Review
Books
Culture
Friendship
6 min read

Why do we ignore the power of friendship

Elizabeth Day’s Friendaholic: Confessions of a Friendship Addict.
A large group of friends sit at a crowded table and share a meal together.
Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash.

Elizabeth Day is a journalist, a novelist, a podcast host, a broadcaster, and a friendaholic. This isn’t a term that she uses lightly, she’s not merely delighting in some quaint wordplay here. Rather, Elizabeth has identified within herself a chronic compulsion, a psychological need, a habitual seeking out, and an emotional reliance on friendship (or, at least, what she perceived friendship to be – more on that later…) 

Therefore, when she labels herself a friendship addict, she does so with every ounce of seriousness. She also describes the symptoms of her addiction with impressive levels of introspection.  

‘I would get a buzz from a moment of exchange; a hit of pure friendship adrenaline. In that moment, I would feel worthwhile and liked and accepted. I wanted more of it. Then I needed more of it. Then it became something that I relied on for my own self-worth. I must be OK, the reasoning went, I’ve got so many friends.’  

These intimate confessions lead Elizabeth to begin the epilogue of her book with a familiar, albeit reconfigured, turn of phrase: ‘My name is Elizabeth Day’ she writes, ‘and I’m a recovering friendaholic.’  

The quality of our social life, whether it be too large or too small, has a significant impact on our mental, emotional and physical health. 

Elizabeth pre-empts any criticism of what could be perceived as a ‘woe-is-me’ memoir by meeting those who may be reaching for their ‘metaphorical tiny violins’ head on. This book unashamedly takes the impact of friendship, or a lack thereof, very seriously. And so should we. Afterall, social injuries are proven to be very real and loneliness a serious determinant of health. On the opposite end of the same scale, ‘social burnouts’, which often lead to social anxiety, are becoming an epidemic, while an increasing number of mental health issues are being accredited to the profound impact of ‘toxic’ friendships. In short, it is becoming common knowledge among researchers that the quality of our social life, whether it be too large or too small, has a significant impact on our mental, emotional and physical health.  

And yet, despite this - we have barely any language with which to adequately address or inspect the topic of a ‘social life’. It seems that generation after generation, we have failed to take the art of friendship seriously. 

‘Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art.... It has no survival value.’ 

C.S. Lewis

Considering the psychology, this seems non-sensical. Why would this be?  

It could be a symptom of individualism; the emphasis that our Western society places on individual success, personal goal setting and the virtue of independence. Maybe it has more to do with our inclination toward all things productive, and, to (partly) quote C.S Lewis, ‘friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art.... It has no survival value’. The other explanation could be our pre-occupation with romantic relationships, and the habit we have of idolising them over and above all other social attachments. In her book, Notes on Love, Lauren Windle powerfully reflects on this, she writes  

‘maybe it’s time to stop looking for a partner who is also my ‘best friend’ and start appreciating my best friends. Maybe it’s time to stop feeling bereft of true love and realise that I already experience it. Every day.’   

Whatever the reason(s) may be, we have neglected to take seriously the science of the social life, and the results of such an oversight are encapsulated in Elizabeth Day’s self-diagnosed ‘friendship addiction’, and the book that has documented it.

Elizabeth places her personal life on the altar in this book, she sacrifices the privacy of her emotional life. 

Elizabeth talks us through her most formative of friendships - the long-standing and the fleeting, the nourishing and the draining, the durable and the fragile – this book is an ode to them all. She introduces us to her ghosts of friendship past and present (although, once they read of their appearance in this strikingly honest book, I do worry that a couple of her friends may slip from the latter into the former category), and does so in a way that makes you, as the reader, instinctively close the book for a moment and indulge the continual urge to reflect on the mosaic of people who have entered and exited your own life.  

Elizabeth places her personal life on the altar in this book, she sacrifices the privacy of her emotional life for the purpose of speaking with powerful candour. She tells the intimate stories of how her addiction came to be, and how she has sought to feed her need for a thriving social life at her own expense. Elizabeth has offered herself up as a case-study of what inevitably happens when we don’t have the tools, the maps, or even the language with which to engage with the subject of friendship. As it turns out, friendship – the real kind – was not what she was addicted to, nor was it what she was accumulating. Rather, it was approval. It was the self-worth that she drew from the affirmation of others. If we, as a society, ensured that we were more socially-literate, perhaps Elizabeth could have identified the difference much sooner. Perhaps we all could.    

As well as telling her own stories, Elizabeth weaves together insights from psychology, philosophy, history, and the experiences of others in differing contexts. This ensures that as many people as possible are able to find themselves in the pages of this book. And, as a result, I found Friendaholic to be the book that I didn’t know I had been missing.  

It’s funny. It’s emotive. It’s generous. It’s honest. And it’s refreshingly serious about friendship. I recommend it heartily.  

 

Nobody is totally immune to cultural individualism, the idol of productivity, nor the heroizing of romantic love. 

There’s just one thing that felt missing, one insight that I instinctively began to fill any gaps with. I found myself willing Elizabeth to take a biblical route (totally unfairly, I should add, as she doesn’t identify as a Christian, nor does she claim this to be a book of any religious inclination).  

I wanted her to explore the Bible, because in it, she would find an abundance of evidence for almost every point she felt compelled to make. Friendship soaks the pages of the Christian Bible.  

Friendaholic quotes Jesus in its very first chapter, making reference to his declaration that ‘greater love has no one than this, that someone lay his life down for his friends’, but then never picks this astonishing claim, nor the history-altering man that it came from, up again (once again- this is no criticism, if it were, it would be a mightily unfair one). The platonic love that Elizabeth takes so seriously, and that our culture doesn’t take nearly seriously enough, is claimed to be the ‘greater’ love by Jesus, who subsequently kick-started a movement which was defined by this kind of love. Friendship was weaved into the earliest expressions of what we now call Christianity/the church. Jesus’ words were, and still are, lived out with astonishing impact.   

This is not to say that Christians always perceive or do friendship perfectly. On the contrary, nobody is totally immune to cultural individualism, the idol of productivity, nor the heroizing of romantic love. Indeed, the afore mentioned quote by Lauren Windle has been taken from a book where she tells the story of ‘being single in a marriage obsessed church’.  

It’s for this reason that I so enjoyed Elizabeth’s offering. Friendaholic felt like a literary dusting brush, brushing aside generations worth of dirt from a long-neglected jewel; the jewel being real, true, and deep friendship. The kind of friendship that is as integral to our health as food and shelter, the kind that was included in the original blueprint for human flourishing, the kind that is both dramatically underrated, and yet greater than all other human loves.  

You can take it from an ancient book, or Elizabeth Day’s brand new one – as it turns out, they will tell you the exact same thing.  

Article
Culture
Mental Health
Music
5 min read

Dark, sweet and subtle: recovered music orientates us

The alt-folk music seeking inspiration from forgotten hymns.

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

A woman stand at a mixing desk playing a small keyboard.
Lleuwen Steffan plays.

In 2012, musician Lleuwen Steffan first came across a trove of lost Welsh folk hymns preserved in the sound archive of St Fagan’s Museum. Knowing they were not in current hymn books, she undertook further research and discovered they had been excluded from earlier hymn books by the then all-male hymn book committees of their time. Instead, they had been passed on orally, and, although recorded for St Fagan’s by the historian Robin Gwyndaf, had become lost with time and secularization. 

Steffan was particularly attracted to these hymns as many dealt with the dark side of the psyche including addiction and mental distress. She has said that many of these hymns, some of which date back to the eighteenth century, are “conversational and the lyrics feel so current”. She is currently taking these hymns back to where they were born through a tour of 50 chapels in Wales but this is not an exercise in nostalgia as her focus is on their contemporary resonance: “Musically, I’m not interested in recreating something from the past. That’s missing the point. Yes, the words are old but the message is always new. The music is free form.” 

Although the subject matter of these hymns will have been part of the reason for their exclusion from the hymn books of their day, that same subject matter has been part of worship songs from the time of the Psalms to the present. The Psalms are the worship songs of the people of Israel as recorded in the Old Testament and are the first occasion in ancient literature where the voice of victims is heard and valued.  

The Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann in his book Spirituality of the Psalms provides an insightful and structured overview of the Psalms using three categories: orientation, disorientation, and new orientation. Orientation is the establishment of structure and order. Disorientation is a place of imbalance and nonsense, which is potentially unjust. New orientation is moving forward away from what was and toward new possibilities. As a result, the Psalms provide us with expressions of suffering and hope in the seasons of everyday life. In his book, Brueggemann explains how Psalms of negativity, cries for vengeance, and profound penitence are foundational to a life of faith, and establishes that the reality of deep loss and amazing gifts are held together in a powerful tension. 

“This eerie, intriguing and enchanting music... is infused with echoes of the past two centuries’ beliefs and threads of spirituality and song.”

Rupert Loydell 

With such a collection of worship songs as the foundation of worship in churches, and with plainsong in Western churches providing a means by which to chant the Psalms on a daily basis, it should not be surprising that later hymns, such as those being reimagined by Steffan, tap into the dark side of the psyche. The success of albums such as Officium by saxophonist Jan Garbarek and The Hilliard Ensemble, together with Steffan’s own collaboration with pianist Huw Warren and saxophonist Mark Lockheart on Welsh hymns Duw A Wyr (God Only Knows) which is in a similar vein, show how such music can be made relevant to contemporary audiences.  

Ghostwriter’s latest album, Tremulant, inhabits similar sonic territory to Steffan’s current Tafod Arian (Silver Tongue) music. Created over several years by Mark Brend, Suzy Mangion, Andrew Rumsey and Michael Weston King, this album has also been borne out of a shared love of antique evangelical hymns and spiritual songs. Using English, Welsh, Scottish and American source material from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the quartet pieced together their reconstructed hymnal through remote collaboration – creating an album that sounds both ancient and modern. 

In his review of Tremulant, Rupert Loydell says it is “a strange ambient gospel album, where what used to be called spirituals and hymns are subverted by echo, wheezing organ and spacious musical interludes, which recontextualise, reimagine, stretch and mutate the very idea of song”.  This, he says, “is eerie, intriguing and enchanting music” with “echoes of classic Nico (the cold beauty of Desertshore)”. It's ”declamatory poetry, alt-folk, noise and gentle discord” combined with “calm vocals” is “infused with echoes of the past two centuries’ beliefs and threads of spirituality and song”. As such, it's not what you’ll hear the local worship band playing, more’s the pity! 

“Something kept bringing me back. That something has always been there. For that I am extremely thankful and am listening to it more and more.” 

Lleuwen Steffan 

Like buses, other revisiting’s and reimagining’s of old hymns and gospel songs are also coming along together. Hymn Time In The Land Of Abandon by Over the Rhine is “Music that we grew up singing, music as present in our formative years as the air we breathed”. Their recordings of hymns have been described as “spare, sweet and subtle renderings that transform the familiar into something fresh and new”.  

The musical reimaging involved in Over the Rhine’s reinterpretations of hymns takes them into the space that Brueggemann defines as new orientation, while the sounds and, in some cases, content of the hymns chosen by Steffan and Ghostwriter are more in the realm of his disorientation category. The music making of Lleuwen Steffan, Ghostwriter and Over the Rhine takes us to places not commonly accessed by the music used in many church services. As is indicated by the story of hymn book committees omitting hymns that tap into the dark side of the psyche, much of the music used in church services can be located firmly in either the orientation or, sometimes, the new orientation categories.  

Given that the arc of Christ’s life, death and resurrection takes us on a similar journey to that which Brueggemann sees occurring in the Book of Psalms, when our music and liturgy fail to go on a similar journey, we are only encountering part of the meaning and message of faith. The recent music of Lleuwen Steffan, Ghostwriter, and Over the Rhine is therefore profoundly helpful in beginning to redress that loss of balance in worship by taking us back to a fuller appreciation for the original songbook of the faithful, the Book of Psalms.  

In speaking about why she has been drawn again and again to church music, Steffan described her teenage experience of drinking with her “mates in Bangor on the Saturday night” then getting “the last bus back home” and rolling “out of bed the following day to go to Sunday School”. She concluded: “That’s a strange paradox but, you see, something kept bringing me back. That something has always been there. For that I am extremely thankful and am listening to it more and more.” It may well be that that something is the arc of orientation, disorientation and new orientation we encounter and experience in the Psalms.