Friendship

Friendship
1 Samuel 20: 1- 21: 16

I know someone now in her eighties who lived for forty or fifty years with a friend. They had separate jobs, but in the rest of life they were inseparable, involved together in church and social life and spending their holidays together. The friend had a stroke a few years ago, and the woman I know took early retirement in order to be able to look after her and to make it possible for them to continue as full a life as possible together, still going off on adventurous holidays, and she went through grim bereavement when her friend eventually died, the kind of bereavement someone goes through when his or her spouse dies. There was the kind of relationship of mutual commitment between them that you might call covenantal. I used to ponder the likelihood that it would be much harder nowadays for two women or two men to make that kind of semipublic mutual commitment in the kind of conservative Christian circles to which they belonged because it would be broadly suspected that the relationship was in effect a same-sex marriage, and they would be horrified at that idea. In the modern West we have gotten into such a mess about same-sex relationships that the very idea of same-sex friendship has become imperiled...