Tag Archives: relationships

Knowing & Being Known: a book review

Posted in books, recommendations, singleness by

Last week I was walking in the snow with a friend and we were talking about the books we’ll read during Christmas break.

“Remind me of the title of the book you said everyone should read,” she said.

“Well, right now I have two books that I’m saying everyone should read,” I said. “Are you thinking of Relational Spirituality  or The Body Teaches the Soul?”

“No—there was one before those.”

I doubled over laughing.

I can’t help that I’m the enthusiast who is sure that of course everyone will love whatever I love. And that means that I make superlative statements sometimes. But yes. I read a lot and because reading time is limited, I work hard to read the best. Which of course means others will want to read them too.  

Then I remembered that before the last two books I really loved and enthused about, there was one a month earlier: Knowing and Being Known by Erin Moniz.

About once a year, I hear about a freshly-published book, and I know I need to read it right away and shouldn’t wait until I can buy it cheaply used, which is usually how I buy books. Last year, it was How To Know a Person by David Brooks. This spring Tyler Staton’s A Familiar Stranger was another one that I knew I couldn’t wait until I could buy a used copy. 

This makes two new books this year. No—there was also A Teachable Spirit by A. J. Swoboda that also everyone should read, but I digress. Another digression: I sometimes also read old books. On the Incarnation is perfect and lovely for this time of year.

Knowing and Being Known answered the sometimes-whispered, but often-silent questions about loneliness and ache for companionship. Erin speaks from the perspective of working with college students who are navigating relationships and find themselves floundering between their ideals and their gritty, disappointing reality.

She found that behavior modification wasn’t changing students’ lives in the ways they were longing for. She could tell them “Stop dating losers.” But while she could give solid advice, it didn’t address the deeper hunger driving the behavior. So she went on a search to explore the theology of intimacy: what is in the good news of Jesus that meets the universal hunger for intimacy? 

Other researchers have identified three essential building blocks for healthy, sustainable relationships: 

  • Self-giving love: reciprocity
  • Attention/curiosity: orientation toward and seeking the other
  • Commitment: choosing each other repeatedly; mutuality

Erin expands on these, and then broadens the points and finds them modeled perfectly in the Trinity. 

“…the revelation of mutuality and freedom in the Trinity challenges individual, entitled autonomy. The Trinity’s mutual love of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit defines for us the balance of interconnected love and freedom. 

That we are hardwired for intimacy harkens back to an origin story of intimacy that yields the eternal goodness, beauty, and abundance that existed before the dawn of time.”

This is the good news of the Gospel: that the magnet of our desire is pulled inexorably toward  the north star of God’s love, the model and perfection of intimacy.

And don’t think we’re talking only about sexual intimacy, although that’s a valid hunger. This north star is much, much wider and deeper than that one level of intimacy, and it is accessible to everyone everywhere. That’s good news!

I love how Erin addresses loneliness. She acknowledges the hard realities of extended singleness but goes on to name a deeper reality: loneliness is part of the human experience. Further, she says, “I do not believe it is loneliness we fear. What we actually fear is the things loneliness reveals….There are other things driving the pain we describe as loneliness.” 

I think she’s 200% right. I live alone and I love it most of the time. I’m not usually lonely, but when it does descend at odd times, I subconsciously get very creative at avoiding the discomfort. But even a healthy, life-giving marriage wouldn’t fix that. My married friends tell me this and I believe them.

It takes a ton of courage to sit with the questions that lie beneath loneliness. But when we find that courage and that silence, we discover what is under that angst and what we really believe about ourselves, our future, God, and those we love. If we can learn to steer our magnets toward our true north, many of our questions and longings will order themselves under that star, like iron filings tracing the path between strong magnets. 

I’m not saying it as well as Erin does, so get yourself a copy and read it and underline it and discuss it with your friends. I’m not getting paid to promote this. I just want others to  discover the richness of a message that has the potential to comfort and coach toward deeper peace and understanding of each other and of God. So go ahead and order a copy for yourself and a friend as a gift to both of you. It could be a great way to start a new year!

My book talks about loneliness too, and has suggestions for when you’re feeling left behind. You can buy it here.

Fairy Rings and Circles

Posted in community, gratitude, singleness by

Photo by Mahad Aamir on Unsplash

I’ve been thinking about circles and the ways they provide spaces of beauty, nurture, and life.

Some of my most formative, life-giving, sacred memories happened when I was sitting around a circle. Not in straight rows, not one-on-one, but in a circle. There were camp chairs or blocks of wood, benches, or floor pillows so some people were sitting higher or lower but no one was outside the circle. Both men and women sat in the various circles, people of many ages and life experiences.

A physical object is usually in the center of the circle. We sit around Sunday lunch or a tray of nachos or a crackling fire or a coffee table with a candle and tea. The object in the center isn’t our sole focus, but it gives us a hub to gather around and something to watch if we feel twitchy and unable to meet someone’s eye.

A circle says everyone matters, every voice is valuable–even the voice that would otherwise stay quiet. No one can hide, and it’s safe enough that no one wants to hide. The circle includes, expands, takes in, listens, responds. In these spaces, there’s one conversation happening that everyone contributes to, not splattered clusters of discussions, although those also have value. The words I carry away with me often begin with:

What I hear you saying is….

Have you considered…?

What if…?

You need to know….

I never thought of…in that way.

I heard Jesus say…

I remember circles with gales of rollicking laughter that helped set my world right again. I remember deep questions with long silences. I remember thoughtful observations and poetry read. Food is always a nice feature, and tissues for tears are essential. I remember advice given to me that I could hand to someone else in turn. What’s spoken was usually simple but valuable because it was born out of experience.

To be clear: not all circles are life-changing. Sometimes the conversation is about the lettuce in the garden or the housing market or wall paint. I don’t love small talk, but I’ve learned to try hard to engage even there because it gives me data for conversations with those people in the future. Small talk is a window into what they care about and it establishes trust and safety. (Read The Six Conversations by Heather Holleman for more ideas and guidance about conversations.)

When you’re done with small talk, the real enjoyment and life-giving exchanges happen with good questions.

What have you been processing lately?

What’s big for you next week?

Are you happy?

What are your dreams for the next 10 years?

These are the kinds of questions that enable knowing and being known, a level of intimacy everyone hungers for. These questions went deep fast in the circles I’ve sat in recently. I love that circles are a recurring theme of my story. I blogged about it here before and probably will again.

You can choose a favorite question to keep in your back pocket for the next circle you encounter.

Laurence Koo, board member of Authentic Intimacy, teaches that humans were created for five levels of intimacy:

  1. intellectual (exchanging and pushing around on ideas)
  2. emotional (friendship, banter, camaraderie)
  3. spiritual (sharing what we know and learn and love about God)
  4. physical (hugs, sharing personal bubbles)
  5. sexual (one man and one woman in marriage)

People live whole, full lives without sexual intimacy (thousands have, over the centuries), but people cannot flourish without those first four levels of intimacy. However, when someone has vacancies in any of those first four aspects, they’re more vulnerable to sexual sin.

I’m an unmarried woman at 50 without a date. Multiple formal and informal circles provide those first four levels of intimacy for me, and I dream for everyone to have the same opportunity to flourish and develop.

But here’s the rub. Circles don’t usually show up at your fire ring uninvited. Only fairies and mushrooms do that. To engage in those facets of intimacy, you have to be intentional and risk and give up significant control and autonomy. To be part of a circle might mean you plan, invite, or host to make it happen instead of stay tidy and cozy at home.

You don’t usually just happen onto a circle. You choose to linger when it might be easier to leave an event early. You choose to engage when it would be easier to stay aloof. You choose to ask questions and be awake to who is around you and what they’re saying.

So start small and fun: a shared activity like a walk or work or art project or birthday to celebrate. Find a common interest like poetry or bird watching or thrifting. Start light and breezy, not heavy and ponderous.

Ask God to give you circles to be part of. It was His idea in the first place, that you thrive in community with other voices contributing to your life. He cares about the circles you sit in. I can trace His mysterious, light fingerprints in the way He arranges the circles I’ve been part of. It was clearly His arranging, not mine, but it was on me to be aligned with what He was up to.

Loneliness is an epidemic in the West, and loneliness doesn’t go away when someone gets married. That means everyone needs to find ways to live well in our common experience of being lonely, separate, other.

So let’s learn how to hold the weight of loneliness without crumpling. Let’s find places—circles—to offer companionship, understanding, presence that offers an antidote to crippling, suffocating loneliness.

This doesn’t mean that we should desperately chase after circles so that we’ll never be lonely again. In an ironic turn, I’ve found that when I’m most at peace in solitude, I am most ready to contribute and receive from the bounty of a circle.

Circles are gifts to receive, not rights to demand. But isn’t it good of God to give such lovely gifts?

Celebrating True Love

Posted in life by

This morning I saw a photo of my cousin posing with his bride. He was radiant, and she was laughing, and seeing them gave me a burst of joy and delight. They are gifted, wise people. I know they will serve each other and their world like Jesus would, and it’s so wonderful and beautiful to see that it makes me cheer.

The mysteries of love are a mystery to me (to everyone else too, I guess) but when a man and woman find each other and settle deeply on far more than fluff and feelings, and commit to loving and serving in the nitty-gritty for the rest of their lives, it has to be one of the most beautiful things in the world.

Which means that divorce is probably the worst thing in the world. Maybe because it desecrates the symbol of God’s choosing us and faithful betrothal to us.

I bumped against the divorce word so often this week, maybe it’s why I was particularly sensitive to the happy wedding picture.  I heard mothers talking with each other: “You don’t have a husband either? Me too, I’m happier this way, being lonely, than being with my husband.” I read a woman’s words about how everyone else liked her husband but she couldn’t live with him so she left him. It all made me want to weep.

My friends tell me that marriage is hard work and demanding in surprising ways. (I say that singleness is too but in different aspects.) When I see couples promise their lives to each other, and each is whole and and focused on and sacrificial for Kingdom priorities, it gives me hope that some things in this ravaged world are as they should be.

It isn’t always like that. There are moments when I watch girls give their hearts to unworthy men who are happy to take them, and I want to shout “Oh,no,no,no,no,no, please no.” Not that I’m an expert match-maker, but I think that at this stage I have a pretty good idea of what a girl’s heart is worth.

So, to Caleb and Sandra out there ready to do life together for always, here’s one voice who’s cheering for you, proud of you, and wishing you everything beautiful!

Article Recommendation: What’s a Man to Do?

Posted in recommendations, singleness by

This week my wise, gentle friend Elisabeth whom I’m never met but correspond with regularly, wrote a brave article here on Boundless. I say it’s brave, because it takes a lot of courage for a single woman with a quiet spirit to write about the unspoken dynamics between single men and women.

Chatting with Elisabeth this morning, she told me she’s gotten good feedback on the article, mostly from girls, which means it’s more than just me who says it’s accurate and well-done.

In her blog, Elisabeth writes an introduction for the article and says it took her way out of her comfort zone and that a lot of the points can apply to both men and women.

It’s a delicate balance, I know. Over-kindness and over-coldness are equally off track. Selfish rashness and selfish caution: both are outside the kingdom realm.

Believers in Jesus, whether we marry each other or not, are on parallel tracks toward a common goal. This is a lifelong closeness and commitment: not to one another, but to Him.  As C. S. Lewis describes in The Four Loves, we stand — not eye to eye, like lovers — but shoulder to shoulder with eyes on the same goal. And with eyes (and heart) on that goal, we’ll be steering very well.

Sometimes we don’t realize we have the power to hurt others, but as mature men and women, we need to recognize this and plan accordingly.

And honestly? It’s not impossible to get it right.