A Festival of Friends (and Sex)

Smiles and laughter and pleasant times
There's love in the world but it's hard to find
I'm so glad I found you -- I'd just like to extend
An invitation to the festival of friends

--Bruce Cockburn
Festival of Friends
from the album In the Falling Dark

The glue of emergent is relationship, says Tony (p.56). It's not a shared set of doctrine or a community built around membership. Emergent is a festival of friends. The conversations that are the stuff of emergent take place within what Tony calls an envelope of friendship.

Emergent types seem pretty self-conscious of living in a world in which they are both at home and not at home. They are not at home in the sense that they feel the world pressing in on them and inviting them to find themselves in its story of consumption, greed, fear, exclusion and self-reliance. They are at home in the world in the sense that they feel made for this time, this place, this earthly realm.

In a world characterized by consumption, greed, fear, exclusion, self-reliance and easy-to-prepare, prepackaged answers to life's difficult questions, emergents are finding each other, they're investing in each other, and they are orienting their lives around each other--from where they live and work to how they get there and whether or not they take the big promotion and move away. And if emergents don't feel wholly at home in the world, they don't feel anymore at home in traditional evangelical churches, and for some of the very same reasons they don't feel at home in the world. So, says Tony, emergents are "largely people who feel great disappointment with modern American Christianity" (p.70).

Where earlier generations of Christian dreamers dropped-out of society and dropped-in to communes, emergents are a new generation of dreamers, but they're not dropping out of society, they're staying put, gathering together in urban and suburban locales, in virtual digs like blogs, myspaces, facebooks, etc. and, as I've so often heard it said, they're doing life together. What are they doing together? They're thinking, dreaming, questioning, longing, worshipping, and seeking to be agents of reconciliation and God's shalom at this particular time in history and in the particular places and spaces they live, work and play.

Emergents have also abandoned a one-dimensional view of human beings they believe the Enlightenment bequeathed them, a view which sees us as primarily cognitive, rational, computing-machines, and they're embracing instead a more holistic view of human beings, a view which validates "emotions, experience, relationships, creativity, nature and the many other aspects of being human" (p.79). And all of this in a thick soup of friendship.

My friend Dan Brennan has a blog dedicated entirely to friendship. Like a lot of emergents, he's an adventurer and one of the frontiers he explores on his blog would scandalize garden variety evangelicals, i.e., cross-gender friendships --friendships between men and women who are not married to each other, but may (or may not) be married to someone else. These are deep, emotional, affectionate and intimate bonds, too; but they are bonds that don't have genital union as their natural end. You'll notice by the way that I didn't say sexual union. That's because the sort of intimacy Dan thinks can and should exist between cross-gender friends is sexual. How can it not be when the friends are themselves sexual beings?

And this leads to another feature of emergents, what Tony refers to as "a hope-filled orientation" (p.72). Emergents live eschatologically, i.e., in light of God's future, a glorious future that has come and is coming still. They're convinced that Jesus came with good news and that God has a program of all-inclusive love, wholeness and restoration for the world and they're eager to get on board with God's agenda. Their view of heaven, therefore, like my own, is not that of a disembodied place in the great by-and-by, but an embodied future where things--earthly things like relationships, drinking water, economic systems, eco-systems, all things--are the way God ultimately intends them to be. That future, they believe, is something to get excited about and to start actively anticipating.

Did you notice that when I ended the brief paragraph on friendship and sex I began the very next paragraph with [A]nd this leads to another feature of emergents, and then I went on to talk about eschatology? If so you may have wondered what those two things have to do with each other, sexuality and eschatology. Permit me to stray from Tony's book for just a minute in order to say, very briefly, how I see the two being connected.

The English word sex comes from the Latin secare which literally means to cut-off or to sever. To be "sexed" is, in a very meaningful sense, to be cut-off, disconnected from a whole or severed from it. And that, I think, is part of the human condition, to find yourself self-aware, aware of a kind of loneliness, incompleteness or un-wholeness. Sexuality is nothing more and nothing less than that drive or energy in all of us for communion, relationship, connection, affection and wholeness. "It is not good for man to be alone." That is sexuality. And what is the eschaton if not community, connection and wholeness? Communion with God and each other. If sexuality is the question, the eschaton is its answer. So, sexuality and eschatology are actually deeply connected. In fact the one (sexuality) is aimed at the other (the eschaton).

Genitality, by the way, or "sexual intercourse", is but one aspect of this larger phenomenon of sexuality. It's a really important aspect, but it oughtn't to be confused (the way it so often is) with the larger creational reality (i.e., sexuality) of which it is but a part.

Anyway, back to Tony's book. Is emergent perfect? Does it always live up to its own ideals? I think what Fredericka Mathewews-Green says about culture applies to emergent itself, it's a "fleeting human creation, a spontaneous uncontrolled collaboration, and we shouldn't expect it ever to be perfect or even to be very good" (p.74). Like a flash-mob that converges for a brief time and then disperses, emergent is a sort of spontaneous uncontrolled collaboration of Christian dreamers. They're converging in real and virtual spaces and doing some wild and crazy things. Who knows how long the collaborative experiment will last. But when its time is up and the crowd disperses, you can bet its DNA will be passed on and turn up in some future gene pools. Right now, though, it's here.