Transforming Stranger Danger: Aelred, Spiritual Friendship, and the Online World

Don’t talk to strangers. Definitely don’t talk to strangers in chatrooms in 2003. 

These are the sorts of essential socializing advice that you received growing up in the 90s during those peak “stranger danger” years and then in the early years of widespread internet access that followed. I suppose these are still the basic rules parents and caregivers offer to children, but the internet of my childhood is long gone. And yet, once upon a time, the strange, faceless corners of the internet were where, even as a teenager, you could navigate from anonymity into deep, even life-changing, friendship. Some might even fulfill Aelred of Rievaulx’s idea of spiritual friendship, unlikely as that would seem to look at the potential dangers of our digital lives.

Friendship Perfect In Christ

Aelred of Rievaulx, a 12th century English abbott and theologian, is commemorated on January 12 and our prayer of remembrance is a superficially simple one, at least compared to many other saints: that “we might know the love of Christ in loving one another.” But Aelred also understood friendship through a lens far-removed from the one most of us see through. There was the love of Christian charity that led toward universal benevolence – and which precluded particular friendships; I would describe such friendship as a temperament more than a relationship. And such a definition poses a problem for the contemporary person, because  particular friendships are what we think of when we use that word.

Many of Aelred’s contemporaries understood particular friendship as a sort of favoritism because of our equality in the eyes of God – and yet such avoidance even in spiritual settings seemed to require external discipline. To avoid the relationships that were “easy,” the ones where people experienced deeper connection, required figures like monastic abbots to rotate their brothers so they couldn’t establish preferred partners for walking around the yard or processing side-by-side to meals. That was thought to be the right way to be spiritually, even if it was socially and emotionally unfulfilling, and Aelred, who spent some 15 or 18 years drafting his work, Spiritual Friendship, was not sold on the notion. To him, spiritual friendship was both particular and rooted in Christ and could strengthen each individual’s walk with God.

From Spiritual Friendship to Digital Friendship (And Back Again)

As a teen in the mid-late 2000s, my particular friendships emerged out of the strange corners of the internet that the adults in my life couldn’t understand. The mainstream internet was still new and the sorts of people I made friends with were my comrades in HTML and indie rock. We found each other searching tags and leaving comments on posts, as voices slipping out of some mysterious void. Especially for the misfits, these digital outposts were our primary sources of connection, places for working out identity, for pushing against the limits of who we had to be the rest of the time, when we laced up our shoes and hauled our backpacks off to school. On Livejournal and MySpace and eventually Tumblr and now Discord, we found each other and became more of our true selves.

It’s easy to doubt the depth of these digital spaces, particularly for young people in the years before constant texting and video chats, but let me tell you that my wife invited her friends from the Neopets forums to our wedding. That’s a nearly incoherent sentence if you aren’t of a certain age, but the simplest way to explain it is to say that as a gay expat kid growing up in Central America, my wife befriended a contingent of other queer artistic young people on a flash game platform with digital alien pets. Okay, that probably didn’t make the situation much clearer, but the fact is that 20 years later, those friends are still around, and they’ve gone IRL, as the kids say.

Four years ago, I wrote a college recommendation letter for a friend I had made on social media years before. This friend, whom I have still never met in person, had experienced severe educational neglect by parents who used her disabilities as an excuse. Despite this history, she had consistently proved her intellectual capacity in the blogosphere alongside my circle of humanities graduate students. Having fought through earning her GED, she’s now preparing to start her senior year in the honors program at the flagship campus of our state university. 

For all the parents of youth reading this, I won’t pretend the internet isn’t full of scary people with bad intentions. There are plenty such people online, including those seeking to abuse or radicalize young people who were just looking to play video games or talk about digital art – but those people exist in the face-to-face world, too, and so I turn back to Aelred. Aelred’s model of spiritual friendship as a relationship that, being rooted in Christ, is, through closeness, prayer, and seeking the good of the other, ultimately perfected in Christ. 

Don’t talk to strangers—in person, in chatrooms, on Discord servers, or on Reddit—was not a very helpful guideline 25 years ago, and probably still isn’t, just as dutifully rotating which monks walked together couldn’t realistically keep some duos from enjoying each other’s company more than others. Friendship, including in its spiritual conception, calls for something more nuanced. Do you feel better when you’ve talked to that person? Do they make you want to be a better person? Do they challenge you respectfully in debate, and can you both approach such disagreements with humility? Patience, forgiveness, humility, and compassion are central ethical elements to spiritual friendship. They can help us teach young people better ways of encountering could-be-friends online, too.

[Image Credit: Fr. Lawrence Lew, O.P via Flickr]