LOYALTY BINDS ME: Some notes on Alan Bray, The Friend<\/em>.<\/strong> The first thing to say is that I love this book.<\/em> It\u2019s a study of the culture, rituals, ethics, and tensions of same-sex friendship in England, from 1000 AD through, essentially, the death of John Cardinal Newman.<\/p>\n I could not love this book more if it were made out of chocolate and shaped like Sophia Loren, with a cameo by Iron Man.<\/p>\n But now that I\u2019ve got that out of my system: This is such a heartfelt book, and such a humble one. Alisdair MacIntyre rabbits on about how some virtues are necessary products of certain practices (like, chess isn\u2019t chess if you cheat); this book demonstrates how history as a practice can inculcate, or reflect, or strengthen, a genuinely spiritual humility. Bray can be wry, he can be pointed, but he\u2019s always <\/em>ready to submit his preferred conclusions to the uncertainty of the evidence. This is basically the opposite of a polemic; it\u2019s a complication.<\/p>\n Okay\u2026 there are some twitches. Bray frequently, but super-briefly, falls into a utilitarian-universalism, where the *~*real*~* <\/em>purpose of Christianity is friendship\/reconciliation\/social order. (To put the three terms in order from most awesome to least.) This is a complete anomaly from someone who generally goes out of his way to acknowledge alternate readings. It\u2019s a misunderstanding of tradition-in-general and English-Christianity-in-particular, since few robust traditions are simple enough to have one \u201creal\u201d purpose, one \u201ccentral\u201d concept. A tradition builds persona (see below!) precisely by being much more complex than this.<\/p>\n And Bray does have occasional fits of rhetorical Protestantism. I don\u2019t have any idea whether that reflects his actual beliefs\u2013for all I know he was as Catholic as Morrissey when he wrote this book. But at least twice, to take the most notable example, he writes that a vowed same-sex friendship might be considered \u201cmore <\/em>Christian\u201d because it did not require the gatekeeping approval of a priest. I totally agree with him that a Christian pledge of love does not become less <\/em>Christian in the absence of a dogcollar, but that isn\u2019t what he says; if you turn what he does say inside-out, like a glove, it imples that sacraments which require a priest are less Christian than those which don\u2019t. I doubt Bray himself would really argue that the Eucharist is less Christian than marriage! So I read this as a verbal tic, signifying a genuine defensiveness about the ability of the laity to sanctify their lives and loyalties, but not meant to be read too literally.<\/p>\n Speaking of the Eucharist, I love <\/em>how thoroughly Bray has placed this sacrament at the heart of his book. Anyone interested in Eucharist as love-feast and as quintessential Christian prayer cannot afford to miss this book, for real.<\/p>\n Similarly, you can\u2019t read this book and then attend an ordinary American Mass without wanting to cry at the loss of the Kiss of Peace. The \u201chandshake of peace\u201d is a horrifying sign of how far we have come from the world of Bray\u2019s book.<\/p>\n This is not \u201cweaponized\u201d history. I think it does provide hope and succour for those of us who wish to create a fruitful, joyous, and sublime way of life for contemporary gay Catholics; but I\u2019ll talk tomorrow about some of the tensions and cautions this book outlines for that project. Bray\u2019s own position I think will be clear to anyone who reads the afterword, but even there, he speaks with the bone-deep humility of a historian who has fallen deeply in love with his subjects and will, therefore, respect their memory by not getting in the way<\/em>. He doesn\u2019t put his own heart over their faces.<\/p>\n This book overlaps, at the very end, with the very beginning of Roden\u2019s Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture<\/em>. It made me want to re-read Roden, to play the two off against one another.<\/p>\n I\u2019ll close by saying that he\u2019s a terrific stylist. I especially love his trick of ending each chapter with a cliffhanger!<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" LOYALTY BINDS ME: Some notes on Alan Bray, The Friend. The first thing to say is that I love this book. It\u2019s a study of the culture, rituals, ethics, and tensions of same-sex friendship in England, from 1000 AD through, essentially, the death of John Cardinal Newman. I could not love this book more if […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1071,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1055","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n