"Shortly before I met Brad, I went to my Mother and said, 'I don't know why, but I feel I need to pray for this person that God has out there for me.' And she said, 'Well, okay, honey, we'll go pray.' I learned later that Brad had been in a very bad car accident at about that time. And once I met him, I knew immediately that he was the one God intended for me. I said, 'Well, God, this is it, right?' And God said, 'Right!'" (Carol Hall)
Earlier this fall a parishioner came up to me after a service and said, "Brad, I need some help. I need some friends. I come down here each winter to live in the desert and I love it, but I'm having a hard time finding any friends--someone I can be close to and share my life with. What can I do?"
My heart went out to this woman because she spoke the truth about an issue which touches us all so deeply--our need for friends: a person, or persons if we are fortunate, with whom we can share our full selves; a person who accepts us as we are, a person to whom we can say almost anything and who will still be our friend.
Today I would like to respond to this woman's question by exploring the wonderful, if elusive, world of friendship. I'll begin with what our great American essayist and philosopher, R.W. Emerson, had to say about friendship. Emerson writes that friendships are gifts and expressions of God...and they form when the divine spirit in one individual finds the divine spirit in another.
This divine union of two people into a great friendship is expressed most eloquently in the Biblical story of Jonathan and David (I Samuel). When David was still a young man and had just slain the giant Goliath, he earned the adulation of all Israel and the jealous wrath of King Saul, whom he outshone on the battlefield. But King Saul's son, Jonathan, saw in David a divine spark of goodness and courage and, as the story in Scripture put it so beautifully:
"Jonathan saw David's courage and the soul of Jonathan was knit to the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as he loved his own soul."
This divine friendship would soon be put to the test when Jonathan had to make a hard choice--to be loyal to his sworn friend David and save him from the murderous hands of his father, the King. As a result, Jonathan's soul friendship literally changed the course of history, for David lived to be Israel's greatest king.
This idea of developing a divine bond with a friend was a very popular concept in the early Celtic Church of Ireland, Wales and Scotland. On our Celtic pilgrimage to these lands this year, we discovered an ancient word--anamchara--which means "soul friend," one who shares another's heart and soul. Anamchara relationships were considered to be one of the most important characteristics of Celtic spirituality, not only crucial to one's spiritual growth, but also nurturing our human sustenance. And so Celtic monks and nuns were required to seek out and develop an anamchara, a soul friend.
In these relationships they saw a model of their personal relationship with God because, with a soul friend, one could say anything, share the deepest, most innermost parts of your life, confess your sins and still maintain a loyal bond of friendship and filial love. Not even death could break this bond of anamchara.
Along with acknowledging the "divine nature of true friendships," Emerson continues his essay outlining other characteristics of human friendship:
"When they are real, they are not glass threads or frost on a window pane, but are the solidest things we know...
"A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature."
Happy is the house that shelters a friend, yet, as my inquiring friend shared with me that past fall, these kinds of friendships are hard to come by. Indeed, most of us struggle mightily to make reasonably good acquaintances, much less deep and abiding friendships. As writer Henry Adams put it: "One friend in a lifetime is much, two are many, three are hardly possible." St. Jerome put it this way: "A friend is long sought, hardly found and with difficulty kept." So what can we say to this parishioner who seeks a friend? How do we go about seeking, finding and keeping friends?
Perhaps the most important thing I've learned from our Celtic journey about finding and developing soul friends is that friendships are intentional. They are sought, found and then must be carefully maintained. Samuel Johnson said, "If a man does not make new acquaintances as he advances through life, he will soon find himself alone. And," he added, "a man should keep his friendships in constant repair."
So, finding a friendship means that we must intentionally go out and become a friend--and for some that is hard to do. A story that makes this point:
A forest ranger had to consult a distant property owner about a boundary issue. As he walked up the long pathway to the home he encountered several signs posted along the road: NO TRESPASSING, BEWARE OF DOGS, KEEP OUT, THIS MEANS YOU.
Arriving at the door he found the homeowner congenial and talkative. As the ranger left the man said, "Would you come and see me again sometime? I don't understand why, but I don't get many visitors up this way. I am really lonely."
I find this a helpful example of why friendships so often seem to elude us, even when we want them so desperately. We put up personal barriers: "Beware, Keep out, No trespassing" in the form of studied shyness, over neediness, hidden strings, lack of self-confidence, critical words, complaints, or just plain lack of courtesy and kindness.
If we saw ourselves as others see us, we probably look and act like that man living alone in the woods, with our insides soft and lonely, but the way to our home filled with off-putting signs and prickly quills.
I've discovered in my own life that it helps to have a good look at the pathway to our home. My personal experience is that this requires quite a bit of vulnerability, opening up the door to inner lives. I've also discovered that sharing the deep parts of our being with another person (or even our spouse) is hard to do, because intimacy and friendship are first cousins.
I learned this when I went through my mid-life crisis of illness, some twenty-five years ago. Up to that point my signs and exterior quills were up and ready. I was an aviator, an "iron man" as we often called ourselves, immortal, afraid of nothing and nobody. Oh, I had many acquaintances and a few friends, but other than Carol, no real soul friends, and so I thought, no need for them. You see, I was quite self-sufficient. That is, until I "crashed" one day and discovered in a hospital bed that my exterior was hiding and guarding a lonely soul desperately seeking love and support and bonds of true friendship.
Through the support of my one soul friend, Carol, and then the grace of God which literally burst into my life in many forms, I dropped my quills and took down the "beware" signs and revealed the same lonely man living in a house deep in the woods waiting for someone to come by. I was now ready to seek and search for friendship.
In a recent LA Times article, a USC professor shared a similar story of his discovery of the value of deep friendships and strengthening the bonds of family relationships following major heart surgery. The title of his article tells the whole story: "Don't Wait Until It's too Late to Connect."
"Oh, the comfort, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person, having neither to weigh our thoughts nor measure our words, but pouring them all right out...."
Well, there is lots more that needs to be said about developing and maintaining friendships and I leave that for you to explore in the year ahead. I will close with a lovely statement from writer Merle Shain:
"The friends in one's life are like the pillars of an old- fashioned front porch. Sometimes they hold you up, sometimes you lean on them, but most of the time it's just enough to know that they are always standing there."
Amen.
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