Canter Bridge

The time on my watch is two hours behind Charlotte’s languid late-morning minute hand. It’s ‘Going Home Day’, that passage of my journeys which begins far from the hearth, often with colleagues and friends, occasionally in the faux hominess of a hotel room, and ends—finally, it ends—amid familiar smells, domestic jokes, wagging tails, and loving arms.

This day is for looking forward, a day whose frenzy is overshadowed by its destination. It is re-rooting. It is debriefing. It is settling back in. It is one’s own bed. It is a welcome sigh at the end of the blur that is international travel. So it matters little what time it is in the various time zones and airports that will be my momentary hosts today. Only home matters, and the hour of those who await me there. Going Home Day only has only one time zone.

Strange then that it hurts to leave Charlotte, that one feels palpable loss in this airport concourse these bare twenty minutes after a friend drops me off at curbside. Odd, this pulling loose from what is not home but is something warm, something half-anchored, something resolutely forceful in its intermittent and fruitful pressure upon the heart.

It is the power of friendship, that loving violence that is exercised upon pilgrims by persons and personalities whom one has grown unable to live without.

John and I met as seminarians, limply aware of being headed in similar directions, roughly paced at similar speeds, vaguely alike in our respective routes through new marriage, professional training, academic trial-and-error, perennial agony as Red Sox fans, the arrival of babies, and the incessant lure of the distant and the cross-cultural. Yet neither of us would have guessed back then this interweaving of heart, task, and calling in which our distant lives have become entangled.

Fifteen years later, our collective memory is seasoned with a map’s worth of shared experience. Tracking old acquaintances in Madrid, sketching out a book idea in Cambridge, laboring alongside church leaders in Cuba, exulting in the sacred space of Fenway Park, pulling on the thread of institutional analysis in Costa Rica, probing at a ten-year horizon in Toronto, and now stamping out a template for future shared work in Charlotte.

The biblical landscape of genealogy is drawn in the vocabulary of father and mother, son and daughter, brother and sister. This fixation upon blood relationship knows no competitor. It is the way of talking about the people thing. Tribe and nation, through this lens, are merely the disparate branches of the human family.

Biblical story traces humanity’s very genesis in the lines of a first couple and its first offspring. ‘Now this one is bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh!’, Adam exults—his name itself means Humanity—a rhetorical pairing off that forever distinguishes humankind from all other kinds. No other sociology is required where ‘the man’ and ‘the woman’—the husband, the wife—define humanity’s impending tragicomedy as a family story.

The birth of agriculture, of the arts, of technology and its bloody potential are sketched in the birth of three brothers. In Hebrew, their names are their identity (selves): Cain, the spear, bloody brother-killer. Abel, a mere breath, so quickly gone away. And Seth, whom the Lord ‘places’ in dead Abel’s place to rescue one of the family’s bloodlines from an early end.

Marriage itself, that archetypal family moment, is defined first of all by the bonds it breaks. Such is the medley of ecstasy and completion that the first man and first woman find in each other that their experience becomes the prototype of all marriage to come. But new union is first of all a tearing apart of family ties: ‘For this reason’, reads the Primeval History of the book called Genesis, ‘a man will abandon his father and mother and join himself to his wife, and they will become one flesh.’

To abandon or otherwise dishonor one’s parents was a capital crime in Israel’s Law Code. With exquisite irony, the Primeval Historian traces the agony of breakage which makes possible the love-shout of union. There will be no history, no hope, no future, if the mother who bore a boy and the father who trained him to be a man do not cede their space to a stranger who now shares their son’s bed. This will be the way of Creation’s human sovereigns. Not for a moment does it stop being about family.

Later on, the patriarchs’ descendants—we know them as ‘Israelites’—are in fact the ‘sons of Israel’, even if English translation obscures the genealogy that is engraved in the very name of this remarkable nation. The man Israel, that usurper, had first been named Jacob until a shadowy night visitor wrestled with him and re-named the limping survivor. He was son of Isaac, who in turn was Abraham’s son. Abraham himself appears to history and faith as the Man With No Family, not because he was born that way—perish the thought!—but because he did what the sane do not do. He left the succor of home, tribe, and clan. His was the strange calling to peel off like wet clothing all that was identity until nothing remained but a turning away from all that had ever been known to matter—the shorthand for this is family—and a turning toward the promise of something known only to the Caller.

Abraham’s defining moment, to Jews the Akedah, the Binding of Isaac to Christians, still brings hushed solemnity to the most secular of circles when it is read. This tale—at once deeply disturbing and formidably compelling—tests a father’s willingness to slaughter the son through whom he would regain a family. Here the biblical narrative lingers powerfully over the sight of Abraham climbing Mount Moriah knife in hand toward the strangest of sacrificial rites, pausing to catch his breath and attend the troubled questions of ‘his son … his only son … Isaac … whom he loved.’

In Israel’s checkered history—EveryNation writ small and brought near to God—the brother is avenger and fellow warrior. In the face of Cain’s bitter evasiveness—‘Am I my brother’s keeper?—biblical law melds with narrative and poetry to say, collectively, ‘Of course you are!’ Brother provides for brother.

Indeed, brother lies in the place of brother. According to the ancient law of the Levirate, it is the brother who disrobes with his fallen brother’s wife and gives his seed to prolong the name and the family of his dead kin, a task whose attractiveness must have varied wildly with the comeliness and cooperation of the bereaved. Probably, it produced no end of locker-room speculation.

The biblical Ur-history, its ancient Story-of-Where-We-Came-From, knows only the dialect of family, of blood, of father, mother, son and daughter. For each generation, it is the language of brotherhood, which is everything.

Like family stories of every age, the biblical one knows that families are both blessing and curse. They both exalt and degrade those who are nearest. Constancy and betrayal, even between God and people, is painted with the passionate literary brush of marriage and adultery, of love offered and rejected, of hearts uplifted and torn, of eternal vows and temporal rupture, of promise and pain and reconciliation. It is a family story. And, when sons and daughters stand on the same generational plain, it is the tale of brotherhood and of sisterhood.

It is hardly to be remarked then, that Christians today in many nations address each other unselfconsciously as sister and brother. It could hardly be otherwise, since the Christian movement, even from its early trauma of reluctant divorce from what would become normative Judaism, spoke the same biblically phrased language.

If Easter was to define a new future, if following Jesus was to tug and tear at ancient loyalties, then a new family would emerge to address themselves by those old, affectionate terms. This brother, however, this sister would not always share blood. The Christian community, almost from its conception, confessed a sociological heresy, writ large in the multicultural, polylingual festival that became their Pentecost. That rebellious new truth: there is a bond that is deeper than blood. They found this identity in their common allegiance to a Galilean prophet whom they discovered to be much more than that. One of their most sophisticated writers, the author of the letter to the Hebrews, even dares to call Jesus ‘elder brother’.

This is the language of family, an ancient tongue now liberated from blood-ties and brought to bear on a community that Christians dare to hope will one day encompass—again, in the repetitive rhythm of Biblical prose—‘every tribe, every language, every people, every nation.’ In the paradox of biblical logic, a new family is born of those whose allegiance sometimes ruptures blood ties, now come full circle to embrace that very genealogy, now writ large. Once again, it is all about family. Once again, in a given generation, it is about sister, about brother.

How strange then this inversion of all that, come to us in the spare poetry of the biblical Proverbs:

There is a friend closer than a brother.

The network of family, both biological and spiritual, the givenness of humanity’s fabric, is here pierced through by a clipped row of words that suggest far more than they assert. The teller of proverbs uses few words, so each one is chosen with an astute precision that assures their echo will ring louder and longer than the speaking of them.

We wouldn’t know he was talking about a friend were it not for the run-up to the statement I’ve quoted. That brief prelude speaks of a ‘friend’, of sorts, but not one to die for. This is merely the entrée to what the writer really wants to say: ‘But there is one who loves …’ We would say, ‘one who truly loves’.

Astonishingly, this is his way of speaking about a friend. If the context did not set us straight, we might think he spoke of the intimate love of a woman or the paternal affection of a father. But he does not. The true friend is his topic, and he has not yet finished. This kind of ‘lover’ clings tighter than a brother.

Once before, masculine affection is spoken this daringly, when David—not yet king nor particularly aspiring to the job—bares his heart regarding a fallen friend by means of an expression that has unfortunately been brought into modern conversation about homosexuality:

I grieve for you, my brother Jonathan; you were to me greatly beloved. Your love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women.

The proverbial Sage writes in Hebrew. His language of two friends’ proximity employs the vocabulary of marital clinging to each other and of a chosen nation’s religious struggle to belong only to Yahweh. In both cases, the alternatives were numerous and compelling. He talks about a friend in phrasing redolent of the nearest, the most passionate, the most religious, the most familial, even the most sexual of bonds. In the stingiest of syllables, ‘closer’ speaks volumes about affectionate loyalty, about well-weathered covenant, about hell’s and high water’s inability to penetrate the solidarity of two men, about knowing what the stiff is going to say before he opens his mouth.

Now, back home, I recall John closing his eyes across the room as we both soak in the sensual eloquence of Eva Cassidy’s voice, too briefly with us before her untimely passing. The tension of responsibility shared, of burdens separately borne, of lonely leadership decisions too few will understand, of concern for a family sleeping upstairs gradually drain from this friend’s face. And, I suppose, from mine.

I’ve been everywhere with this guy. We’ve emptied our hearts of all their words and we’ve ridden in silence across Cuba’s hot plains. We’ve belly-laughed at the ironies and wept before the pain. Now, the music takes the stage. We become its small, silent audience.

A friend knows when to speak and when silence is the better speech. A friend makes connections without instruction, perceives the soul’s landscape with little direction, interrupts without apology, shows up without invitation, leaves quietly knowing no explanation is required.

Friendship is sisterhood with no papers, brotherhood outside the law.

Friendship requires a brother’s pact and a warrior’s valor, yet is experienced chiefly as gift. Friendship derives its shape from the mundane, but its gleam comes from the surprising and eventful. Friendship is not often to be spoken of. It retreats from self-consciousness, harbors no heroic pretensions. Its finest moments pass unremarked.

Friendship has only one advantage over brotherhood: it is a surprise. Its idiosyncrasy is its unexpectedness. Nothing foreordains it. No bloodlines point this way, no family duty clears this space. A friend, massively out of step with all that can be inherited or required, loves uniquely.

Stubbornly, exquisitely, resiliently, a friend simply gets on with what a brother must. Then sometimes—biblical wisdom would have us celebrate the fact or cultivate a taste for its possibility—he does it better.