Friendship as Formation Across Cultures, Centering the Marginalized

Abstract

In this article, we share authentically from our own experiences of tasting” heaving on earth,” centering the margins as a place of richness and weaving in scholarly work with practical implications. The margins are experiences, encounters, exploration of spiritual development that occur organically. Usually, they are an afterthought during formal education and spiritual formation, and yet they are spaces where divine and human energies meet. We hold up friendship as an illustrative example. We would go so far as to posit that the “margins” are often labeled as such because those who do not belong to or understand it have exerted power (and in some cases, injustice and oppression) by giving a name for that which is not their primary domain. Yet in our Christian tradition, heaven is described as a place where “every tribe and tongue and nation” worship God together. Moreover, Christian discipleship has been predicated on the friendship of the first apostles, and through apostolic succession extended to the entire human race through friendship with and from Christ.