This is the third in a series of reflections on
friendship that I shared with my men’s group known as “Brothers on a Journey” that
meets at All Saints Episcopal Church every Monday night. You can read the first two at:
As I looked back over the friendship I formed
during the first half of my life, I realized that although I had some amazing
friends, I have a feeling of loss as well as gratitude for those who enriched
my life during this period. Many of these friends of yesteryear I have lost
touch with, and I miss them. I did a google search and discovered that the Dalai
Lama had some wise and comforting words to say about such transient
friendships:
"Old friends pass away, new friends
appear. It is just like the days. An old day passes, a new day arrives. The
important thing is to make it meaningful: a meaningful friend - or a meaningful
day."
This is a very
enlightened perspective, yet the feeling of loss and longing is also very real
and worth taking seriously. This desire for a friendship that doesn’t pass away
is, I think, at the core of our Christian faith—we yearn for relationships that
last for a lifetime and beyond.
Eight years ago I
lost my best friend, who also happened to be my wife, yet hardly a day passes
that I don’t think of Kathleen. When she died, I took comfort in the words of
William Penn: “Life is eternal and love
is immortal and death is only a horizon, and an horizon is nothing but the
limit of our sight.”
The pain of her loss
has subsided but not the memory and the feeling that she is still with me,
hovering just beyond my line of sight. I can’t see what lies beyond the horizon
of this life, but through faith I catch glimpses and look forward to the day
when Kathleen and I will see each other face-to-face once again in a place I
can’t even imagine since our marriage and our friendship was grounded in
something very special, something that will never die. Kathleen’s example also
inspires and challenges me to live my life in such a way that I will be worthy
of being reunited with her.
Ali is right that
friendship isn’t taught in school. Certainly not in grad school, where we were
mostly too busy and too preoccupied with our careers to make lasting friends. I
had to learn about the meaning of friendship in the school of life and through
the Religious Society of Friends. I also did some research on friendship to prepare
for this share. I went back to my roots, the roots of our civilization, namely,
the Greeks. The Greeks believed that friendship is a kind of love. You probably
have heard the Greek language has three words for love: eros (sexual desire), agape
(spiritual love) and philia (friendship).
Eros is a physical
desire for another person that we care about and long to be with. Agape is an
unselfish desire for what benefits that other person. Philia has elements of both. In his Nicomachean Ethics,
Book VIII) Aristotle said there
are three bases for friendship:
- . Pleasure. This could be a friendship based on mutual enjoyment of anything ranging from sports to literature to drinking vintage wine or micro-brewed beer.
- . Utility. Friendships that are mutually useful and beneficial usually arise out of some shared activity, like one’s job or career. Phil calls these “instrumental friendships.”
- . Virtue. These are sometimes called spiritual friendship and are grounded in a common sense of goodness and purpose.
In real life, most
friendships are a mixture of all these elements.
So here’s my definition of friendship.
Friendship
is a relationship of mutual caring and trust, based on shared interests and
enjoyments as well as a shared commitment to something greater than oneself,
i.e. goodness, truth, justice, etc.
In the first half of my life, most of my
friendships were based mainly on shared pleasures. Love of literature, love of
ideas, love of music and art, and love of coarser pleasures like going for
walks, drinking alcohol, or smoking pot. The English comic writer P.G.
Wodehouse wrote that “there
is no surer foundation for a beautiful friendship than a mutual taste in
literature.”
From what I have read of Wodehouse, I’m sure he would agree that alcohol,
preferably a very expensive sherry, enhances such literary friendships.
Other friendships were useful. I made friends with
class mates, colleagues and co-workers. We are on friendly terms with such
people because these relationships are mutually beneficial. When you and the
other person no longer need each other, these friendships tend to fade.
The friendships that last the longest and are most
deeply satisfying are the ones that are grounded in goodness and spirituality.
These kinds of friendship also open us up to new insights into ourselves and
the world. As the French writer Anais Nin wrote: “Each friend represents
a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by
this meeting that a new world is born.” ― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934.
Finally, I have been
inspired by what Jesus says about friendship, particularly how we can have an
intimate relationship with the Divine. Quakers have adopted this ideal
friendship as the basis for their name, the Religious Society of Friends. In
John 15, Jesus tells his disciples that there is only one commandment that
really matters. Love. He then
defines love as the willingness to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. This
is a high bar for friendship, yet it is important to remember that real
friendship usually entails some self-sacrifice. Jesus says that if we follow
this commandment to love unselfishly, we not only deepen our friendships with
each other, we also become friends of Jesus: “I no longer call you servants, because a
servant does not know his master's business. Instead, I have called you
friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to
you.” This is a truly astonishing idea—that
limited mortals can become friends with God. It makes no logical sense, yet we
are told it is possible through the power of love. Spiritual love, agape.
Obstacles to friendship: What blocks us from becoming friends with
others? How do we choose our friends? Do we pick people who will help open up
new worlds within us, or only those who make us feel comfortable with who we
are now? Do we seek out friends of different backgrounds and ethnicities from
our own?
After sharing this reflection I talked about some
of the following friends who have been important to me during the second half
of my life.
- · Ed Miller, the Friend who introduced me to the Religious Society of Friends in Princeton, NJ.
- · Janet Riley, a Friend with whom I worked on a Soviet/American joint book project in the 1980s and who has become a deep and lifelong friend.
- · John Ishvardas Abdullah, my Sufi friend who wrote the book One World Under God. I got to know John through the South Coast Interfaith Council. He is one of several wonderful Muslim friends that I made after 9/11 who have expanded my spiritual horizons.
- · Jeff Utter, a UCC pastor, and Joseph Prabhu, a professor of philosophy and religion, have become my spiritual “amigos” and we meet regularly to walk and talk. We met through the Parliament of the World’s Religion, where I have many wonderful friends of different faiths.
- · Robert Cornell, a therapist/gardener friend who started Brothers on a Journey. We meet once a month at the Huntington Gardens to have heart-to-heart talks and enjoy the beautiful gardens (we are both avid gardeners).
- · Mark Schmidt, a formerly homeless man who is a guest in our home and has become a good friend over the years, with a passion of justice and a great sense of humor.
- My wife Jill, who has become my best friend and spiritual companion, opening me up in so many ways through her deep love of Jesus and justice, as well as of honesty and caring for others.
Our group then responded to the following questions
about friendship and there was a rich time of sharing.
Queries on friendship for
reflection:
- What happened in your life that helped you to understand the meaning of friendship?
- What do you do to cultivate friends?
- What has stood in the way of your friendships
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