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

Te Awa Kairangi (the Hutt Valley), contributed to my formation as a young adult.

      As a descendant of settlers, I bring cultural blind spots to this work. I come to this research having experienced the joys and challenges of friendships in four different countries. I have experienced cross-cultural friendships in contexts where I am a visible minority and an invisible minority. I have also experienced such friendships as part of the majority culture. Despite these diverse experiences, I have not been part of a people group that has been radically discriminated against, enslaved, or colonized. While I have experienced some forms of discrimination, I have not experienced friendship that has endangered my life, nor have I been deprived of friendship (personal or civic) or of land stewardship on the basis of my skin color or ethnic background.

As further outlined in Chapter 2, the colonial legacy in Aotearoa, including the dishonoring of Te Tiriti o Waitangi (The Treaty of Waitangi), has negatively impacted friendship possibilities. Nevertheless, I have been privileged to learn from the wisdom, hospitality, and spirituality of Māori and Polynesian friends, and to develop an awareness of Māori, bicultural, and Treaty issues. Learning has taken place through conversations, course work, reading, participation in a variety of noho marae (overnight marae stays) and hui (gatherings),⁴ and through conversations and collaboration with Māori friends.⁵ While in my previous roles as a teacher and educational consultant I sought to honor Māori and Te Tiriti through supporting teachers of full immersion Māori language classes, learning and using basic conversational Māori, and developing bicultural teaching practices, there are gaps in my knowledge and practice. Conversations associated with this research have provoked a determination to address these gaps, and to work towards becoming increasingly bilingual and bicultural as I seek to live out a practical theology of friendship.

      At the time of writing, I live with my immediate family on unceded Coast Salish territory by the Salish Sea, on the colonized continent known to many Indigenous people as Turtle Island. Here it has been a privilege to learn from Indigenous people, including Cheryl Bear (Nadleh Whut’en), Raymond Aldred (Cree), and Graydon Nicholas (Maliseet), and to learn from and with the NAIITS Indigenous Learning Community. Yet another invaluable learning experience relevant to this work was participation in the 2019 International Academy of Practical Theology conference in São Leopoldo, Brazil, with its theme of (De)coloniality and Religious Practices: Liberating Hope.

      I am aware that any proposed practical theology of friendship must reckon with the social imagination(s) operative in its contexts that perpetuate fear of and discrimination against the other and that hinder the cultivation of personal and civic friendship within communities of practice. My focus within this work is primarily on developing a transformative ideal to be worked towards. I acknowledge there are very real challenges in pursuing personal and public ideals.

I engage diverse voices as I seek to develop a rich and thick theological understanding of friendship. At times breadth is privileged over depth. This breadth is not inappropriate, given that the social imagination is formed and informed by diverse voices and sources. In fact, a more thorough practical theology of friendship would include even greater diversity. While my research predominantly draws on Western sources, traditions, disciplines, and epistemologies, I also seek to weave in Indigenous perspectives.

      This introductory chapter outlines the context for this research by providing an overview of practical theology, discussing understandings of the word practice, identifying the importance of the social and theological imagination, and outlining the methodology and structure of this research. But firstly, why would I want to study friendship? Why develop a practical theology of friendship?

      Why Friendship?

As I write, with minimized social contact and physical distancing requirements in place throughout much of the world as we collaboratively seek to protect our communities during a pandemic, our human need for connectivity and friendship has become all too evident. In early April 2020, after our first few weeks of “lockdown,” my ten-year-old son, an avid reader, protested to me that “books and videos are poor substitutes for friends.” I agreed with him. While adults have been able to maintain relationships and even forge new friendships through online forms of connectivity, some relationships have become stressed or neglected due to dependence on technology. Younger and older generations are discovering anew a need for the physical presence of others. Despite the emotional cost of isolation, friendship as a basic human need is not consistently recognized. For example, during the second lockdown in Victoria, Australia, an exemption to lockdown could be made for an “intimate relationship,” but for those who lived alone without such a relationship, no similar exemption was allowed for friendship.⁶ This restriction was subsequently modified to allow for visits with one “bubble” friend, though not without controversy. In Canada also, friendships have been vulnerable to “the divisive vagueness of provincial guidelines,” with some health messaging suggesting that, at least as far as the state is concerned, friendships are not important.⁷

The widespread need for social and civic friendship has also become all too evident as the pandemic has disproportionally impacted People of Color and been further highlighted by the violent deaths of People of Color due to the discrimination of police officers and other citizens in the United States and Canada. Ongoing deaths and injuries have highlighted systemic racism and provoked widespread protests. Long-standing systemic and social inequities have put many people from marginalized groups at increased risk of contracting and dying from Covid-19.⁸

      Covid-19 has highlighted the interdependence of human beings. While an initial sense of solidarity has, in some contexts, been challenged by political polarization and conspiracy theories, numerous memes and posts on social media express a need and desire to create a truly new normal after Covid-19, rather than to return to the way things were. Collectively, we are faced with both the opportunity and the need to rethink our ways of life. It is into this context that I advocate the metaphor of friendship and the concept of civic friendship to shape our social imagination and the new normal that many of us long for.

My interest in the formal study of friendship began over a decade ago, through an interest in the relationships of spiritual friendship and spiritual direction, with their focus on attentiveness to God, self, and other. I wondered about the possibility of bringing that same level of attentiveness to our everyday friendships, as I recognized the potential for these friendships also to be shaped by the Spirit. I subsequently became intrigued by the Māori concept of whanaungatanga (kin and kin-like relationships), the classical notion of civic friendship, and the potential for both concepts to contribute to fostering a pervasive culture of friendship. Admittedly, I initially skimmed over Aristotle’s terminology of political friendship, incorrectly assuming such a relationship was about using people. On further reading I became captivated by a broader understanding of friendship. As I dug deeper into biblical texts, I was intrigued by the manifest desire for communities to be shaped by friendship-like relationships expressed in texts more ancient than Aristotle’s. The need for communities to be shaped by care and concern for all is increasingly evident as we collaboratively seek to survive a pandemic. A concern for communities to be shaped by social friendship has been affirmed by Pope Francis in his encyclical Fratelli tutti, released in October 2020.

      While Western paradigms of relationality have occupied recent scholarship regarding friendship, contemporary Euro-Western culture is largely indifferent to the formative potential of friendship, and has much to learn from Indigenous, classical, biblical, and historical understandings of friendship, kinship, and right-relatedness. Friendship has been devalued, sidelined, trivialized, sentimentalized, and sometimes eroticized within contemporary Euro-Western culture. Currently, friendships tend to be perceived as recreational relationships.