Towards Friendship-Shaped Communities: A Practical Theology of Friendship. Anne-Marie Ellithorpe

Acknowledgments

      At the beginning of a book that seeks to articulate a practical theology of friendship, I firstly acknowledge God, people, and land as sustaining me throughout this writing project. I express my gratitude first and foremost to the Creator, the ultimate source and sustainer of all life, love, and friendship.

      I am deeply grateful for the friends, communities, traditions, and resources that have provided various forms of inspiration, sustenance, and support in the crafting of this book. This project builds upon my doctoral journey and thus I express my heartfelt thanks to my supervisors, Dr. Neil Pembroke, Dr. Charles Ringma, and Dr. Irene Alexander for their mentoring, insight, and friendship. I also wish to express my gratitude for the support provided by an Australian Government Research Training Program (RTP) Scholarship and an Australian Postgraduate Award as I pursued this research through the University of Queensland’s School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry. This project goes beyond my doctoral work with a more explicit focus on Indigenous values, understandings, and experiences. I am particularly thankful to Rev. Dr. Rangi Nicholson for his encouragement and mentoring in this regard. He has been an invaluable Māori language adviser and cultural consultant.

      Others who have encouraged me with the importance and contemporary relevance of this work include Dr. Susan Phillips, Rev. Dr. Patricia Dutcher-Walls, Rabbi Dr. Laura Duhan-Kaplan, and Dr. Paul Wadell. Several anonymous reviewers of my book manuscript have also emphasized its timeliness; I am grateful for their positive and constructive feedback. I have discovered various conversation partners through the libraries I have had access to throughout my research and am particularly thankful for access to the library resources of the Vancouver School of Theology and the University of British Columbia.

I thank Matua Rangi Nicholson for his encouragement that this work is relevant to the future of Aotearoa New Zealand, and for his constructive feedback on my chapter exploring coexisting friendship worlds in Aotearoa, Hannah Chapman and Sina Asomua Bishop for their encouraging feedback on the same chapter, and Sister Josephine Gorman and Joanne White for supporting my exploration of the life and work of Suzanne Aubert. I am grateful to Paul and Kathleen Wagler for friendship-focused conversations and their ongoing generous hospitality, Jonathan Wilson and Soohwan Park for making possible a writing retreat, Janet Eastwood for generously giving her time to assist me in sharpening my writing, and my mother, Glenis Maindonald, for the provision of several illustrations. My family have been invaluable sources of encouragement, support, and inspiration throughout this project; I am especially indebted to James Ellithorpe for the many ways in which he has supported me in this work. I deeply appreciate all the conversation partners and friends, past and present, in book form or in person, who have formed me, informed this writing, and provoked a vision of communal nurture of friendship-shaped communities.

      I am grateful to all those at Wiley who worked to bring this book to print. I extend particular thanks to Catriona King for sharing my vision for this work and to Clelia Petracca for bringing it to completion.

I acknowledge with gratitude the beauty and sustenance of the unceded Coast Salish territory of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples, where much of my writing has taken place, as well as that of my homeland, Aotearoa New Zealand. This work has been deeply shaped by aspects of the story of Aotearoa, and thus I provide here two maps for the benefit of the reader who is less familiar with this country and its stories. Prior to colonization, the map of Aotearoa was oral and told through narratives. In one such narrative, Māui is credited with fishing up Te Ika-a-Māui (the North Island) from his canoe Te Waka-a-Māui (the South Island). Map 1 depicts place names related to this account and is oriented with Māui’s canoe above the fish. Map 2 features place names mentioned in my Introduction and in Chapter 2 and is oriented north to south.

      Map 1 Māui and Aotearoa New Zealand. Source: Te Ara The Encyclopedia of New Zealand.

      Map 2 Aotearoa New Zealand. Source: map template from Antigoni, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons, annotated by the author.

Introduction

      This book investigates questions of friendship from the perspective of practical theology, with specific consideration given to practices of friendship and to the social and theological imagination. Through this research I argue that friendship is essential for flourishing and for an ideal of multidimensional private-public friendship that overflows into social friendship, civic friendship, and reform. I advocate for the nurture of Spirit-shaped friendships and friendship-shaped communities, that is, of friendships that are shaped by the Spirit and of communities that are shaped by attitudes and actions of friendship. Such friendships include extended family and family-like relationships. Our actions and attitudes affect a broader community than our immediate circle. Relational practices and the creative, proactive nurturing of various dimensions of friendship have a multigenerational effect. Friendship is precious not only for its own sake but for the sake of further generations and ought to be intentionally built up between persons, communities, and people-groups.

      Rather than being in opposition to God or love of neighbor, friendship provides an alternative way of understanding relationship with God and neighbor and has a long and rich history in and beyond Western Christianity. Moreover, in explicitly Christian contexts, an overarching theological narrative of friendship may serve to shape and ground all else.

Contemporary communities stand to gain immensely from reincorporating understandings and practices of earlier times and, no less, from Indigenous understandings of kinship and friendship. Indigenous perspectives remind us that relationality is inherent to the fabric of the universe.¹ Friendship is a practice through and by which we may build genuinely mutual relationships with people who are other, unlearn internalized colonial patterns, and decolonize founding and formative stories.

I begin by introducing myself and acknowledging my social context. Māori, the Indigenous people of Aotearoa New Zealand, traditionally introduce themselves with a greeting that links them to their ancestors and to the land by identifying their tribal mountain and waters, by naming the canoe on which their ancestors came to Aotearoa, and by acknowledging their extended family, clan, and tribe.² My knowledge of my own heritage is poor by comparison.

My ancestors immigrated to Aotearoa primarily from England, including Guernsey, as well as from Scotland, Ireland, France, Denmark, the United States, and the Reunion Islands. They arrived from 1842 onwards, settling in a variety of locations including Motueka, Blenheim, and the lower North Island. The earliest arrivals I know of are the Newport family from Buckinghamshire on The Sir Charles Forbes and the Kinzett family from Warwickshire, on The Thomas Harrison, both into Nelson, and the Dodge family from Wiltshire into Wellington on The Clifton, all in 1842.³

      I do not know specific ways in which my primarily working-class ancestors contributed to the oppressive colonization of Aotearoa. I do know that at the turn of the century my mother’s great-grandparents, John Marple and Evangeline Tindill, lived amongst Māori in ‘Rūātoki, a community with a long history of resistance to colonization in the Bay of Plenty. Their granddaughter, Nellie Hunter, my Nana, spoke Māori fluently as a child growing up in this region. Sadly, she lost this knowledge once her family moved to the city.

      Tāmaki Makaurau (Auckland) is where my early formation took place. The landscape of Te Upoko o Te Ika a Māui (the head of the fish of Māui,