Good evening, gamers!
And welcome back to the Thoughts From The Couch newsletter. I’ve written about 10 emails in the time since you’ve last heard from me, but scrapped each one of them 2/3s of the way through. That’s called “working on your writing style”, if you’re in the biz (biz means business). At any rate, I will try (but not promise) to be back a bit more often. Also, I moved to Substack. It saves my posts easier so you, too, can go back and read my greatest hits!
That Beautiful, Finite Bond
Liz Bruenig posted a beautiful thread on friendship the other day, which inspired these thoughts, and I’d like to repost here as a starting point.
Liz was writing, in some sense, about one of her friends who did something awful years back and is just now coming back to the public scene. I’m unfamiliar with the incident entirely, and will just use this as a general jumping off point for my thoughts.
What has always irked me with the concept of cancel culture (I don’t really believe it exists—it may de-gender a talking potato or cause you a ruckus online for a bit, but for the average person, there are no real consequences of being “canceled”) is that I find it somewhat incompatable with the Christian idea of forgiveness. If we truly believe that every person is made in the Imago Dei, can we exile forever a part of the body of Christ? Ought it be our decision in the first place? Here is where you can lay a cheeky joke about God being the only one who cancels people. But even the punchline does not land—after all, is it not the condemned who damn themselves by rejecting Christ in the final judgement? Which begs the question: who are we to cancel if Christ Himself refuses?
(Hi, welcome to Hunter’s Corner, the place where I clarify my prose before it goes too far. When I denounce our ability to cancel, I do not mean that it is bad to bring to light truth or enact justice here on Earth. Obviously those who commit genuine offenses—I think here of crimes, anything that falls under the #MeToo movement or constitutes harassment—should be brought to light, especially if that person is a public figure or in a place of power. Discretion of their victims also applies here, as does the attidude of the canceled, whether they are genuinely trying to be good or not.)
What Liz writes about rings true, though, as hard as it can be to hear. Friendship is a sort of odd courting itself. One starts to hang around the same people more and more, often-times not of their particular choosing. I think of coming to college for the first time, getting assigned to a random group of people to be an “orientation group”, and spending the rest of the academic year hanging around them. We had basically nothing in common, no overlapping interests (or even majors!), and yet we became great friends for the better part of the year. Even before college—how did I pick my friends in elementary school? The kids I sat around in class? The ones I ended up in four-square with at recess? The old adage about choosing your friends, not family, falls flat on its face here.
Given that, the idea that we must only hang around those that have committed no major “incidents” is laughable. I’ve spent 23 years on this Earth and I think you’d be very hard pressed to find someone who’s never deeply hurt another person—intentionally or no! I acknowledge that this is a mindset that requires some time to convince oneself of, but really, what is the alternative? Liz phrases it as “open-air solitary confinement” and that about sums it up. Should one have to distance themselves from others forever because of something they said in high school, or because they got depressed and ignored their friends for a while? Phrased without context, this sounds obviously egregious.
My thesis, then, is this: we don’t really choose our friends. We don’t have a lot of knowledge about them by the time that we consider them someone dear to us. When one of them does something Bad, should we just…leave them in the dark? Or ought we be as Christ to them, calling for mercy when every other party demands vengeful justice (John 8:1-11)?
I spent an evening this past week on the phone with an old friend. We had hurt each other a good bit in the past, and as a result, spent time apart to heal. To say I was nervous prior to talking would be an understatement—would I be forgiven for what I had done? Would we be able to find some sort of normalcy? The time off had been significant—would a friendship even be possible again? All things racing in my head as I began to make the call.
Call it grace, call it mercy, call it what you will. But after some brief apologies and catching up, we chatted for hours as if none of it had ever happened. It has been the highlight of my month so far. This, in truth, is what’s gotten me thinking about friendship in the first place. When one truly believes in Christian forgiveness, in abundant mercy, in love without condition: that is where friendship can truly flourish. There will be bumps and bruises. There will be hurt and pain and mess. But if both parties are committed to love, well, is that not the recognition of Christ in the other? Is that not the greatest love there is?
I hope you are well—I have been better than usual as of late. If you’re looking for some of my other work or to catch up, feel free to drop a line. I’ve got a couple quarantine-madness-induced creative projects on the horizon. Who knows if they’ll ever go public, but they’ve been fun to work on. Grateful for your support in this and all things.
In Christ,
Hunter “please don’t put in the papers that i’m a podcaster. i’m not a podcaster” Lantzman