This year, I find myself drawn to the practice of deep friendship—not merely as a subject of research and writing, but as a way of being. Though uncommon in our era, there are spiritual and cultural traditions that speak of a kind of friendship that transcends our modern understanding—a kind of intimacy we might call deep friendship—an intentional practice of knowing and being known.
I believe all healthy relationships require practice—intentional and mutual actions of personal agency. And without mutual practice, what is friendship? Without the repeated, conscious choice to engage one another, to listen, to be vulnerable, and to remain present, what is left? Surely something less than deep friendship. Likely something merely transactional.
I lean into the notion of practice for three reasons. First, it is a theological understanding of personhood—an applied theology, if you will. I understand God-self existing as relationship. My relationalism informs how I see all persons and nature itself, though that conversation is for another time. For now, it will suffice to say that, to me, friendship is not merely a nice gift or happenstance in life…but a spiritual practice, a sacred way of participating in the relational fabric of existence—the Ground-of-All-Being.
Second, I think friendship exists within us. It is not merely something we engage in externally; it is something we cultivate inwardly. We experience friendship. Friendship is something actively nurtured, developed, and lived within us. Therefore, it requires our inner awareness and kindling. And it requires us to bring our whole selves to the table—not just our curated, performative selves, but our real, uncertain, sometimes fearful selves.
Fran Ferder, in Words Made Flesh, writes:
Letting people get to know us means more than letting them in on the facts about our life. It means letting them know the background fears that haunt our quiet moments, the heavy loneliness that sometimes lurks behind our smile, the passions that both excite and scare us. Self-disclosure means just what it says: disclosing the self. All parts of us. It means uncovering what we most want to hide and telling what we most want to keep secret about ourselves to those who would be our friends.
Most specifically, self-disclosure means revealing our current reactions and feelings to those with whom we are relating. Without this information, others can only know our facade. A facade is not a building block for friendship.
Exactly! And I suspect moving beyond facade-friendship is more challenging than we think. The human instinct to hide is deeply embedded in our human nature, our nervous system, and in our habitual practices. It requires great intention and practice to recognize our own hiding.
There was a season in my life when I was struggling deeply—caught between personal disappointments and vocational uncertainty. One day, I was sitting with a friend who sensed that I wasn’t doing well. After a time of typical small talk, they simply said, “Tell me the real story. I want to hear your real experience.” That was all. No fixing, no advice, just an invitation to be heard, held, and seen.
I hesitated. My instinct was to smooth things over, to present the “I’m fine” version of myself. But something about their presence—the realness, the lack of agenda—allowed me to be honest. I admitted some of my doubt, my insecurity, my fear. They listened, nodded, and at one point said, “Yeah, I get that.” That was it.
That one conversation didn’t solve my problems, but it shifted something in me. It reminded me that deep friendship at its best is about witnessing. It’s about being willing to be with one another in the raw, unfiltered truths of life and say, “I see you. You are not carrying this alone.”
Why practice friendship in this way? Because the foundation of all human desire is a secure sense of self. As Walter Brueggemann puts it, “The human person is… talked out of self, robbed of power, courage, energy, and freedom for selfhood.” (112, HCTP). And, I believe we are listened back into ourselves. And this is the third reason we need to practice deep friendship…as a life-long discovery of our own self.
What many of us consider our ‘self’ is often far less than true selfhood. Our feeble attempt to know ourselves is often marked by mere cultural identity markers—what we have, what we do, what we have accomplished, what others say and think about us. This kind of external self is not grounded in true essence or being; it is externally defined, shaped by doing, measured by achievement and activity, and will always leave oneself perpetually seeking external validation.
So, what do we do?
We practice friendship. We practice friendship as a counter-formational act of knowing and being known, as a space where we refuse to be merely what our facades attempt to say we are. Deep friendship becomes a place of our true humanization, a space where we are seen and known beyond our roles, beyond our productivity, beyond our histories or projected futures. In the risk of deep knowing—allowing ourselves to be truly seen—we find the rewards of true companionship: courage, energy, and freedom for selfhood.
Yes, friendship, when practiced with intention, becomes not only a source of comfort but a path to transformation. It is a practice of presence. A practice of patience. A practice of love that insists on truth. A practice of refusing to let one another be reduced to the shallow scripts of culture or the exhaustion of pretending. A practice of seeing and promoting the good in the other. It is a place where we can, perhaps for the first time, encounter our truest selves in the reflection of another’s unwavering gaze.
If we are to reclaim a kind of deeper self, one not bound by expectations but rooted in essence, then we must insist upon friendship as a practice. And not just any friendship, but the kind of mutual befriending that invites us beyond mere familiarity or interests and into the sacred work of deep, inner self-revealing.
Shane Ash 