Unconsciousness as Intimacy

My wife and I had a mini-road trip over the weekend, getting a chance to see two sets of friends.  First we stayed with a friend of mine from YDS in South Carolina.  We got lost on the way and didn't make it to their house until late, but it was so wonderful that it didn't matter.  We stayed up and talked with them until after midnight, sharing stories and laughing and enjoying the fellowship that is rare without a set of shared experiences in the background of the present.  We've stayed with them overnight once before, and it was equally wonderful.  The wife put words to one of my own thoughts over breakfast the next morning: "It's really nice to have people stay with you because it's just a different way to hang out than when you just come for a little bit and are gone the next day."

Sleeping together creates intimacy.  Whether it's in the same bed, under the same roof, or even under the same stars on a camping trip (which I really want to do with my youth group this summer), sleeping together and waking up together must be a kind of liminal experience.  Whether it is because you enter into a new kind of trust with someone when you are willing / forced to be unconscious around them or simply because they were there in the night and are there again in the morning, you're sharing something (that I think is) extremely special.  My two best friends from college are both guys that I lived with, guys whom I visited and spent the night at their house.  Even my roommates that I'm not in close contact with now... I shared something with them I didn't have with other friends at college.  And some of the most treasured friends of my heart are the ones I spent entire summers with on a ministry team.

I remember, actually, being secretly terrified of one of my friends that I spent two summers with on a ministry team.  It became increasingly difficult for me to understand that they probably knew me better in so many fundamental ways than anyone else.  She had seen me in an endless number of situations where there was no pretense in my being, when I had no chance of trying to control the way that other people interacted with me, whether that was jumping up and down in worship or crying my eyes out or playing soccer.  Then we got in the same van with all those other people and kept on driving.  Our friendship grew, over time, and even though we were never extremely close, but I was aware that she had insight into my identity (or at least I felt she did) that no one else shared.  And I was afraid.  I was still learning to trust that people actually liked me, the real me down at my core.  The unconscious me.

On Trinity Sunday, a day when everyone should be preaching, teaching, and learning about perichoresis (without every using the word, for heaven's sake!), maybe my sermon would have been that the church should experiment more with road trips and slumber parties.