The Beauty of Christian Friendship

The trees are green again and the days are long. Now that spring has fully arrived and summer is following soon, I can sit in my garden in the evenings and watch the summertime shadows stretch themselves out over my yard.

There’s something unavoidably nostalgic about those shadows. Summer evening shadows bring back childhood summers when we ran wild around our cozy, little neighborhood – riding bikes in the parish parking lot and sneaking down to the sketchy convenience store on the corner to waste our money on candy bars.

Summer evening shadows remind me of the people who shared that childhood with me – siblings and friends who made each long evening magical, just by being a part of it.

Most of us have strong memories of childhood friends. Best friends, buddies, small packs of other people who shared (even in some small way) our experiences. But we grew up, and often, our friendships didn’t grow with us. By the time adulthood rolls around we have spouses and kids, but about 1 in 10 of us (more than 1 in 4 millennials) don’t have someone we’d call a close friend.

It’s common to joke about the impossibility of making new friends in adulthood. “Jesus’ real miracle was in having 12 close friends after the age of 30,” is a common – and tragic – illustration of just how little we prioritize adult friendships.

God has always prioritized His friendships; He is eternally reaching out to build those friendships with His people. In fact, the Catechism reminds us that “the whole power of the sacrament of Penance consists in restoring us to God’s grace and joining us with him in an intimate friendship” (CCC 1468).

The Friendship of God

We have an unfortunate tendency to think of the friendship of God in New Testament terms only. Christ is friends with His disciples – often shown as an exhausted, disappointed sort of friendship, in which He is continually sighing over their failure to understand Him. But the truth is, God has been forming deep friendships with sinful men since the fall of Adam. Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Moses, and David were all singled out by God in particular friendship.

Unlike the world-weary Christ portrayed in too many Christian movies and television shows, God’s friendship with man is continual renewal. In the Old Testament, we often have a hard time recognizing God’s friendship at all. But read closely and you’ll see that the whole of Revelation is the story of “God striding across the earth like a sower; He takes His Heart in both hands and scatters it over the face of the earth” (Paul Claudel).

The generosity of God’s friendship is a model for us – no matter what stage of life we’re in, friendship isn’t just a perk, it’s essential.

A Friendless World

If God values friendship so deeply, why don’t we? The ancients and medievals considered friendship one of the greatest loves; but these days, all we can do is question those friendships, implying that there must have been something else going on. Such questions and implications only show that true friendship is all too rare in today’s world. Too many of us can’t recognize it when we see it.

In this friendless world, it’s men and boys who suffer the most. Women still have cultural permission to form close friendships, and often married women expect their husbands to just follow along. It’s common for most men to strike up casual acquaintances at work and befriend the husbands of their wives without ever having the opportunity to build true friendships.

Women have more opportunity to make friends, and more societal approval when they choose to spend time with their friends. But women’s friendships tend to fall apart in contentious times like these. Articles like this encourage the sort of “cancel culture” that runs rampant through all of our relationships right now.

It’s certainly not an easy time to build strong friendships, but we need our friends more than ever. Emotionally, physically, and mentally, we are struggling to hold ourselves together. Almost half of all Americans report having experienced recent symptoms of a depression or anxiety disorder in the past year. Even before the pandemic, 3 out of 4 Americans reported feeling consistently lonely. Loneliness doesn’t just happen to singles and widows either, it’s something so many of us are dealing with – even in happy, supportive marriages.

Unnecessary Love

Often, we’re lonely because marriage, work, kids, and social media aren’t enough to fill our hearts. We’re called to imitate God in friendship as well – to reach out in love and build up a community for ourselves in the light of His Revelation. It’s not that we need friendship to survive – the data shows that many of us are living lonely and isolated lives. Friendship is, as C.S. Lewis writes, “one of those things that gives value to survival.”

Christ picked His Apostles to be His friends and companions during His ministry; and while we hear often just how rough and uneducated they were, we rarely hear about the Apostles as the friends of Christ. It’s important to remember their friendship though, because Christ is never utilitarian. He didn’t pick His friends to be ironic, or to drive home a point to the Pharisees. He picked men He loved because He enjoyed being with them. Men who brought joy, laughter, tenderness, and beauty to the world and shared it with their friends.

In this lonely world, Christ is calling us to do the same. We need to pick friends because we love them and then allow ourselves to continue loving them, no matter how different our politics, states of life, or ancestry. To make friends – no matter what age – we simply need to trust that

A secret master of ceremonies has been at work. Christ, who said to the disciples, “Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you,” can truly say to every group of Christian friends, “Ye have not chosen one another but I have chosen you for one another.” The friendship is not a reward for our discriminating and good taste in finding one another out. It is the instrument by which God reveals to each of us the beauties of others. — C.S. Lewis