Faith Dance

Update

I am now 31  pages into my second chapter.  I feel good about the weekend.  I have just a couple of more paragraphs to add before I will conmsider myself done with the first draft.  Whew!  I've written 60 something pages (unedited) for the book.  Thank you for your prayers. I continue to feel energy and this drving need to write.   

Cross-Sex Friendship Quote of the Week

"In this sense, friendship between the sexes may take us not out of ourselves but beyond ourselves and may make us whole, balanced, and sane than we could otherwise be.  Indeed, I think this is one of the purposes of friendship--one of the purposes God has giving us friends.  We are being prepared ultimately for that vast friendship which is in heaven, in which we truly are taken beyond ourselves, and which all share in the love of God."  Gilbert Meilaender  The Changing Face of Friendship

A Good Day

   Here is a picture of my other good friend, the other Jennifer in my life, Jennifer Ould.  She graduated today with a M.Div. from Trinity Divinity Evangelical School.

Prayer Request

Sheila received word today that her mother is suffering from a brain hemorrhage. She's 85 and has been suffering from gradual dementia over the past few years. Because of that Sheila "lost" her mother a while back--although her mother can at times in spurts, recognize her. Her mother has been in an assisted health care facility in Duluth Minnesota during the past few years. Doctors have told Sheila and her brother unless doctors do major brain surgery, her mother will die very soon--could in the next couple of days, or could be in a couple of weeks. Sheila and her brother are both in agreement, that kind of surgery in this circumstance, is not what her mother would want at this stage of her dementia. We're praying right now about when Sheila should go up, either tomorrow or Sunday for sure. Even though Sheila has shed many tears over her mother's dementia the past few years, making this decision and facing another "loss" has been very hard.

Thanks for your prayers.

On Writing

So, one of the most important questions in writing they say, is your targeted audience. My targeted audience is layered. I doubt my book will appear on a "family" bookstore shelf near any pop fluff. I think most people who would be interested in reading about cross-gender friendship have a little more complexity in their relational life than the stuff that's light reading. I am interested in reaching a broad audience at many levels--primary and secondary levels.

I'm at 23 pages in my second chapter. I have 63 footnotes in the chapter so far. :-)

Update

Well, tonight is our first dance lesson.  Quick...."The best things happen when we're dancing"  from what movie?  Okay, Could be more than one more.

We'll dance with it. :-)

Thank you, thank you, for your prayers and support.  I am now 22 pages into my second chapter-and I felt a burst of energy to go in a direction this morning--and I am wanting so much pour it into words.  22 pages means I am at 53 pages now in this stretch.  I appreciate your continued prayers.

Something to Think About

"In my book, Standing Again at Sinai, I discussed some of the complicated history of Jewish perspectives on sexuality as they affect women.  The rabbis, I argued, were deeply ambivalent about sexual desire.  They called it yetzer hara, the evil inclination, and saw it as both necessary to the existence of the world and potentially disruptive and destructive.  As an essential component of human personality, sexuality needed to be carefully channeled and controlled.  But what were the mechanisms of that control and at whom was control aimed?  On the one hand, men were perceived as more able to control themselves and were, therefore, responsible for reigning in their urgent sexuality and avoiding occasions that might trigger inappropriate thoughts and uncontrollable passion.  On the other hand, simply by virtue of existing, women were the ubiquitous temptations, the sources and symbols of illicit desire.  To speak of control was necessarily to speak of women—of the need to cover women, to avoid women, and to contain women in proper families where their threat was minimized if it could not be entirely overcome. "

Judith Plaskow, Rethinking Jewish Sexual Ethics

God Forbid: Religion and Sex in American Public Life

Cross-Sex Friendship Quote of the Week

"Yet whatever we may write to each other matters little, beloved: within our hearts is the ardour of our love in the Lord whereby you speak to me and I to you continuously in those wordless outpourings of charity which no tongue can express nor letter contain."

Jordan of Saxony to his friend, a Dominican nun, Diana d'Andalo

Emotional Affair or Friendship Love 11

I ran across this link of Jocelyn C Green this morning when someone was searching for emotional affairs

I hope my book addresses the issue with a much deeper Christian response than this one on emotional affair:

18 Pages

So I finished the weekend with my second chapter draft at 18 pages!!! That means I got in four plus pages yesterday. Actually I did five--with scraping one of the the previous pages I reworked. I am still in the place of diving into the depths of a theology of male-female friendship that provocatively delves into the long-standing hierarchial typology of love in the Christian church (read mostly male dominated views of love) and accompained with gendered views of passion, love, and friendship. I think the Jesus and Mary Magdalene friendship (no, I don't think they were married--but I do think they had a relationship that would make most evangelicals queasy) gives us much to think about when it comes to male-female friendship in the new creation.

That means of course, in a period of 3 weeks, I have written 48 pages.

44 and Counting!!

Yesterday, I was able to get 8 more pages of writing in.  That puts me in this current chapter at 14 pages.  I felt I needed to have a very good day yesterday because this next Saturday I'll be at a graduation (one of my closest friends) and then dinner after.  So, I don't think I will be able to get much in next Saturday--which is why I really wanted some progress yesterday--and I think 8 pages is pretty good. 

In the last 3 weeks then, I have written 44 pages towards the book!!!!  Wow.   Its happening.  I still feel I have a lot of energy for this.  For those of you who are praying for me and this--I am so grateful.  I am currently working thru a piece on eros, Jesus and Mary Magdalene--and what that means for male-female sexuality in the kingdom.

The Stormy First Steps: Tenderness and Eros

Some stimulating thoughts on the first day of the week from Elizabeth Moltmann-Wendel in Rediscovering Friendship:

Something to Think About

L. William Countryman muses over the fact that, “Christians have a long and complicated relationship with love, sexuality, and friendship.”  He adds, “Some Christian thinkers have used the multiplicity of Greek terms as an opportunity to define several different and even mutually exclusive types of love…Others (I count myself among them) think this multiplication of loves overinterprets the linguistic differences."

Love Human and Divine: Reflections on Love, Sexuality, and Friendship

It Doesn't Get Any Better Than This...

So, I am in the midst of writing about passionate desires for the other gender--not romantic--but passionate desires towards the other in love and cross-gender friendships. Pretty provocative material for your average evangelical. As I mentioned I am at 6 pages. I emailed Sheila the 6 pages just to have her look at it--and she emailed back to me this morning:

"This is utterly wonderful, Daniel, my Daniel!!! Look neither to the right, nor the left. Just keep listening to the Lord and writing what He gives you."

Update

This has been a good groove I've been in on working on my book. Late last night, after a pretty exhausting today, I thought I was just going to go to bed without doing anything on my book. Sheila said to me, "Why don't you go to bed early?" But suddenly, there was a spark of energy to write something down. Three pages later, or a little after midnight, I went to bed!! So, I now have six pages into my current chapter. So far this week I have had a productive week, writing wise. I feel good about this week. I've now been in a good stretch going on three weeks of working on my book consistently night after night, with a night off here or there.

I feel this it and even though I only got four hours of sleep last night, I am encouraged that I seem to have hurdled a major block through past starts and stops--of not being able to move forward.. I am looking forward to this weekend. All day Saturday is set apart to working on it.

Thank you for your prayers.

Christian Tenderness

Elizabeth Moltmann-Wendel in her book Rediscovering Friendship, quotes Heinrich Boll in an interview in 1969:

Something to Think About

"And the companion of the Savior is Mary Magdalene.  But Christ loved her more than all the disciples and used to kiss her often on the mouth.  The rest of the disciples were offended by it and expressed their disapproval.  They said to him, Why do you love her more than all of us?  The Savior answered and said to them, Why do I not love you like her?"

The Gospel According to Philip