‘Cultivating Friendships’ - Rev. Adam Slate

‘Vulnerability: The Key to Close Relationships’ by Karen Young

The best part of being human is being able to connect with other humans. We’re hardwired for it. We live in tribes and families, work in groups, love as couples and thrive in friendships. The drive to connect is in all of us whether we acknowledge it or not.

Yet, we’re seeing more loneliness, more depression, more broken relationships, more disconnection. What’s happening?

Vulnerability is the driving force of connection. It’s brave. It’s tender. It’s impossible to connect without it.

But we’ve turned it into a weakness.

We’ve made ourselves ‘strong’. We’ve toughened up, hardened up and protected ourselves from being hurt. We’ve protected ourselves from vulnerability and disallowed the surrender. Here’s the problem. When we close down our vulnerability, we are shielded from hurt, but we are also shielded from love, intimacy and connection. They come to us through the same door. When we close it to one, we close it to all.

Introduction

How many of you saw the film The Banshees of Inisherin from a few years ago?

It’s a beautiful film. It earned a bunch of awards, and virtually every critics list I have seen puts it as one of the top three films of 2022. Visually it’s magnificent.

In the film, we meet Paderaic and Colm, two lifelong friends evaluating the state of their friendship. I won’t tell you much about the story because I hope you will see it if you haven’t already, but the two men have vastly different opinions about their friendship and this difference of opinion plays out to dire consequences.

One of the things about the film that drew me in–maybe the main thing that attracted me in a film with many compelling features–was the way the two friends express profound vulnerability throughout the story. Their honesty is rendered even more raw under the microscope of the small village in which they live. Both of the main characters at times express their vulnerability badly, clumsily. And at other times, so beautifully.

Friendships are Important and Healthy

We are drawn to friendship both because of our human needs and because of a higher calling to love and to look after each other.

Friendships bring us wholeness that radiates out to the people around us through our actions and behaviours. In this way friendships help us bring wholeness to the world. We see this call for strong friendships across religions.

• In the Qur’an, the prophet Mohammad (PBUH) says that we are shaped by the faith of our friends. Friends are understood to be an important part of our social existence and contribute greatly to the development of one’s personality and other aspects of our lives.

• Friendship is highly valued in Hindu traditions: an ideal towards which we are encouraged to aspire in all our relationships. 

• The biblical call to love our neighbour and to show hospitality to strangers is central to the Jewish and Christian scriptures.

Friendships have been shown to be linked with better physical and mental health. People with close relationships have half the risk of premature death from all causes.

Our lives move through many phases: childhood; schooling; jobs; maybe romantic relationships; maybe children; empty nesting. These cycles all tend to happen at distinct points in our lives; yet friendships stretch across these phases and provide continuity in the midst of life changes. 

Given the stability and sense of security that our friendships can offer, it is surprising most of us do not prioritize them the way we prioritise other parts of our lives.

Spiritual traditions often focus on kindness and love–what is sometimes called agape love, a ‘selfless, unconditional, and creative goodwill for all people.’ But it is our everyday friendships that offer the life-sustaining experiences that support us to live fully into the larger world.

Friendships Are Difficult to Maintain

So what keeps us from going out and making tons of friends? If friendships are so healthy and life-sustaining, why not become close friends with everyone in this room, so that you are forever bathed in acceptance, validation, love, and support?

Well… lots of reasons.

Friendships take work. They have to be nurtured. One estimate says that it takes 200 hours to make a close friend. So doing a rough count of the people at this gathering, you would need to spend an hour with one of us every single day for over 25 years to become good friends with all of us. That is a lot of time; it is a big task that would be hard for many of us to manage with everything else we have going on.

For you over-achievers… if you spent two hours a day, you could get that down to 10-15 years!

Another challenge is that we have a harder time developing and maintaining friendships as we age. A recent study has shown that the average age at which we meet our best friends is 21.

I said earlier that friendships can last across major phases of our lives; that is true because we can opt into them for as long as we like. But as we get busy with work, our kids, our partners… it is also easy to put off those opportunities to maintain connections.

I have a good friend back in the States with whom I had coffee several times a week. Even during the pandemic, we started many mornings sitting on opposite ends of his porch unpacking whatever was on our minds.

We have tried to keep that up since I have been in London–usually thanks to him messaging me on my day off to let me know he is starting to boil a kettle. But when I have a busy week, it is the easiest thing to drop because it is not urgent like a meeting, a to-do list, or getting a gathering message ready for Sunday.

Friendships also are harder to maintain because people are more mobile than we used to be. A survey following good friends over a period of 20 years found that they moved on average every three or four years. And when we do move, we move further than earlier generations did.

One researcher looked at his family’s “lifetime track,” the area in which people move over the course of their lives. His great-grandfather lived within an area of roughly 40 square miles. His grandfather lived within an area of 400 square miles. His father moved within a 4000 mile area. And his life had spanned a 40,000 mile area. In spite of many amazing tools available to stay in touch from far away–I’m looking at you, Zoom congregants!--distance can nevertheless puts stress on friendships.

And then there are the everyday structural challenges that get in the way of us making and keeping friends. Being busy at work. The tendency to spend more time on our intimate relationships. Obligations related to raising children. Friends feeling like they need to take sides in a divorce or separation.

Friendships Require Us to Be Vulnerable

In spite of all these things that challenge friendships, they often fail simply because we do not tend to them the way we should. To make a friendship work, we need to invest in it, take risks, and have those risks pay off in terms of a positive responses from the other person.

In the Hindu Bhagavad Gita, Krishna characterizes the sort of human being who is dear to him. He describes this person as compassionate, non-possessive, forgiving, and free from self-centeredness. These descriptors give us a guide for understanding what supports a friendship, what kind of risks we need to take to be a good friend: namely humility and vulnerability.

Ninth century Muslim leader, Imam Isma'il al-Bukhari, writes that if you wish to mention the faults of your friend, mention your own faults first.” In other words, before being critical, be vulnerable.

Lest you think all my sources about friendship are ancient religious texts, the Mayo Clinic also offers suggestions for making and keeping friends, and their advice centers on vulnerability as well.

They suggest introducing yourself to people and reaching out to those you have enjoyed meeting at social gatherings. That sounds a bit like asking someone on a date, doesn’t it? Because it involves the same kind of risk putting oneself out there.

To sustain a friendship, the Mayo Clinic says to be willing to open up about yourself and share personal experiences, thoughts, and concerns. Seeking an appropriate level of self-disclosure—leaving room for your friend to also be able to share—is an important part of a balanced friendship. 

The psychologist John Gottman has introduced the idea of “bids”: small requests for connection, like starting a conversation, extending a social invitation, or asking for help. When one person extends a bid and another responds favorably, it can “deepen the bonds of friendship and trigger a cycle of trust and vulnerability.”

Some friends are tuned into our moods and behaviors in a way that can make us feel very exposed if we are not used to being vulnerable in our relationships. We even hear stories of people who have known a close friend was pregnant before the friend knew themself. That can be a bit unsettling for some of us, to have a close friend who is paying closer attention to us than we may be.

If you are someone who can be anxious sharing parts of yourself in friendships and social interactions, try this mindfulness exercise. Each time you expect the worst, pay attention to how often the situation you are afraid of actually plays out. You may notice that the scenarios you fear do not happen as often as you expect.

This does not mean all of our friendships are going to work out. Like the two friends in The Banshees of Inisherin, sometimes we do not see eye to eye. Sometimes friendships do not last. And sometimes those things are out of our control.

A friendship that does not work out, or runs its course, does not mean something is our fault. And even in those cases where it may be, it does not mean we are a bad person. It means we are a human person.

But if we are not willing to take risks, to make those “bids”–those small requests for connection– then we let our fears take from us the very thing that we need most to grow strong and healthy friendships.

A Word about Apologies

Perhaps the part of relationships that require the most vulnerability and humility is apologies. It is tempting to only apologize when we feel there is no other choice, when we have gotten into enough of a mess that it would be too conspicuous not to.

I would like to reframe apologies as a tool for strengthening our friendships and other relationships. To think of them not as a last resort, but as a chance to show how important the friendship is to you.

A while back I was listening to a podcast on masculinity, and one of the guests discussed how, if we can put away the idea that we have to be perfect and cannot make mistakes, we can train ourselves to see feedback about how we have been wrong as a gift. As a chance to learn. As a chance to make things right.

Not everyone gives us feedback with the care and thoughtfulness that allows us to hear it like a friend can.

And when we apologise, we let our friends know we value friendship over our pride, that we acknowledge we have hurt them, that we are listening and paying attention, and that we have learned something.

I cannot overstate how powerful these moments can be to a friendship, and encourage you to look for them and make the most of them.

Opportunities at New Unity

Most faith leaders will tell you that the magic that happens in a spiritual community–the glue that holds the community together–is what is often called ‘small group ministry’... groups of 6 to 10 people who meet weekly or monthly. Traditionally these are the new member groups, bible studies, the potluck dinners. Here at New Unity, it’s the monthly Sharing Circle that happens today after the gathering. It’s the weekly meditation group, the Grief Support group, the Men’s Circle, the various social action teams, the new First Thursdays Social Club, the Global Justice Discussion Group that is kicking off at the beginning of June, the choir. You could even say that the trustees are a kind of small group ministry.

These small groups are how we nurture relationship in our community, and if you ask pretty much anyone who you think of as being really connected to this place, they’re probably in at least one of these small groups.

I will share a ministry secret with you. I’m going to tell you my highly confidential and finely-honed criteria for deciding whether to do a small group here at New Unity. It’s this: if you ask about starting one, I will say yes pretty much every single time. I will support you however I can, from finding a good time and getting it in the diary, to helping facilitate if you want me to, to being a cheerleader. They’re that important.

Conclusion

One of my kids once wondered aloud to me what the world might be like if people in relationship would simply be willing to say to each other “I want attention from you.”

What if we could all just say that kind of thing to each other. “I’d like your attention.” “I need a friend.” “I need help.” “I’m feeling down.”

What if we could all access that kind of vulnerability all the time? How much more might we contribute to bringing wholeness to the world if we could pursue that kind of wholeness for ourselves?

I would like to challenge us. Sometime this week, pick one person with whom you would like to deepen your friendship. And pick one thing that your resistance to being vulnerable keeps you from saying. Nothing big. You do not have to profess eternal love for your friendship or share your most personal revelation. But find something, maybe something you admire about them, or an overdue apology, and say it. And then–here is the important part–pay attention to how that moment feels, whether it has an impact on your friendship, and how you feel about it later. Did a scenario you fear come pass, or did your action help bring you closer?

These acts of taking risks, of humility, of emotional investment form the foundation on which strong friendships are built.

It is a fragile foundation that requires care and attention, but we are well-suited for the task if only we can value our friendships as the precious resources that they are.

May we be that wise and that strong.