Our lives are made and marred by our friendships. In the worlds of nature and grace love is more powerful than reason, heart than head, friendship than law. We can easily notice that people have always influenced us more than books. The literature of our time moulds us, it is true, but generally only just so far as we find it embodied in those about us or in one particular person who sums up for us the principles of a philosophy. It is the man that matters. The action of Christ in becoming flesh was motived undoubtedly by the deep knowledge that He had of the human heart. The whole story of the Incarnation is the splendid attempt of God to appeal to us no longer in the formless definition given to Moses, I AM WHO AM; but as a definite personality whose actual features and whose life should really stir humanly the human soul. "He knew what was in man." He proclaimed not so much a code as a personality, not so much stone tablets as a friend. And what He has done in the super natural sphere shows us also what is going on in the natural - that our lives are made and marred by our friendships. These are not, therefore, to be considered evils, nor as things merely allowed us. For the pagans, friendship was the very end and purpose of life. For our Lord Himself it is a thing right and good. He has His chosen twelve, and out of the twelve an especial three, and out of the three one above others, the Beloved Disciple. Then there were the Magdalen and Lazarus; and what He began the saints have freely copied: in the biographies of so many we read of special friends. Friendship, then, is allowed and was practised by the Master whose lessons we try to learn.
Now the reason why friendship is thus powerful in human life can be readily understood when once we have tried to think what friendship means. It is obvious that friendship implies an openness between friends, confidence, the absence of all reserve: between friends there can hardly be any secrets. Friends, therefore, must, in their talk and in their silence, be revealing to each other what are their secret thoughts; consciously, even more unconsciously, they are letting each other in behind the veil that to outward seeming shuts off their lives from others. The deepest feelings and desires become apparent, the little touches that are lost upon others are to each other revealing. The effect of each upon the other is incalcul ably great. By this friendship the two are made equal; though one be but a shepherd boy and the other a king's son, yet if their souls be knit as one soul, all such artificial checks and barriers of class, age, ability, temporal goods, spiritual endowments, are brushed aside quite lightly. Mutual attraction, therefore, means ultimately mutual influence. I cannot go on living with others or feeling drawn to them, and so opening out to them my heart and listening to or watching the language that tells me of their soul, and come away the same as I was before I knew them. I have affected them, and they me; and all the world can tell how much we have in common. The influence, then, of friendship is all-powerful just because it means the absence of reserve and brings friends to the same level of greatness or littleness in character.
Friendship, then, is not wrong; indeed, it is to be found in the Scriptures, in the life of our Perfect Model, in the stories of the saints, whose deeds here rather than their words are to be attended to or rather, perhaps, whose words are to be interpreted in the sense of their deeds. It is even, as the pagans declared, the most perfect gift of God to men. There is nothing else which gives greater joy in life, nor the loss of which makes the leaving of life more easily accepted. But because of the very fascination of it, for its due exercise certain qualities have to be observed. The most sacred things are the more easily profaned; indeed, you cannot profane that which is not holy. The higher and nobler are our helps, the more dangerous does their abuse become. Friendship, therefore, must be (a) loyal: there must be no fair-weather friendship, nor any friendship that allows an attack to be made unparried. A man may sit and say never a word, yet leave the room with the shame of disloyalty on him. Rats leave a sinking ship, but that is to be expected from rats. (V) Constant, for constancy is of the essence of friendship. Those who are always changing their friends, full of affection for one today, revealing all their reserves, and tomorrow seizing on another and making him also a recipient of their tales, know not what is true friendship. To be changeful of friends is bad for them and worse for me. Many acquaintances, yes; many friends, no! (c) Frank: friendship must be based on sincere confidence and trust, but this does not justify constant correction, which is an over-hasty attempt to reach the results of friendship: (d) ideal: I must see my friend as he is and as he might be; (e) respectful, for passion destroys friendship by destroying respect, and cheapens the precious signs of love.
- text taken from Meditations for Layfolk by Father Bede Jarrett, O.P.