Soul Friendship

What do 'soul friendship' relationships depend upon? — They depend upon how much each person in the relationship is willing to stretch and grow. These friendships require both men and women to call upon parts of themselves that are usually less accessible when relating to their typical same-sex friends. For a man, a woman who is just a friend allows him to express his more emotional side, to experience his vulnerability, to treat himself and his friend more tenderly than is permissible with male friends. What is typically missing for him in this cross-gender relationship, however, is the kind of rough camaraderie he can have with another man.

For a woman, a man who is just a friend helps her express her independent, more reasoned and tougher side - the harder edge that's kept under wraps in relationships with women. The down side for her is the relative absence of emotional reciprocity and intensity she normally shares with a female friend.

Soul friends share common values – a common vision of reality. Soul friendships include not only affirmation, but the ability of each to challenge the other when necessary. This facility is sometimes the most difficult aspect of any intimate relationship, but without it the friendship can soon become superficial, stunted, and eventually lost.

Soul friendship is associated with great affection, intimacy and depth. Soul friends share what the Greeks and Romans, as well as early church Fathers and Mothers, equate with true friendship itself: one soul in two bodies, two hearts united as one.

Soul friend relationships are characterized by mutuality: a profound respect for each other's wisdom, despite any age or gender difference, and the awareness that the other person is a source of many blessings.

Soul friendship is centred on God, the soul friend in whom all other friendships are united. True soul friends do not depend on each other alone, but root their relationship in God.

Soul friendship survives geographical separation, the passage of time, and death itself. They separate and go their own ways but never forget what each has meant to the other.

Human and Christian Destiny

"Man as created was already crowned with glory and honor, for made in the likeness of the enthroned Glory, a little lower than the angels of the divine council, man was invested with official authority to exercise dominion as priest-king in God's earthly courts. Yet, the glory of man's royal functioning would be progressive as he increasingly fulfilled his historical task of subduing the earth, his ultimate attainment of functional glory awaiting the eschatological glorification of his whole nature after the image of the radiant Glory-Spirit. Ethical glory also belonged to man as created and in this respect man would have gone from glory to glory had he not sinned, moving on from a state of simple righteousness to one of confirmed righteousness.

Man in the Fall became destitute of the glory of God (Rom. 3:23) -- at least such was the effect of the Fall apart from the intervention of divine grace. Actually, by the common grace of God, a measure of the glory-image was preserved in spite of the Fall. Scriptural references to postlapsarian man as still the image of God (Gen. 9:6; James 3:9) show that man continues to be the image of God after the Fall and that he is so even without personal experience of redemptive renewal. According to Genesis 3:22, man had in the very course of the Fall manifested the official-functional glory he had been given by engaging in judicial action after the manner of the divine council. Of course, he did so in such a way as to be guilty of gross malfeasance and forfeited his right to continue in office. But by the common grace of God this official glory of man was perpetuated and constitutes the primary if not the total basis for the Bible's attribution of image-of-God status to fallen man even apart from re-creation in Christ. By falling into sin, man lost his ethical glory. The covering of glory was replaced by the nakedness of shame. Though still possessed of an official glory by common grace, man was stripped of righteousness, holiness, and love of the truth. Whatever semblance of ethical glory was maintained by common grace, such does not clearly figure in the Bible's identification of postlapsarian man as still the image of God. Fallen man is a naked Image.

Man re-created in the image of God is restored to the hope of the formal-physical image-glory of resurrection immortality and Spiritual existence. Meanwhile, God, who has prepared for the new man the covering of eternal glory, gives him the earnest of the Spirit (II Cor. 5:5). In his redemptive renewal man is re-created after the image of God in true knowledge, righteousness, and holiness (Eph. 4:24; Col. 3: 10) and with respect to this ethical glory-likeness to God man is transformed from glory to glory by the Spirit of the Lord (II Cor. 3:18; 4:16; Rom. 12:2). Beyond the official-functional glory the new man has in the realm of common grace, he has through his union with Christ in the Spirit a part in Christ's enthronement in the heavenly sphere (Eph. 2:6). In this respect too there is movement from glory to glory, for the blessedness of Christian death is the “first resurrection," the intermediate state, where the believer, perfect in righteousness, is present with Christ to live and reign with him (Rev. 20:4-6), [53] and beyond the second (i.e., bodily) resurrection the overcomers, possessed of the fulness of formal and ethical glory, participate with the enthroned Christ in the consummation of man's official royal glory (Rev. 3:21)" Images of The Spirit, 31-32.

-- An excerpt from Dr. Meredith Kline's book, Images of the Spirit

God, Personal

"Men are reluctant to pass over from the notion of an abstract and negative deity to the living God. I do not wonder... It is always shocking to meet life where we thought we were alone. 'Look out', we cry, 'it's alive!'...An impersonal god, well and good. A subjective God of beauty, truth and goodness, inside our own heads - better still. A formless life-force surging through us, a vast power which we can tap - best of all. But God Himself, alive, pulling at the other end of the cord, perhaps approaching at infinite speed, the hunter, king, husband - that is quite another matter. There comes a moment when the children who have been playing at burglars hush suddenly was that a 'real' footstep in the hall? There comes a moment when people who have been dabbling in religion suddenly draw back. Supposing we really found Him? We never meant it to come to that. Worse still, supposing He had found us?"

- C.S. Lewis:

Near Enough to Catch Life

" . . . Christ was also a tiger, the denouncer of a narrow and loveless piety, the scourge of the merely moral, the enemy of every religious tradition of his day, no matter how sacred, that did not serve the Kingdom as he saw it and embodied it in all its wildness and beauty. Where He was, passion was, life was. To be near Him was to catch life from him the way sails catch the wind."

-- Frederick Buechner

Sing ! Wee Bird

O Little Sister Bird, that brims with full heart, and having nothing possesses all, surely you do well to sing! For you have life without labour and beauty without burden, and riches without care. When you wake, lo, it is dawn; and when you come to sleep it is eve. And when your two wings lie folded about your heart, lo, there is rest. Therefore sing, Sister, having this great wealth, that when you sing you give your riches to all.

- adapted, St. Francis of Assisi

Meaning and Beauty

You take the pen - and the lines dance,
You take the flute - and the notes shimmer,
You take the brush - and the colours sing.
So all things have meaning and beauty in that space beyond time
where You are. How, then, can I hold back anything from
You?

- Dag Hammarskjold

Tune Up

Tune me, O Lord, into one harmony
With Thee, one full responsive vibrant chord;
Unto Thy praise, all love and melody,
Tune me, O Lord.
- Christina Rossetti

Cautious

A lot of people tip-toe through life so that they can arrive safely at Death's door.

- Tony Compolo