Nearly everyone has friends. Some have lots and do a great deal of socialising. Some have a few close friends and more aquaintances. I suspect that how many friends you have and, possibly, how much time you spend in maintaining those friendships depends largely on your personality, mainly if you are an extrovert (lots of friends and maintenance) or an introvert (not so many or so much).
A lecture in the Ethics module last year at college started me thinking about friendship. According to the lecturer, friendship requires some sort of equality between the two people concerned, especially equality in knowledge about each other, and in the relationship – you can’t be friends if one is exploiting the other in some way. At the time I was pondering over a new friendship that seemed to be uneven and wondering on how it was going to work out. (And it has worked out fine because it has evened itself up.) You choose to spend time with your friends and to get to know them, and they you. It is a mutual relationship, in which you each give time, attention and love, to the other. Most of my friends make me laugh too; joy in and with each other should be there as well.
But it seems that part of the process of friendship is being vulnerable to each other. That is something that ordinands are told about too, that being a priest or pastor means allowing yourself to be vulnerable. I think that I would worry about a minister who has no close friends – or perhaps whose only close friend is their ‘nearest and dearest’. How else do you learn and practise being vulnerable?
And here we come to a possible problem for those of us who are ministers living in parishes. How do we make new friends? Where do we find them and who are they? And how do you manage boundaries in such friendships?
Whenever I have moved in the past I have been pretty quick in joining a few things – partly because those are my ways of relaxing and partly because it’s a good way into a community. The advantage of having children, especially youngish children, is that you automatically find yourself drawn into the local community through them and their friends’ parents. If, like me, you don’t have children you have to make the effort. But finding time to do anything other than ‘work’ (and study for me) is not easy. I certainly spend more time and effort now on maintaining friendships I have brought with me.
After four months as a curate, I have got to know a couple of people in my community who I think may become friends. But they are also my parishioners which raises the problems of equality and boundaries. It is easier to separate parish and personal life and find friends outside the parishes and among other clergy. But doing that feels like a bit of a cop out. We are called to live in these communities and be part of them. At my sending church I was fortunate to find two very good friends in the curate and his wife. Looking back now I realise that was quite an unusual thing…
A lecture in the Ethics module last year at college started me thinking about friendship. According to the lecturer, friendship requires some sort of equality between the two people concerned, especially equality in knowledge about each other, and in the relationship – you can’t be friends if one is exploiting the other in some way. At the time I was pondering over a new friendship that seemed to be uneven and wondering on how it was going to work out. (And it has worked out fine because it has evened itself up.) You choose to spend time with your friends and to get to know them, and they you. It is a mutual relationship, in which you each give time, attention and love, to the other. Most of my friends make me laugh too; joy in and with each other should be there as well.
But it seems that part of the process of friendship is being vulnerable to each other. That is something that ordinands are told about too, that being a priest or pastor means allowing yourself to be vulnerable. I think that I would worry about a minister who has no close friends – or perhaps whose only close friend is their ‘nearest and dearest’. How else do you learn and practise being vulnerable?
And here we come to a possible problem for those of us who are ministers living in parishes. How do we make new friends? Where do we find them and who are they? And how do you manage boundaries in such friendships?
Whenever I have moved in the past I have been pretty quick in joining a few things – partly because those are my ways of relaxing and partly because it’s a good way into a community. The advantage of having children, especially youngish children, is that you automatically find yourself drawn into the local community through them and their friends’ parents. If, like me, you don’t have children you have to make the effort. But finding time to do anything other than ‘work’ (and study for me) is not easy. I certainly spend more time and effort now on maintaining friendships I have brought with me.
After four months as a curate, I have got to know a couple of people in my community who I think may become friends. But they are also my parishioners which raises the problems of equality and boundaries. It is easier to separate parish and personal life and find friends outside the parishes and among other clergy. But doing that feels like a bit of a cop out. We are called to live in these communities and be part of them. At my sending church I was fortunate to find two very good friends in the curate and his wife. Looking back now I realise that was quite an unusual thing…
2 comments:
If you want to borrow any of my children at any point you know you only have to ask.
Interesting to know.
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