Friends
“With-ness: that is all friendship wants. That is joy, because it is the image of what ultimate reality is if Tolkien’s Christian faith is true. The pagan mystic may seek his joy in the flight of alone to the Alone, but not the Christian. For according to that faith, the trinitarian God Who is not alone made man in His own image and declared that ‘it is not good for man to be alone’, even in ruin” (211).
The Philosophy of Kreeft by Peter Kreeft
We spent the evening with friends. Our Bible study group came over for dinner, singing and fellowship. The time was sweet, as I was able to spend time talking with and listening to two ladies dealing with family struggles. I agree with Kreeft. The time I spent cleaning and cooking was well worth the effort.
Some things on friendship from Lewis’ “The Four Loves”:
Aristotle in Lewis: “Friendship . . . can be a school of virtue; but also . . . of vice . . . It makes good men better and bad men worse.”
Friendship is “free from jealousy, and free without qualification from the need to be needed . . .”
“Those who have nothing can share nothing; those who are going nowhere can have no fellow-travellers.”
Now, do not read the following unless you have time to read it well. It has been very important to me in the past couple of years. It is a picture:
“In a perfect Friendship this Appreciative love is, I think, often so great and so firmly based that each member of the circle feels, in his secret heart, humbled before all the rest. Sometimes he wonders what he is doing there among his betters. He is lucky beyond desert to be in such company. Especially when the whole group is together, each bringing out all that is best, wisest, or funniest in all the others. Those are the golden sessions; when four or five of us after a hard day’s walking have come to our inn; when our slippers are on, our feet spread out towards the blaze and our drinks at our elbows; when the whole world, and something beyond the world, opens itself to our minds as we talk; and no one has any claim on or any responsibility for another, but all are freemen and equals as if we had first met an hour ago, while at the same time an Affection mellowed by the years enfolded us. Life—natural life—has no better gift to give. Who could have deserved it?”
There is a sort of deep lesson that I have learned from having a couple of relationships like this. It is hard to point out and doesn’t show its face often. It is a sort of permanent companionship that is insulted by such lower labels as “buddies”. It is a living alongside, a journeying for a long time with. This is the form of friendship.
Can friendship really be defined as merely being with someone else and that’s it? There has to be a mutual desire, a wanting. It’s not impure in want, merely a desire.
Sometimes that wanting can be the only companionship to define a friendship.
Or it’s entirely possible that the companionship of friendship is a juxtaposition ordained by God and all other thought on it is irrelevant.
But I so dearly wish it not to be so. What is a friendship that cannot be taken apart and inspected more thoroughly?