She was telling me about a friendship she treasures; and amid her story, she told how over the years, she and her dear friend have developed a simple practice between them. Every so often, one will turn to the other and say: read me.
What an invitation!
Not “talk to me.” Not “advise me,” or “help me,” or “tell me what you think I should do,” or even “listen to me.” Just, read me. A vulnerable opening of oneself to another with the willingness to be seen.
Ever since I heard that phrase and invitation, I’ve been pondering on it. Primarily because it represents such a different depth of vulnerability than what is common in our current era of constant self-preservation, protection, and managed relationships.
And I get it, the complex social conditions of our day do not make it easy to trust one another. We have been disappointed too many times, and maybe even had our vulnerability used against us. The hesitation makes sense. Which is exactly what makes this simple invitation so radical.
Yet, here is why it inspires and challenges me.
I too often fear the unmanaged.
I am aware that even among my friends and family I often wear a kind of armor to protect myself from what feels unsafe. I’ve noticed lately that I tend to approach my relationships a bit like I engage social media…I only present the highlights and the story I want others to see. And most of the time, my way of trying to be vulnerable is merely saying what I think in an unfiltered way, or declaring whatever I feel in the moment. At best that is still a managed offering of myself, and at worst, sometimes it’s a manipulating one. I pick and choose what part of me can be known.
Read me offers something else entirely. It puts oneself into truly vulnerable and unmanaged territory and says: I am willing to let you tell me what you see in me. Now that is a completely different kind of posture, and requires a completely different level of trust.
Most of what we call love is actually an agenda or transaction in disguise.
Simone Weil once wrote that attention is “the rarest and purest form of generosity.” That’s quite a demanding claim! Genuine attention isn’t the mild, polite nodding and listening most of us offer while we wait for our turn to speak. Real attention is an act of self-emptying. Anyone who has tried it knows what it costs: that inner sensation of feeling your own thoughts rise up an wanting to speak, wanting to fix, wanting to be useful…and choosing instead to set it down. To stay present. To remain attentive. It seems that most of us can only manage focused attention for about ninety seconds before we drift back to thinking about ourselves. I think Weil would say that it is because we have not yet learned to love.
I recognize this in myself. Often when I say “I’m here to help,” I usually mean I want to fix it…and to feel good about fixing it. When I say “I just want to encourage you,” I mean I want to be liked for my affirming. I am usually too quick to give advice because advice makes me feel capable, wise, and needed. And then the other person becomes, without my even noticing it, a subplot character in my own story of being a good friend.
I suppose none of that makes me a bad friend, but surely it falls short of genuine love and attention.
Perhaps to attentively respond to a read me invitation would be to sit with them the way you read a poem for the first time. You must stay with it line by line, let it unfold, and be willing to be both surprised and changed by it. I suspect that kind of attention is one of the most loving acts I know of. Not because it solves anything. But because it says: you are worth my full attention. All of you. Even the parts I don’t yet understand, know, see, or hear.
The read me invitation is the practice of deep friendship.
To say read me is to declare that you trust the other person’s perception…that you believe they have seen enough of you, and know you well enough, to value their reading. That is not a small thing. It is a statement about the quality of trust that already exists between you.
And to accept the invitation, to say yes, I will read you, is to offer back your full presence and attention as a gift, and to carry the responsibility of another person’s trust. This is where it becomes deep friendship. When two friends take turns saying read me, neither is the expert or the gatekeeper. Both are trusted explorers, learners, and listeners. This kind of friendship only exists between two people who have agreed to take each other seriously and carefully, to show up without armor, to attend without agenda, and to trust that being fully known is worth the risk of being fully seen.
I think this way of relating matters more than it might first appear. Because almost every framework we have for caring for one another is uneven by design. There is a leader and a participant, a therapist and a client, a director and a directee, a teacher and a student. Someone holds the care; someone receives it. These arrangements are not wrong, they serve real purposes. But they can quietly teach us that depth and wisdom only flows in one direction, that someone must always be the expert and someone the one needing help. The read me invitation and exchange between equals refuses all of that. It insists that neither person has the high ground or more power. It makes love something that can only be discovered together, in the space between two people willing to be known.
That’s friendship in its deepest form. And perhaps it’s what the ancient writers meant when they spoke of the love of David and Jonathan. It may be what was happening between St. Francis and St. Clare of Assisi…who across every social boundary their world enforced, somehow held each other without possessing one another, who helped each other become more fully who they were called to be. Aelred of Rievaulx called this spiritual friendship, and more recently John O’Donohue beautifully highlighted it as Anam Cara: a deep bond in which two friends help move one another toward whatever is most true and alive in them. Let us remember, these were not casual relationships. They were people who intentionally invited and learned to read each other.
Why does this matter?
I have come to believe that friendship, when practiced with great intention, is not merely an important quality of a life…it may be what makes a good life.
And I continue to wonder if intentionally practiced friendship is one of the most honest forms of spiritual life and spiritual formation available to us right now. If so, it will require presence, stillness, listening, receptivity, curiosity, and a willingness to be surprised by what you find in others…which is, when you get down to the nitty gritty of it, a kind of radical faith in and promotion of the inherent worth and goodness of another person.
So, if you have a friendship that holds even a hint of this quality, even occasionally, tend it carefully. It is one of the most transformative graces a life can receive.
And if you don’t, maybe the first step is simply learning how to offer yourself. To practice setting down your own defenses long enough to turn toward someone you care about and say, with receptive hands and genuine curiosity: read me.
Shane Ash 