In a class this spring a couple of students drew some interesting “hugging connections” between Schnarch and Volf.
In David Schnarch’s Passionate Marriage he encourages hug therapy, which he sums up as “hugging till relaxed”. Schnarch describes hugging till relaxed as a fourfold process:
- Stand on your own two feet,
- Put your arms around your partner,
- Focus on yourself, and
- Quiet yourself down – way down, (Schnarch 1997, p. 160-4).
Combine this with Miroslav Volf’s “Drama of Embrace” from Exclusion & Embrace and we might we well on our way to a relational theology of hugging.
- Opening the arms: inviting the other in.
- Waiting: with arms open one must wait for the other to respond.
- Closing the arms: the goal of the embrace is a reciprocal holding of the gift of the other.
- Opening the arms again: embrace does not permanently make the two one – the end of the embrace is the beginning of another embrace (Volf 1996, p. 140-7).
What is the difference between hugging and wrestling? Who wins when hugging?
Peace, dwight
Hugging Until Relaxed
Sorry to bother you in this way, but I noticed you managed to change the names of the standard categories in the sidebar. How?
When Logged in as editor:
Goto the Sidebar tab
Click the Blogrolls option
Then rename/manage/delete as needed or scroll down to add new headings
Does that make sense?
thank you i’ll roll over to try!!
Nice connections! I like it!
schnarch, volf and the simpsons…great intertextuality. i think that if we really did learn to embrace, to offer and receive and then to release…then the world would change!
thanks for this post.
Your question rang deep within me: is there a difference between hugging and wrestling?
I wonder…
could it depend on what your body seeks through the contact… to claim, to punish, to assure, to pleasure, to adore, to be held up, to overwhelm, to rest, to kill, to win, to be won, to crumple in exhaustion, to inspire, to comfort, to stifle, to torment, to crush, to cry, to whine, to tickle, to give… yet couldn’t any of these be both?
I think that my relational wrestling and hugging morph and collide into such a profound mess that it is impossible to isolate or glorify or know only one of them.
I think that if I was honest with my body and my soul I would see that even my most tender of hugs churn into a bit of conquest, a bit of violence…
even my most vicious wrestling looks a bit like frantically running towards holding and being held by another.
It’s a glorious mess. At least, that’s my hunch.