Relationships

Beauty, attraction and modesty – a five act thought process

Danny Webster 5 Comments

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A couple of weeks ago I went to Scotland and it was beautiful.

It is as easy and natural as that. The description of beauty was done without any further thought or consideration.

Last night I went out and met a beautiful girl.

Well actually I didn’t, I stayed in on my own and watched a couple of episodes of The Pacific. If I had used a real life scenario it would have suddenly become awkward. And that’s my point. When we talk about beauty and it relates to some feature of nature or a work of art it does not provoke the same array of inquiries as to its meaning or subtle squinting of the eye to work out where the statement in question originated.

If I say a girl is beautiful it is taken to mean something more than just a factual observation. In short you’d probably assume I was interested in her romantically. And I might be: because I’m a guy and have been known to be interested in that sort of way.

But it’s also far too reductionist and it takes a whole swathe of compliments out of use. While I am sometimes attracted to a particular girl because of her beauty, that does not mean I am attracted and seeking to romantically pursue any girl I consider to be beautiful. Continue reading →

Friendship with the other

Danny Webster 2 Comments

I’ve always had lots of female friends. There’s something about using the word female over girl that immediately takes the romantic assumption from the form of words and convinces me it is as simple as that. Because at most points in my life my closest friendships have been with girls.

Yet when I suggested yesterday that maybe this wasn’t always the most ideal situation it prompted a deluge of justification for why they are healthy, important and biblically directed. I call four direct messages a deluge. In the early days of the life of this blog I wrote about how friendship can get in the way, and I stand by those thoughts but maybe I am trying to reduce relationships to a simple form that cannot hold them.

I reflect on the nature of the many friendships I’ve had and cherished. Of the girls at school who in hindsight treated me a bit like their non-gay, gay best friend, the non threatening bridge into the male gender who they’d pepper with questions and attempts to reassure themselves of their attractiveness and possibilities for romance.

I think about the friend who as we walked told me she now liked the man who’s advances she had previously rebuffed.

Of the lady who made me nearly cry with her insight to my character. And I only liked her more.

Perhaps I ponder why it was a certain girl was sure I was interested in her because of how I chose to spend my time.

The friends I’ll meet for dinner and not think twice. Until later and the encounter is replayed in my head and the doubts begin to fester as to the status of our friendship.

The two girls I spent a whole day with not so long ago. Friendship I enjoyed without pressure or the need to act up to impress or to be one of the guys.

I could blame it on my family and their friends, my sisters, their friends and the almost entirely female friendship pool I grew up surrounded by. On my darker more sombre days I wonder if I play certain cards to keep emotionally detached: enough friendship to sate my loneliness, but not too much to ever cause a rupture of unease. I opt for the easier option in the short term even if it becomes more complicated as life roles on.

Last night I listened to Rowan Williams, the outgoing Archbishop of Canterbury, pontificate on the nature of personhood and how a proper grasp of this moves us beyond a focus on the individual and towards a fuller and healthier understanding of each other. The bearded wonder was at his cerebral best, which meant I didn’t understand too much, and quotes from Lossky, Spaemann, Sennett and Augustine provided some needed light relief. Maybe once I’ve had a chance to listen to the audio again, read the transcript and rubbed my head a little more, grown some more facial hair and accumulated the subsequent wisdom I might record some more thought through reflections.

He said something along these lines: “What makes me a person… I stand in the middle of a network of relations, the point at which all the lines cross.”

So whether the relationships are clarified, confused, distorted or direct, it is the patchwork quilt which we inhabit that makes up much of what defines as a person rather than any anatomical structure.

He also said:

Last summer I wrote a couple of posts while reading Alan and Debra Hirsch’s Untamed and explored the idea of otherness and the need for a deep ‘I-thou’ relationship with each other that fully values the other as something different to yourself. The differences that lie between us are what makes it so important that we grow closer together. We understand each other better by a life that is lived together.

In Christian theology we are used to referring to the otherness of God but we need to get better at embracing the otherness of each other. There’s a tendency to want us all to be alike, custom built, unique in the eyes of God but conformed by the power of the church.

Of course there’s confusion, misdirected emotions, ambiguity over whether you like someone or they like you. And it’s easy to see the tortured web we weave and opt for the clarity of straight lines. Boundaries and definitions, what is in and what is out. What is allowed and what is not. What is inappropriate and leads towards sin and what is healthy, positive and life affirming.

But here’s the thing. Risk is life affirming. Have you ever felt fully alive playing it safe?

Ambiguity is the love child of a universe embracing both chaos and wonder. Otherness is the gift of a God that wants us to get better not become the same. A wise lady put it like this: “Rules lack the grace required for the complexity and nuances of human interaction”.

I could seek clarity from every friendship I form with a girl. We could have a contract, it could be laid out whether or not we were pursuing anything other than friendship. There could be defined steps and processes, it could be recorded and audited, inspected and refined. It would remove the confusion that haunts as you lie in bed at night and wonder the precise meaning of the final words, or intent behind the body language you thought might convey something approaching affection.

It would also destroy the beauty that forms as you approach someone else, hesitant, faltering, nervous. If I knew all the answers I would ask no questions, and if I did not question the nature of the other I would not know just how different it is yet how alike we are. If I am only affirmed in my personhood by relationships with others, that relationship, whatever form it might take has to come before any determination of where it might end.

Ambiguity is part of the fun. Let’s enjoy it, and not run away scared.

The faded certainty of attraction

Danny Webster Leave a comment

I thought that I would know. I thought that the moment the right person walked into my life all would become clear. Sirens would scream, lights would flare, passions would ignite and all doubt would be banished.

I thought that one day I’d be mature enough to move past the waves of attraction that fade in and out like the intermittent reception on the battered transistor radio placed between the paint and tins of nails in the garden shed. I hope in some recess of my mind that certainty is still only the right person away. But that hope recedes into the realms of fantasy.

Because what I learn each moment that I pass through life is that affection and attraction are fickle friends. And knowledge and certainty are elusive ideas that once found only present more dilemmas. Following yesterday’s post on Vaughan Roberts’ interview, I thought I’d ponder a little more. This is a tad more theological that I originally intended, maybe all a smokescreen to protect my fragile emotional state!

In response I, and you, and anyone else, could take either of two divergent paths. Either we see the doubt that lies before us and turn and run away. We could opt for what we know, what is safe and what is comfortable. In the most relativistic sense we rely on where we are to authenticate our ability to decide truth. We either allow comfort to lead to inertia or dissatisfaction to prompt change.

The second option is to live in the light of what Francis Spufford in his new book apparently labels with the acronym HPtFtU. I haven’t read the book – it’s on my ever expanding list – and for the sake of modesty I won’t unravel the abbreviation, but it’s what we in more biblically literate times might label as sin. Stuff goes wrong, and we do not see clearly how things can work themselves out. We live in chaos and confusion, and in the most enlightened of moments only have hazy clarity and even then we might be kidding ourselves.

So the gaze of attraction I cast toward a lady in my midst might be motivated by lust, or it might be the beginning of a love that she is due. And in most cases it is probably a little bit of both. Because even if I get married I will not be free from lust – I’m told that enough by my married friends – I will at times lust after my wife, and other women I encounter.

But all this talk of lust scares me off. It makes me worry that any attraction is motivated by my nefarious desires. Somehow this needs to be redeemed. Beauty is not bad, attraction is not bad.

Beauty must be appreciated for what it represents. It represents God’s creation and his love for us. It is not just the physical but it is the physical. We are not to get so spiritual that we deny what is literally right in front of us. Something I have to repeatedly remind myself is that finding someone attractive is not a bad thing.

It leaves me embracing uncertainty, and learning that as much as I might like things ordered and classified, colour coded and project managed, that’s not the way life works. There is ambiguity around every corner, there is discernment over what needs discernment and what needs a shunt of courage to spur us to take risks when we will never know all we wish we did.

Doubt lurks around every corner waiting to cripple me and hold me back. Whether it is my worth, my value to others, my abilities, or the prospects of love, doubt undermines your security and tries to tell you your identity is in whether you overcome these frailties, and if you don’t then your identity is as a failure.

But doubt is the door through which redemption arrives. We learn that we cannot do it on our own, we are weak and we are frail, and we are broken and lost, and these will not be cast aside any time soon. But when we learn that we cannot overcome all that might try to drag us down we look up. We see that in the mystery and confusion, and the uncertainty and unsettled resolve there is a place we can be secure. And from the place of security we can go on adventures unshackled by doubts and fears.

Appropriate attraction

Danny Webster 3 Comments

Vaughan Roberts has won plaudits for the incredible honesty and bravery he has shown in his interview with Evangelicals Now. Those I share and add to: I think the words of a man highly respected for his commitment to biblical truth and Christian ministry describing his struggle with same sex attraction could potentially be a game changing moment for the way such issues are understood and handled in the church.

What Vaughan Roberts says, and the way that he says it, is a mark of maturity. It has and will continue to attract attention because of the subject matter and the highly volatile current political debates around same sex marriage. I encourage you to read the interview in full, but to summarise he outlines that while he has struggled with same sex attraction this has not diminished his commitment to living a life that upholds the orthodox Christian understanding of sex as reserved for a man and a wife. For him, this means he lives a celibate life.

Each of us have things in our life which pull us away from the type of life God would prefer us to lead. For each of us these are different in their specifics, but hallmarks ring loud and clear. Sexual attraction of one sort or another ranks high, as does a desire for power and authority, a propensity for self interest and greed dominates too many of our lives. We put ourselves above God and choose to let that which is not God take priority in the ordering of our lives.

In the interview Vaughan Roberts studiously avoids describing himself as gay, a demarcation that has already generated discussion. This is interesting because it raises the question for all of us of how we define ourselves and what identifies us from the crowd. I recall a quote which I’m failing to attribute, whoever it was he was asked whether he was homosexual or heterosexual, to which he responded neither. He said that he’s not attracted to men or women but to one woman, his wife.

What struck me as I pondered Vaughan Roberts’ words is that it’s not as simple as same sex attraction is something which we should flee from. I think there are good and bad forms of attraction, the good form, when we indulge it we are actually becoming more human in the giving of ourselves to another. But there are other forms of attraction that we choose to spurn because we believe them not to be in tune with a way of life that honours God.

The most refreshing part of the interview was the implicit acknowledgement, and if I am reading too much into it then I apologise, of the present continuous nature of his struggles. It’s something I’ve been toying with for a few months, how we handle the fact that we don’t just move past our struggles, that they often continue to walk with us. Roberts puts it like this:

“While homosexual sin must always be resisted, the circumstances which often accompany same-sex attraction should be accepted as a context in which God can work. There is, without doubt, a difficult aspect to those circumstances, such as, for example, the frustration of not being able to experience the intimacy of a sexual relationship or a feeling of isolation because of the sense of being different.”

He goes on to say: “This perspective should transform how we view all the difficult circumstances in our lives. We’re not called to a super-positivity which denies the frustration and pain; nor are we to embrace a passivity which spurns any opportunity to change our situation. But we are to recognise the loving hand of God in all we experience and see it as an opportunity for service, growth and fruitfulness.”

Because we are not defined by whatever brokenness exists in our lives we are defined by who we are in Christ. Dallas Willard writes in similar terms about our lostness, not something that we resolve as soon as we trust in Christ but a path we will frequently find ourselves on once again.

In a bonus track on the new Mumford and Sons album they sing: “Wanting change but loving her just as she lies, it’s the burden of man who’s built his life on love.” I could take that as how God views us.

So to me. If the only appropriate attraction we are to indulge sexually is between a man and a wife where does that leave me, a single man attracted to women. I hope that for one of those I find my heart stirred towards, that might one day be what we are to each other. But for now I find myself attracted in different ways, at various times, in degrees of intensity to different women. And not all of that can be wholesome. Not least when confusingly they overlap.

There is a goodness in some of my attraction that needs to be discerned. There is prospect for an intimacy where that attraction will be fully indulged. But for now it is as much a temptress as a guide.

And then there is this other thing. The damage we do with only associating beauty with sexual intimacy. A friend recently suggested guys need to do a better job of complimenting girls for how they looked, regardless of whether they were interested in them. And in theory I agree. But first of all I might need to get better at doing it for girls who I am interested in.

Royal privacy privilege and why page 3 should go

Danny Webster 5 Comments

If you’re going to sunbathe topless within 600 metres of a public road, and you’re an attractive young woman married to an heir to the throne it’s not a surprise the images find their way to glossy magazines and tabloids across the globe.

Scandalous? Certainly. Distasteful? Definitely. Predictable? Sadly. Wrong? Probably.

‘Only probably?!’ I hear you cry, and my response would be it depends on what you mean by wrong. Because as I’ve thought and reflected on this issue which has surged up the news agenda and prompted legions of sexually excited men to turn to google images while shaking their heads in disgust at such a gross invasion of privacy, I’ve wondered at why we think it is wrong. And where I’ve ended up is that within the parameters of what we as a society allow and deem acceptable it is hard to logically oppose the publication of the pictures.

That doesn’t mean I think they should have been published. They certainly should not. But the question that’s been playing over in my mind is why should they not have been published? It means we have to reach back and think about what we have already granted license to and whether we should reassess those permissions. I’d be fascinated to hear what you think, and why you think it, and then what we can do to address this. I’ve been playing the ethics and logic of all this over in my mind for the past few days, and it also relates to a new campaign encouraging the Sun to stop putting topless women on page 3.

The photos clearly represent an invasion of the royal couple’s privacy, but other photos from the same location showing the Duchess in a bikini have been published and the news outlets are not subject to the legal action directed at Closer in France and Chi in Italy. Like the topless photos they were taken from the roadside with a telescopic lens. If one set of photos are allowed, or at least tolerated, in the public domain, then why not the others? The issue here is therefore not primarily one of privacy, although that is the legal avenue being pursued to prevent their further publication.

What drives the attention is that the photos are of the Duchess of Cambridge topless. A statement of the obvious if ever there was one.

But topless pictures grace the pages of the UK’s most popular paper everyday. And even those that pour scorn on the endless sexualisation of children plaster the sidebar with image after image of girls in skimpy bikinis, extolling the latest diets of celebrities, or their failures to shed pounds after giving birth.

These pictures fall into two categories, one directly relevant to the most recent scandal, and the other indicative of our cultural attitude. The first is pictures similar in type and origin to those of Kate in Provence, celebrities spotted in private locations snapped with long lenses in positions or states of undress they might hope would remain private. If the photos of the Duchess of Cambridge should not have been printed, then nor should these. While it is undoubtedly more newsworthy that the subject is a future queen, this should not entitle her to any greater protection. This is why the scorn of the British tabloid press, including the Sun which reportedly turned the photos down, rings somewhat hollow. If they empathise with the pain that William and Kate are feeling, do they consider others printed in the 3am column unworthy of empathy?

The second issue is that papers, most notably again the Sun but other papers print far worse, make nudity a key aspect of their sales strategy. Topless Page 3 models grace the inside leaf of the paper each morning (I don’t think at the weekends) in what has become a tolerated and mainstream acceptance of nudity and the commodification of the female form. This is significantly different than the paparazzi shots that breach privacy without any imaginable public interest defence. In these cases the subjects have chosen to be photographed, it is the publishers would argue, a consensual relationship for both the reader and the pictured girls.

To conclude my analysis of the logic before moving on to some further comment, if the paparazzi photos are of the same level of nudity as others that are accepted, and other photos taken in the same manner but not of the Duchess of Cambridge topless are tolerated, then it is hard to see how we can argue the photos should not be printed.

As I said above, I do not think they should be published, but I think the logical inconsistency we are seeing shows why we need to take a step back and consider both privacy and the acceptance of nudity and the sexual form in our culture. Privacy is a matter for another day, but as Mitt Romney has learnt if you are in the public eye perhaps you have to assume virtually anything you ever do can some how be captured, recorded and publicised.

On nudity and sexualisation I’m also not out to be a prude. This post over at prodigal today about relevance and innocence is certainly food for thought. And in response to the current campaign for the Sun to stop putting topless girls on page 3 one Telegraph blogger took out his annoyance on the snobs trying to stop the working man enjoy the view.

I don’t think we can sustain a shocked posture in response to the pictures of the Duchess of Cambridge if we are party to the parading of women for our viewing pleasure and to sate our sexual appetite.

If the naked form is normal why are we shocked by its unveiling?

Because there is something special about who and what we are, that is not to be trivialised or given at any whim. In the film Anna Karenina Constance Levin says: “An impure love is not love, to admire an other man’s wife is a pleasant thing, but sensual desire indulged for its own sake is greed and a misuse of something sacred. It is given to us so that we may choose the one person with whom to fulfil our humanness.”

In an era when the naked form is more available than ever before it is curious that trips to the beaches of Europe do not bring the same quantity of topless sunbathers as it might have a decade before. Maybe we are slowly discovering that the beauty of the human form becomes devalued the more available it becomes. And yet the more we see, the more that we find we want, even though it does not bring us the satisfaction which we thought it might.

Page 3 does not belong. It’s not about being a prude, it’s about wanting sexuality to take its proper place. Sign the petition, encourage everyone you know to as well.

If we cannot stop photographers with telescopic lenses prying into private holiday villas, or mobile cameras lurking in every shirt pocket, maybe we can lessen the normality and the acceptance of naked women as a form of news.

Breaking up is hard to do

Danny Webster Leave a comment

Dear readers,

Thank you for your time, attention, comments and shares over the past few months. It feels like I’ve thought and wrote more about relationships in these weeks than I have, well since last summer.

And like on that occasion it gets to a point when I have to step away from the keyboard. When I have to let the hum of keystrokes fall silent and the words pause their progress across the screen. There are times for creativity, there are times for searching out wisdom. There are times for humour, and times for the shedding of tears. I have felt all of these while writing these past few months.

There are times when tearing back the covers and exposing the frailty of the your soul is the strongest thing that you can do. And there are times when you need to rest, recuperate and recover the longings of your soul.

Because I am tired. I am spent from exerting the energy it takes to write words that comprehend what I have spent most of my life ignoring. I am exhausted from embracing the honesty that I have adopted as my trademark, an ever incremental appetite that is not quenched by the post that tells of more than you ever thought you would tell.

It was one day at work when I had been asked to write for a new site called threads (going live soon, sign up to learn more). ‘What should I write’ I inquired, ‘something like your blog’ came back the reply, the ping pong went on, ‘what is it about the blog you like’, I was hoping for direction and clarity to make the writing easier. ‘Your honesty’ she confirmed.

I’ve always set out to write as honestly and bravely as I could, I never wanted anything to be off limits. But in some of the early throws last year I wrote with a shield of abstraction cast around me. Everything was general, projected onto others, with carefully calculated asides into my own thoughts and processes to dust my writing with authenticity.

The more I thought about it, the harder it became, I was trying to manufacture authenticity, I was aiming to write in a way that would ease people into my story but only on terms I choose, which in turn I was plucking out of the air. So instead of authenticity I aimed for integrity. I wrote what I felt, and when that helped me clarify the turbulent waters of my emotions and thoughts, and shone light on the segue between my plans and my dreams, and the oceans that stood between them: I acted how I knew I must.

I write early in the morning, it’s when I think most clearly with the first waves of caffeine rushing through my veins. Before work a couple of times a week I’ll sit and find words to convey what I want to say, grateful for the delay not given when I try to speak the same thoughts which often end up in a muddled, confused, sometimes abrupt tone. I’ll head into work exhausted from the emotional energy I have expended on the words I schedule for display later in the day.

I’m taking a break. At the moment I’m off work, I’ve had a long weekend away from twitter, apart from the odd snap posted from Instagram. And tomorrow I head off again. It is good for my soul to disconnect because I don’t always manage my relationship with the online world particularly well.

This is a season for rest. I’ve got a few bits of writing to do, some long promised articles which have slipped below the bottom of the pile, so I won’t be entirely silent. But there will be nothing new on this blog until September. After a constant progression of growth in readership from February until now, August will be a fallow month. A time when the ground is cleared and left without manipulation or exertion. A time when abiding in what already is comes before seeking out what is to come next.

I want to cut off the need to check how many people have read the blog today. I want to remove the frustration when a post I have thrown my all into languishes in double digits.

I want to take an axe to the root of the jealousy when a beautifully crafted and impeccably timed post goes viral. I want to disconnect my worth from the attention I receive.

So this is not a good bye. And I value your words more than you can imagine. In the cliched words of most televised high school break ups, ‘it’s not you, it’s me’.

I need some time alone, some time to gather my thoughts and to recharge. To find emotional security away from affirmation. And to learn the lessons that my desire to be honest has uncovered in myself, and to address the weaknesses I’ve seen displayed as an excuse for bravery.

Until the autumn, you are my friends. And I’ll still be tweeting now and then.

Danny

Today I write for Prodigal: Never Been Kissed

Danny Webster Leave a comment

Today I share the story of my single life over at Prodigal:

There are awkward conversations. And then there are conversations you would do anything to avoid. There will be a whole tranche for each of us that fit into this latter category. For me they start something like this:

“Danny, what’s your worst ever dating experience?”, or maybe, “When did you have your first kiss?”

I can’t answer them.

This week I had one that ended up along similar lines, but I didn’t see it coming. For some absurd reason I started a blog last summer and choose relationships as my specialist subject. I had opinions and I wanted to share them. Whether anyone was listening was comparatively unimportant, and if they were I planned on ignoring them. That illusion was shattered the moment I walked into church and saw the people who had shared my post or commented on the blog.

… read more over at Prodigal Magazine

If you’ve ended up here after reading my post take a look around, you’re welcome to linger a while or stay for as long as you want. I’m always interested to hear what you think, whether you passionately disagree or find words that echo your story.

Let go, trust and forgive

Danny Webster Leave a comment

I was walking down the road I trod in a puddle. Or a bus passed too close to the curb and drenched me from the waist down. Every moment in life is crowded with details that point to things not working how we might like them to.

I hear that someone I love is ill. I see carnage across the sea. I hear men who should know better suggest reasons for the chaos. All I want to do is cry.

And in my heart I flit between tortured indifference and unbridled anger knowing that brokenness and pain, and frailty and heartache are a normal feature of yours and mine and everyone’s life.

Whether it’s as I try to untangle my attraction to a girl from my insecurity to feel needed, or my rejection as others head to watch the Dark Knight Rises as I am left at home. Things do not work out how I would like them to. It is never as simple as it should be.

And we can fret and we can plan, and we can hope and we can dream. We can long for love to conquer all, we can read the books that claim to guide us. We can have all the answers to our questions and still stand adrift in a sea of chaos.

The final part of the puzzle does not slot into place like a jigsaw, it works in exactly the opposite way. It’s not a solution that makes things easy. Nor even one that tells you after a rocky ride everything will be okay.

Instead the answer is to raise your hands, loose your grip on what is in your hands. And let go.

Ruin is the starting point of transformation, but that doesn’t mean it’s a downhill ride after we’ve scaled the heights of suffering. Ruin requires surrendering, letting go and trusting in God. It means that we know that we cannot sort everything out, that plan B and C and all the way to Z may do us no good.

We trust in God and we hold tighter to him than to any of our hopes and dreams.

And there’s another thing. We forgive, which let’s us enter into the acts of redemption that work through the darkest of niches. Somehow, in the most challenging of situations light starts to shine. When things are wrong it is not the end.

When conflict reigns in a relationship. When pain gnaws away at the loneliness that follows break up. Or the isolation that surrounds singleness. When you do your best to solve whatever problems punch you in the face and they come back with a viscous left hook.

Let go, forgive, trust God. Not easy, never easy, but somehow it is the right thing to do. And even if you don’t, God is still there and he still loves you and redemption comes in the most unusual of places.

Make love not war

Danny Webster Leave a comment

I’m a firm believer that conflict is a healthy part of any relationship. Not because I’m a glutton for hard times but because if it’s not there you’re either lying or repressing the inevitable disagreements beneath the surface.

When conflict, and even anger, is not properly managed it is allowed to linger and fester and at some point, especially in close relationships, it will boil over. In the final sermon in ChristChurch London’s Love is a Verb series this was the topic of conversation, so in this post I’m going to run through the first seven ideas for handling conflict given. In a follow up post I’m going to write about the final one in more detail and with some reflections added.

  1. Decide to resolve conflict.This is the tough one, it might sound simple, even superfluous, but if you don’t take a decision to deal with things then they won’t be dealt with. I know from my experience that once I have taken the decision to do something the challenges of following through with that fade away. They don’t disappear altogether, and I often take longer than I should in getting round to having that hard conversation, but I have it. This is about clarity of communication, regardless of what we think we have said it is vital to pay attention to what the other person has heard, and how they have taken that.

    Our natural instinct is to run away from conflict, but if we just move on we will experience the same friction in a new place, and if we continually shift away from discomfort nothing will ever be dealt with.

  2. Take your time.This is an interesting one. I’ve been brought up under the mantra of don’t let the sun go down on your anger, and consequently I’ve always wanted to resolve issues as soon as they flare up, that’s once I let them flare up.

    But maybe it is sometimes wiser to wait, and acknowledge the conflict, and to allow passions to calm before addressing what lies beneath. When we come under attack, whether physically, verbally or emotionally we freeze, and our knee jerk response is very rarely a good one.

  1. Win hearts not arguments.I like a good argument. I like the chance to best my foes with my wit and wisdom. I like the haggling and scheming, the tactics and the strategy. I don’t mind losing the odd battle as long as I stay ahead in the war.

    This is not a very good way of building relationships. I’m sure my tendency to want to win is shared by plenty of others, the dismay at being thought wrong, when you know you can set the record straight.

    But who really wins in this situation? Certainly not the relationship. I need to learn to prioritise the relationship over what I think is right, and in my case not only the answer but the method. Too often I want things done my way, because I have the best, most efficient solution. It’s okay not to win the argument, it’s more than okay to put the other person first.

    In the end most short cuts are diversions.

  2. Get perspectiveI’m very often right. And I’m more often also wrong. And sometimes I can be both of those at the same time. This is not some relativistic hogwash but instead the acceptance that there are almost always multiple perspectives to any situation. If we’re obsessed with our point of view, our interests, our rightness, then we will miss so much of what is going on. Likewise, if we think that everyone else is against us and become defensive we will end up wallowing in self pity.

    In the talk on Sunday Andy Tilsley gave a pretty stiff challenge to see the other person’s perspective, and to think about how if we do this we could cut out gossip. The point being that gossip is usually when one person’s position is advanced without consideration of how others involved, think, feel or react.

  3. Take responsibility for what you can take responsibility forIt’s not my job to change the world. There are a lot of things that don’t work out the way I would like them to work out and some of the time I will have to live with that. If I spend my life fretting over problems that I have little or no control over then I will work myself into a frenzy and into a spin of stress and disappointment at the futility of it all.

    Whereas if I focus on what I can change, on my behaviour and my relationships, of the way that I think about myself, then I will not only have a greater chance of success but I will also be dealing with the issues that are closer to the heart of the problem. Otherwise I’ll spend a lot of time on displacement activity, trying to get things done, change things, make things better, but all the time remain the frail shell with the same problems as before.

  4. Tell the truthSimple, tough, and essential. We avoid telling the truth because of where we fear it will take us. We worry that if we say something people will think less of us, or be disappointed. Or no that we are interested in them. Or know that this relationship isn’t going to work out. Not only do I need to tell the truth but I need people around me who will tell the truth to me, who will call me out on the nonsense that I spout and the lies that I live.

    It was on this issue that a little query popped into my mind: how do we balance telling the truth with not always trying to win the argument? Because if we know that something is right then we have a responsibility to tell that truth, don’t we? Maybe, but we also need to balance a few other things as well, we can take time in our relationships to draw light onto problematic situations, and we can have grace to understand that things going wrong will not derail our life.

  5. Get helpOur problems are not just our own, and likewise the solutions will often be shared. It’s not an excuse to go gossiping to everyone about the problems someone else is experiencing, but the very real acceptance that we need help to navigate the tricky waters of our relationships. Help from other people can also shine a light onto the extent of the problem, sometimes it will be apparent that in the light of day things are really not that bad. But in others the extent of pain will only become clear with an outside perspective. Sometimes in the midst of a relationship we can forgive and forebear, and then excuse what we should not. There are relationships where the most loving thing we can do is walk away.

Effectively what I’ve presented is my extended notes from Sunday’s sermon along with a bit of commentary and reflection along the way. There is a lot we can do to handle conflict, but the most important part of this post is that we handle it. Something more important than that will come in the next instalment.

What is this thing called love?

Danny Webster 2 Comments

© Emily Martin

Love is a mystery, it is foreign, alien, far from understanding. But it is elemental, it is at the beginning and the end. Of what remains, the greatest is love. Mark Twain said: “when you go fishing for love, bait with your heart, not your brain”.

When we talk about romance, we talk about being in love. When we see someone who takes our breathe away, we fall in love. And when things don’t go so well we can now fall out of love with the one to whom we had given our all. After one of this week’s posts a friend sent me a link to an article about the reasons marriages split up, and all too frequently it is simply that they got bored with each other. And it lead me to wonder, do we put too much store by love, or is it that we just don’t understand it?

I can think of no better book on this topic than CS Lewis’s The Four Loves. Love is not always the same, it takes different forms in different relationships, from affection, through friendship, to the eros of romance and the all consuming unconditional agape love from God. I probably should have reread it before writing this post.

CS Lewis’s point, if I recall correctly, is that the other forms of love only work properly when subordinated to the unconditional love from God. We can love because we have already been loved. When we turn we find that he has already turned.

Am I a reprobate romantic to say that love can conquer all? That our problem is not that we put too much trust in love, but that we give it too little. We hedge our bets, and we take our chances, we mitigate against things going wrong. We build structures of reliance that defend our cause and protect our pet projects. We don’t want anything to fail so too often we just do not try.

We think that if love is the answer it will solve our problems. We think that such a wonderful thing will make life easy.

I was at a wedding yesterday and the during the address the pastor said, “I hope this is the worst day of your married life.” It was a cute point, a good way of saying that marriage is not summed up by the celebrations on the wedding day but of a life lived growing together, that there are far better days to come.

But was it too saccharine? Because marriage will not always be defined by happiness and joy. Because while the wedding day is hopefully not as good as it gets, it is also unlikely to be the worst. There will be sadness and troubles, there will be heartache and agony; maybe that wasn’t a message for the wedding day. I’m sure that if I’m married I’ll wake up on some mornings and wonder what I’m doing there, I may regret falling in love, I may regret trusting in love. Wherever I am, whomever I am with, there will be crappy days.

And on these days, like when I’ve had enough of my friends or my family annoy me, is the answer is to walk away or to recommit? Last year I read McCloud & Townsend’s book Safe People, and one of the most challenging things was the need at times to draw a line under some relationships, and to walk away rather than to expend all your energy on trying to redeem and rescue the other person, or your relationship. I found this hard because I often operate as though the love I am supposed to have for all people is translated into a one-size-fits-all relationship.

But love does not mean I try and have the same relationship with everyone I know, and by extension, everyone I don’t know. It means that I love them in whatever relationship we have. So I love my friends in a way that is different to my family, and one day I hope to love my wife in one way and my children in another.

At my church we’re coming to the end of a series called ‘Love is a Verb’. And for a series titled so there’s been remarkably little discussion of love, with the focus instead on the relationships that provide the context for love to be demonstrated. Love is a thing, it is an emotion, it is a state that we abide in. But it is also a verb, it is something that we do, and must do over. It is something that we cannot ever complete. We cannot be done with love and we cannot do without it. It remains.

“And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.” 1 Cor 13v13

Love is all around us. It is in the papers, on the screens. It is in our hearts, and on our mind. It lets us dream and it stops us sleeping. And too often it is sequestered in pursuit of happiness. Love becomes the thing which gets us what we want. We love because we want relationship. We love because we want sex. We love because we want company, or status, or security.

How rarely do we let ourselves love and beloved for the sake of nothing but that one thing which remains.

Too often we view marriage as the end point of a road of love, but surely it should be the other way round? Should not marriage open the door to a path that is paved with love both given and received, both the end and the means? Love comes in and flows from the relationship as much if not more than being the force which brought it to life. Love is not the answer to all of your or my problems. But maybe it is what helps us live without the answers.

What do you think? Am I getting carried away with my hopes and dreams for love? Is love enough?