{"id":12894,"date":"2019-11-12T12:58:57","date_gmt":"2019-11-12T16:58:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/?p=12894"},"modified":"2019-11-12T12:58:57","modified_gmt":"2019-11-12T16:58:57","slug":"the-fifth-step-as-sacrament-of-friendship","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/2019\/11\/the-fifth-step-as-sacrament-of-friendship.html","title":{"rendered":"The Fifth Step as “Sacrament of Friendship”"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\u2026and other thoughts from my talk at Notre Dame. I was there to talk about \u201cfriendship in narratives of addiction and recovery\u201d aka my ranting about \u201cDrinking Song<\/a>\u201d and We Shall All Be Healed<\/em> and Withnail & I<\/em>. The only, how to put this delicately, book<\/em> I treated in depth was Dan Barden\u2019s 2012 neo-noir, The Next Right Thing<\/em>. I\u2019d read it in early sobriety and liked it quite a bit. I re-read it, finishing up on the plane to South Bend, and people, I love this book. The word I kept thinking of was \u201cconsoling.\u201d It was so good to be back in that very idealized-version-of-AA atmosphere, where everybody\u2019s simultaneously obnoxious and submissive, where the hard-boiled noir coating covers a gooey sweet center of kind sincerity. Anyway, here\u2019s the Barden portion of my talk, and if you\u2019re interested in this stuff, I can\u2019t recommend his book highly enough.<\/p>\n

One recurring theme in the literature of friendship is the transparency of friends to one another. I could tell her anything<\/i>, the friends say. St. Aelred emphasizes that friends must be totally trustworthy because you will entrust to them all your secrets. Andrew Sullivan writes, of the friend whose death prompted the beautiful essay [\u201cIf Love Were All,\u201d in Love Undetectable<\/em>], \u201cI remember how hard it was to lie to him or not to tell him everything.\u201d The Next Right Thing<\/i>, that neo-noir novel, repeatedly returns to the image of the Fifth Step, in which an alcoholic shares his or her resentments, fears, and sins with one other person. The Fifth Step resolves the novel\u2019s plot and themes, but also, more deeply, serves in the novel as a kind of sacrament of friendship. If friendship, even more than marriage, is the realm not of self-sacrificing privacy but of self-exposing honesty, then friendship must be a necessary component of any drama of recovery.<\/p>\n

[Many philosophers have argued that] friendship is a realm of choice and freedom. St. Aelred emphasizes that one must test potential friends, and extend friendship only to those who prove that they can bear it. Sullivan, again, describes the classical philosophical ideal of friendship thus: \u201cA virtuous man\u2026 comes to a friend in exactly the opposite way that a lover comes to his beloved. He comes not out of need, or passion, or longing. He comes out of a radical choice.\u201d \u201cIn a utilitarian world,\u201d Sullivan writes, friendship \u201cis useless in the best sense of the word.\u201d<\/p>\n

And once the friend is chosen, there are no scripts; we make no promises, we pledge no troth. We are friends for as long as both of us choose to be. There is nothing we have to do and no time we have to serve.<\/p>\n

All of that is turned on its head in narratives of addiction and recovery. Here friendship is the site of moral drama because it is unchosen<\/i>, because it has duties which you can fulfill or shirk, and because you need it as you have never needed anything since the day you were weaned.<\/p>\n

The writer Helen Andrews noted that nowadays even some people who have never experienced addiction have \u201cAA Envy<\/a>.\u201d I suspect one aspect of this envy is related to friendship. The ideal (if not always the real) sponsor in AA is a kind of Army-issue friend: not the friend you would have chosen for yourself, a little too one-size-fits-all, not chic or charming; but sturdy. You can get the friend you need and don\u2019t deserve, and all you have to do is admit that you are a helpless failure.<\/p>\n

[In the q&a I talked about how Barden portrays a world where people who are acting badly can nonetheless build a kind of \u201cvirtue friendship.\u201d That\u2019s a fraught process, and Barden shows the way it fails and damages people as well as the way it leads some people to life and hope. To me it makes a lot more sense than the standard way philosophers talk about \u201cvirtue friendships,\u201d where you\u2019re supposed to be a good person (HOW) and find good people to be your friend (WHERE) and somehow this is, eventually, fun or whatever.]<\/p>\n

Dan Barden\u2019s novel The Next Right Thing<\/i> is all about this ideal of sponsorship as friendship. The antihero, Randy, begins the novel in that bad state of mind where \u201cyou\u2019re too lonely to talk to your friends.\u201d These are his friends of necessity, met \u201cin the rooms\u201d of AA. They\u2019re your friends because you\u2019re like them, even if they don\u2019t like you<\/i>: Randy\u2019s sponsor, whose fatal overdose sparks the novel\u2019s plot, frequently emphasizes that he doesn\u2019t like Randy much, but he needs<\/i> Randy, he needs to serve Randy, in order to stay sober. This need is messy and sad, and it saves Randy\u2019s life, and slowly it emerges that \u201cI don\u2019t like you very much\u201d is how tough-guy AA types say, \u201cI love you.\u201d (When people in this novel say, \u201cI want you to be my sponsor,\u201d you feel like they should be on one knee with a ring.) In a world where \u201cfriend\u201d is a word more strongly associated with Facebook than with Christ, Randy struggles to explain his relationship to his potential sponsee Troy. Some cops first think Troy is his son, then guess, \u201c\u2026Your boyfriend?\u201d Randy resorts to comparing them to Batman and Robin, as if this will clarify things. Outside AA there\u2019s no word for what they are to one another.<\/p>\n

Everything Randy does in this novel, from breaking a guy\u2019s nose to building a crib, is motivated by friendship: a friendship of need, a friendship of duty, a friendship which can be criminal and stupid and destructive and still remain somehow rooted in love and the desperate desire to act better than you are. When this is friendship, how can it not<\/i> be a site of moral drama? And this is what friendship is in the Gospels, not a radically free choice but a response of gratitude to Jesus\u2019 love for us in our helpless failure. Where Peter, who is all in his feelings as always, cuts off the ear of the high priest\u2019s slave Malchus because he thinks that might help his friend. Where Jesus dies stripped and criminal, to save His friends from spiritual death.<\/p>\n

Pic via Peakpx.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u2026and other thoughts from my talk at Notre Dame. I was there to talk about \u201cfriendship in narratives of addiction and recovery\u201d aka my ranting about \u201cDrinking Song\u201d and We Shall All Be Healed and Withnail & I. The only, how to put this delicately, book I treated in depth was Dan Barden\u2019s 2012 neo-noir, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1071,"featured_media":12897,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,7,177],"tags":[316,56,52,123],"class_list":["post-12894","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-art","category-mackerel-snapping","category-too-much-is-never-enough","tag-dan-barden","tag-friendship","tag-if-whiskey-were-a-woman-id-be-married-for-sure","tag-we-make-an-idol-of-our-fear-and-call-it-choice"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Fifth Step as "Sacrament of Friendship"<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"...and other thoughts from my talk at Notre Dame. 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