On friendship

One of the richest experiences of grace that we can have this side of eternity is the experience of friendship.

Dictionaries define friendship as a relationship of mutual affection, a bond richer than mere association. They then go on to link friendship to a number of words: kindness, love, sympathy, empathy, honesty, altruism, loyalty, understanding, compassion, comfort, and (not least) trust. Friends, the dictionaries assert, enjoy each other’s company, express their feelings to each other, and make mistakes without fear of judgment from the other.

That basically covers things, but to better grasp the real grace in friendship a number of things inside that definition need explication.

First, as the Greek Stoics affirmed and as is evident in the Christian spirituality, true friendship is only possible among people who are practicing virtue. A gang is not a circle of friendship, nor are many ideological circles. Why? Because friendship needs to bring grace and grace is only found in virtue.

Next, friendship is more than merely human, though it is wonderfully human. When it is genuine, friendship is nothing less than a participation in the flow of life and love that’s inside of God.  Scripture tells us that God is love, but the word it uses for love in this case is the Greek word agape, a term which might be rendered as ‘family’, ‘community’ or ‘the sharing of life’.  Hence the famous text (“God is Love”) might be transliterated to read: God is family, God is community, God is shared existence, and whoever shares his or her existence inside of community and friendship is participating in the very flow of life and love that is inside the Trinity.

But this isn’t always true. Friendship and family can take different forms.  Parker Palmer, the contemporary Quaker writer, submits: “If you come here faithfully, you bring great blessing.” Conversely, the great Sufi mystic, Rumi, writes: “If you are here unfaithfully, you bring great harm.” Family and community can bring grace or block it. Our circle can be one of love and grace, or it can be a one of hatred and sin. Only the former merits the name friendship. Friendship, says St. Augustine, is the beauty of the soul.

Depths 
of
 our
 soul

Deep, life-giving friendship, as we all know, is as difficult as it is rare. Why? We all long for it in the depths of our soul, so why is it so difficult to find? We all know why: We’re different from each other, unique, and rightly cautious as to whom we give entry into our soul. And so it isn’t easy to find a soulmate, to have that kind of affinity and trust. Nor is it easy to sustain a friendship once we have found one. Sustained friendship takes hard commitment and that’s not our strong point as our psyches and our world forever shift and turn. Moreover, today, virtual friendships don’t always translate into real friendships.

Finally, not least, friendship is often hindered or derailed by sex and sexual tension.  This is simply a fact of nature and a fact within our culture and all other cultures.

Sex and sexuality, while they ideally should be the basis for deep friendship, often are the major hindrance to friendship. Moreover, in our own culture (whose ethos prizes sex over friendship) friendship is often seen as a substitute, and a second-best one at that, for sex.

But while that may be in our cultural ethos, it’s clearly not what’s deepest in our souls. There we long for something that’s ultimately deeper than sex – or is sex in a fuller flowering. There’s a deep desire in us all (be that a deeper form of sexual desire or a desire for something that’s beyond sex) for a soulmate, for someone to sleep with morally.

More deeply than we ache for a sexual partner, we ache for a moral partner, though these desires aren’t mutually exclusive, just hard to combine.

Friendship, like love, is always partly a mystery, something beyond us. It’s a struggle in all cultures. Part of this is simply our humanity. The pearl of great price is not easily found nor easily retained. True friendship is an eschatological thing, found, though never perfectly, in this life.  Cultural and religious factors always work against friendship, as does the omnipresence of sexual tension.

Sometimes poets can reach where academics cannot and so I offer these insights from a poet vis-à-vis the interrelationship between friendship and sex. Friendship, Rainer Marie Rilke suggests, is often one of the great taboos within a culture, but it remains always the endgame: “In a deep, felicitous love between two people you can eventually become the loving protectors of each other’s solitude. Sex is, admittedly, very powerful, but no matter how powerful, beautiful, and wondrous it may be. If you become the loving protectors of each other’s solitude, love gradually turns to friendship.”

And as Montaigne once affirmed: “The end of friendship may be more important than love.  The epiphanies of youth are meant to blossom and ripen into something everlasting.”

 

Clarification

I would like to clarify a couple of things in my recent column on ‘Suicide and Despair’ and offer an apology/retraction due to a misquote:

1. The reference to the Catechism of the Catholic Church should not be in quotes. It is not a quote but a commentary (and partial quote) of two articles in the Catholic Catechism.

-2091 The first commandment is also concerned with sins against hope, namely, despair and presumption: by despair, man ceases to hope for his personal salvation from God, for help in attaining it or for the forgiveness of his sins. Despair is contrary to God’s goodness, to his justice – for the Lord is faithful to his promises – and to his mercy.

-1864 “Whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin.” There are no limits to the mercy of God, but anyone who deliberately refuses to accept his mercy by repenting, rejects the forgiveness of his sins and the salvation offered by the Holy Spirit. Such hardness of heart can lead to final impenitence and eternal loss.

2. My text read this way: “DESPAIR is the most serious sin a person can commit! … Like presumption, despair is a sin against the First Commandment. It steers us away from hope, which is an infused virtue received at Baptism together with sanctifying grace and having the possession of God as its primary object.

In Mark, 3:28-29, we read that: “Truly, I say to you, all sins will be forgiven the sons of men, and whatever blasphemies they utter; but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin.”

3. I apologise for the quotation marks around the text. That was a mistake, pure and simple. I took it off the internet without checking it against the text in the Catechism itself and found out too late (when people questioned me) that it was a commentary on the Catechism and not the text of the Catechism itself.

I am sorry, that was a mistake for which I now publicly apologise.

4. However, that being acknowledged, the text itself, I submit, is a pretty accurate commentary on the substance of what the Catechism teaches and what the Catholic Churches teaches. There is nothing in that text that a Roman Catholic might challenge, except the quotation marks enclosing it (and for those I apologise – this is one of the hazards of doing one’s research on the internet instead of in a library.
5. Further … This line has caused some confusion: “Many church people still see suicide as an act of despair and as the unforgivable sin against the Holy Spirit. Roman Catholics sometimes reinforce this notion by their reading of the Catechism of the Catholic 
Church …”

Two things I want to clarify here:

-I say “by their reading of the Catechism”. This is not the same thing as saying that this is what the Catechism says.  There is a popular notion that is pretty common both inside Roman Catholic and other religious circles that believes: (i) suicide is an act of despair, and (ii) this is a sin which cannot be forgiven. The Catechism of the Catholic Churches teaches neither of those beliefs.

-I was not trying to disparage the Church’s teaching on either despair or suicide – I was trying to teach it more accurately. The same holds true for people who still believe that suicide is an act of despair and an unforgiveable sin.

I am not disparaging their belief but trying to free them from a false fear (based upon a misunderstanding of church teaching) which surely must cause them some deep grief and anxiety vis-à-vis loved ones who have died by suicide.

I am sorry about the misunderstandings and take full responsibility for the misquote.