friendship’ because these relationships have been pushed out of the public sphere: Friendship is for children; but once you can reach the YA shelves, messy love triangles are where it’s at.”

3. Parents Are Sacrificing Their Social Lives on the Altar of Intensive Parenting by Joshua Coleman for The Atlantic. This essay follows very logically on the heals of the last essay. One of the reasons there is little space for friendship in our contemporary society is because family life, and particularly parenting, have taken its place.

From the essay: “According to one study, the average number of close relationships that adults had with friends, co-workers, and neighbors decreased by a third from 1985 to 2004. Meanwhile, the number of hours they spent with children skyrocketed. From 1965 to 2011, married fathers nearly tripled their time (from 2.6 hours to 7.2 hours a week) with children, while married mothers increased their time by almost a third (from 10.6 hours to 14.3 hours a week) in the same time period, according to a 2013 report by Pew. In that time, single mothers almost doubled the amount of time spent with their children, from 5.8 hours a week in 1985 to 11.3 hours a week in 2011, while single fathers went from less than one hour a week in 1985 to about eight hours a week in 2011.”

What I’m Reading

Check out these books, magazines, or other publications I'm currently reading or have just finished. I'll only share resources I highly recommend ... and I'd love to hear your recommendations, too!

Becoming All Things: How Small Changes Lead to Lasting Connections Across Cultures

by Michelle Ami Reyes

I haven’t read this one yet (my plan to read only 12 nonfiction books this year has really limited me!), but this new release by Michelle Ami Reyes is timely and much-needed. I know Michelle personally and am really looking forward to diving in on this one when I get a chance (I may even squeeze this one in before the end of the year to make my reading list more like a baker’s dozen).

From the Publisher: “Cultural identities and cross-cultural engagement are not things that anyone can choose to ignore anymore, least of all Christians. Many of us want to have diverse friends and are passionate about justice. But if we are serious about cross-cultural relationships—real relationships that lead to understanding, healing and solidarity across cultural lines—we need to be willing to change. And that's not something that comes easy for any of us.

“In Becoming All Things, Michelle Ami Reyes offers a poignant discussion on the challenges surrounding cross-cultural relationships in America today, including the reasons for cultural difference, stereotyping, appropriation, gentrification, racism, and more. Seeking to deconstruct these things in our own lives, Reyes focuses on the concept of cultural accommodation in 1 Corinthians 9:19-23, and looks at the ways in which we need to adapt who we are in order to become all things to all people.”

Writer’s Notebook

One of my greatest joys is to encourage writers as they hone their craft, develop their voice, and live a meaningful writing life. Here are some tips, insights, prompts, and more to help you as you write.

Last week we talked about the importance of taking a break from writing when the word life seems overwhelming. But we don’t always need weeks away from the page to gain new perspective. Sometimes all we need is a walk.

In “On the Link Between Great Thinking and Obsessive Walking,” Jeremy DeSilva describes the lives of several great writers whose regular habit included walking. From Charles Darwin, whom DeSilva writes about at length, to Charles Dickens, many authors often attributed some of their best thinking, and therefore some of their best writing, to walking. The poet Mary Oliver was actually known to write while walking during the years she lived in Provincetown on Cape Cod.

Walking isn’t just a distraction or a mental reset, though. Psychologists and neuroscientists have studied walking’s affect on cognitive and creative processes, and according to DeSilva, “Walking changes our brains, and it impacts not only creativity, but also memory.”

Nineteenth-century English poet William Wordsworth was said to have walked 180,000 miles in his life. I don’t know about you, but I have a lot of miles to go to catch up with that.

So don’t wait until you’re flummoxed to get up out of your chair. Take a walk today; your writing will thank you.

Well, you’ve come to the end of another Wonder Report! Thanks again for sharing this time with me. If you’d like to send me a note or ask a question, you can hit reply and end up in my inbox. Or you can also leave a comment on this newsletter, which will live in the archive over on Substack. It’s one of my favorite features of this platform.

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