A Psychology of Intimacy with Willie James Jennings

A Short Exploration

Phillip Hanson, The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology Day of Scholarship, January 2024

Sinews of Connection: Eros

How are humans connected to one another? What is the nature of our relatedness? Or are we connected at all beyond choosing to be connected? This is the central question of this section. There is no doubt that humans can be connected. We form bonds of friendship, chosen family, business, etc. But are these the only bonds we share, the ones we choose to share? The confession of the erotic is a confession that admits, “No, we are connected beyond these superficialities, beyond choice. There is a connection that runs deeper. We are connected through eros.” Eros is a good term for this primary fabric of connection because it speaks to the wildness, the bodiliness of this connection, of this energy. Audre Lorde names it as the “physical, emotional, and psychic expressions of what is deepest and strongest and richest within each of us.”1 This is the power, the energy that connects us: our deepest longings, deepest meanings, the yearnings and cravings of our bodies and souls. These longings, cravings, and desires are not for material goods. They are deep lognings for home, for community, for love, for belonging. In our desire, we connect with one another. Our desires run in and out of us and between, through, and within each other. They twist and tangle like a woven tapestry through one another. In these interrelations emerges the energy or power of the erotic. It is, as Rita Nakashima Brock states, “the power of our primal interrelatedness.”2

Drawing Lines

However, in our modern situation, it seems very strange to think of people existing on a woven tapestry of interconnection. It has become more intuitive to think of ourselves as very isolated and boundaried selves. A helpful analogy that I draw from Willie James Jennings is the deformative innovation of private property in new world colonies. Just as boundaries, property lines, and borders were indiscriminately drawn through lands, mountains, forests, rivers, across homelands, burial grounds, and between the movements and practices of humans and animals in those lands, so too has our relational landscape been carved through, parceled out and drawn up and segregated regardless of the sinews of our connection. What Jennings points out is that both these operations are fueled by the same logic: commodification and possession or control. The earth was commodified into separate lands and properties in order for those lands to be controlled and possessed in the service of the individual and his profit. So too are our relationships and our own selves commodified, or better stated, objectified, so that the goods of those relationships can be possessed or controlled for the benefit of individuals.

Safety

What is most important to me is how this has affected our friendships—our connections with peers and partners and people we share our lives within cities, institutions, sport, education, and congregation. Why do we seek to possess the commodities of friendship? Why do we seek to control the terms and existence of our friendships? Firstly, it really helps to keep us safe. When we objectify others and ourselves, we can better control the terms and existence of a relationship. This comes from real pains experienced in relationships. When we ignore the tangled web in which we live by drawing lines around people and ourselves, we can control how often we leave those lines and allow ourselves to be touched by others. We can control when and how much we share in our friendships and participate. We can moderate the reciprocity and we can retreat back into our lines and walls when we need to. This is important because we have experienced relationships in which people thought it was their right to touch us, and they forced themselves upon us, forcing us to receive. This violence destroys relationships and makes friendship dangerous. And it forces us into prisons of safety and individualism which make friendship and intimacy only shadows and distant longings. 

Escape

Longing is the second reason we have as to why we objectify and then seek to control our friendships—or better stated unfulfilled longing. This longing, as we have seen above, is that deep eros, deep yearning in all our hearts, that aching for the good, the true, and the beautiful. It’s that desire for one another. These desires are wild, beautiful, deep, and expanding. They can be full of immense, indescribable joy! And in their wildness and immense energy and power, they can be terrifying. What are we to do with such powerful, wild, unruly, deep, and secret longings? They overwhelm us with awe that we can scarcely speak of them. Eros courses through our bodies and enlivens our spirits. It is like a great fire within us. How can we live in such power? The tragedy is that though we long so deeply, “the world does not dedicate itself to our happiness,”3 as Wendy Farley writes. What we are left staring at are the harsh realities of our own mortality and death, the harsh reality of unmet longings, and even unsatisfiable desires. We long for our desires and longings to be met. And in this aching of our spirit, a clever lie comes in: “Then take it.” Such a lie promises us escape and release from our pain: the seemingly unbearable agony of unmet longings. We can simply take, possess, or control that which we long for; take it, control it, and use it for our satisfaction, to meet our need. This gives us an escape from the pain of unmeetable longings, but it betrays a far more wonderful imagination. 

Friendship is possible in both of these visions, but they imagine a deeply distorted vision of friendship, one gathered around singular individuals and isolated from the wild sinews of our togetherness. These visions of friendship center around the idea of exchange or choice. Jennings writes, “Exchange networks need not be personal, need not be communal, need not be storied, need not suggest long-term obligation or relationship, need not even require names or identities. They only require items and money, that is, commodities.”4 A vision of relationship like this is very safe. It does not invite us into the wildness of interconnection and togetherness. It gives us the benefit of commodities that we can use to temporarily satisfy the longing and desire in our hearts, but it cannot give us meaningful friendships. Once the friend-object conditionally fulfilling our desire crosses that line and ceases to fulfill our need, likewise does the friendship cease. Such visions can bring needed safety and temporary release. But they will never bring intimacy. 

A Psychology of Intimacy

Intimacy grows through a loving embrace of our desire and the desires of others, not collapsing them into demand5 and need-fulfillment and retreating into individualist fortresses, but through a delicate and intricate interweaving of our lives through mutual sharing. We must live in this world through eros, connecting to our deepest meanings, most profound longings, and most meaningful desires. We must not abandon the yearnings of our hearts and the uniqueness of our stories and identities. We must lean more fervently into all our feelings—connecting to all parts of self—and bring them to share in our friendships. This sharing happens through time and presence. It takes slowness, care, quietness, conflict, and commitment. Every effort to share is a meaningful sharing and builds intimacy. Sharing entails mixing our lives together, sharing food, sharing place, sharing land, and sharing the goods of community rather than trying to possess them. What I am speaking to here is the enjoyment and wonder of sharing our desire, the erotic energy of our selves, our feelings, our tears, our laughter, our joy, and our sorrows. I am talking about the courage and beauty of refusing to collapse our longing into possession, control, and the satisfaction of our longings. I am talking about the courage to respond to the longings of our hearts by moving towards others, seeing people not as merely complementary to our own aims or as means to an end, but rejoicing in the intricacies, longings, quirks, identities, stories, and unsurpassable beauty of each person in community. Truly what we long for cannot be satisfied. It can only be shared.

May the flickering and burning of eros in our hearts never be extinguished, may the wooing and beckoning of intimacy not release us yet, may we encounter friends who buoy our hearts and find belonging together with them within that wonderful and wild community of desire that refuses to relent and that gives life to us all. Amen. 

Bibliography

Brock, Rita Nakashima. Journeys by Heart: A Christology of Erotic Power. New York: Crossroads, 1988.

Farley, Wendy. The Wounding and Healing of Desire: Weaving Heaven and Earth. Lousiville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005.

Jennings, Willie James. After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 2020. 

Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider : Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde. Berkeley: Crossing Press, 2007.

Recommended Reading

Butler, Judith. 2007. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge.

Carter, J. Kameron. Race: A Theological Account. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. (Especially Chapter 4). 

Jennings, Willie James. “Barth and the Racial Imaginary.” In The Oxford Handbook of Karl Barth, 499–516. Oxford 2019.

________. The Christian Imagination : Theology and the Origins of Race. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. 

________. "Creating Home: Forming Christians Who Believe in Creation and Creatures" Lectureship, Fuller Seminary, Pasadena CA, April 7-8, 2021.

________. “‘He Became Truly Human’: Incarnation, Emancipation, and Authentic Humanity.” Modern Theology 12, no. 2 (January 1, 1996): 239–55. 

________. "Reclaiming the Creature: Anthropological Vision in the Thought of Athanasius of Alexandria and Karl Barth." PhD diss., Duke University, 1993.

________. “Reframing the World: Toward an Actual Christian Doctrine of Creation.” 

International Journal of Systematic Theology 21, no. 4 (2019): 388–407. 19pgs.

Pavón-Cuéllar, David. “Colonialism, Subjectivity, and Psychology in Latin America.” Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, November 17, 2022. doi:10.1037/teo0000217.

Povinelli, Elizabeth A. The Empire of Love: Toward a Theory of Intimacy, Genealogy, and Carnality. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2006.