Friendship, to me, is one of life's greatest joys and greatest strengths. Yet it is marked by no ceremonies, no rituals, no shared ways to note the relationship. C S Lewis said that friendship was arbitrary and irresponsible love. He said, "I have no duty to be anyone's friend and no one in the world has a duty to be mine. No claims, no shadow of necessity. Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, . . . It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival." There is little utility to friendship. "The value of friendship lies in its exemption from the rules of usefulness, and from the compromises we voluntarily make as citizens." (Sam Keen) Friendship is not an economic relationship. While our friends may help us keep it together, they are not the key people who can help us get ahead. Friends are not mentors or teachers, or bosses. Friendship has nothing to do with the work of raising children or caring for aging parents. At the core of friendship is simple enjoyment of another. (Harris Riordan) "Friends," Thoreau wrote, "do not live in harmony, but melody. We do not wish for friends to feed and clothe our bodies, neighbors are kind enough for that – but to do the like office to our spirits."
Friendship is a comfortable knowing of one another; an acceptance and a liking; it is a sharing of what we enjoy and what we love; it is a mutual trust; it is a safe place to try things out; it is a mirror in which we see who we are. "In a friend's face you recognize your own. A friend reminds you of who you already are, who you have decided you would like to be. Similarity and agreement give friendship its strength and nurturing power. Loyalty is friendship's passion. . . . Our friends do much for us. A thousand hours of assistance, another thousand hours of idle talk. They know us red-faced and puffy from tears, giddy with pride, when we are moved beyond words. They know when to listen and when to ignore our blustering pronouncements. They remember whether we do or don't take cream. Friends help when life feels like a disaster." (Harris Riordan) Friendship is a free relationship in that we don't have to take responsibility for each other's happiness, or each other's success, or welfare etc.. Friends are free to let each other be and that is the beauty of friendship. And finally, friendship is chemistry. It is an indefinable attraction which we cannot completely explain and which we can't predict.
Well then, if friendship is so wonderful how come so many of us don't pay enough attention to our friends? How come some of us have trouble making and/or keeping friends? Human relationship is hard. Life in the 21st century tends to mitigate against friendship. Demands of time, of work, of family fill us up. A cartoon in the New Yorker captures this very well. A man is on the telephone, date book open, and he says, "How's never? Is never good for you?" Friendship takes time, and we have no time to give it, or we think we have no time. Further, our consumer society encourages us to expect immediate gratification and to think in terms of ourselves, in terms of "I" rather than "we" and these attitudes mitigate against friendship. In such an individualistic atmosphere, in such a narcissistic atmosphere, the balance of giving and receiving becomes skewed. We look at people for what they can give us; we look at friendship for what we can get out of it. Many people just want to be taken care of by a friend. They look for solace in a risky world. Probably we all need solace, but that's not necessarily the same as friendship. Or because of bad experiences in the past our ability to trust others or to loosen up and let someone else know us is adversely affected. "There are people who idealize others as a way of solacing themselves, and others who keep you on a treadmill, auditioning for their approval, but always seem to keep the approval strangely in reserve. And there are people who seem to always be in crisis, needing you to continually reassure them, but it's hard to find a person who gives as good as they get or one who loves you for yourself." (Merle Shane) For lots of reasons, then, personal and societal, friendships can be hard to make and hard to keep. This despite the greater ease and greater variety of communication tools that we have at our disposal.
The qualities of friendship, though, make it worthwhile for us to take a look at ourselves as friends and to face our own loneliness. Wilbur the pig's life had been saved by his spider friend Charlotte, who had woven webs with all sorts of messages on them, like "humble" and "radiant" and everyone who saw them was amazed to find such words applied to a pig. Wilbur asks Charlotte, "Why did you do all this for me? I don't deserve it. I've never done anything for you." "You have been my friend," replied Charlotte. "That in itself is a tremendous thing. I wove my webs for you because I liked you. After all, what's a life, anyway? We're born, we live a little while, we die. A spider's life can't help being something of a mess, with all this trapping and eating flies. By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone's life can stand a little of that." (E.B. White, Charlotte's Web) "To be good as a friend requires maturity, integrity and character, a generosity of heart and mind and time, that is and should be claimed as a part at least of a full and healthy human being." (Harris Riordan) "Friendship requires trust, patience, attentiveness, courage, repentance, forgiveness, celebration, and most of all faithfulness." (Henri Nouwen) To have friends requires that we be a friend. Friendship asks for our willingness: willingness to put in the time; willingness to keep up the contact; willingness to hold lightly both judgment and idealization. Friendship asks for our generosity. A certain lack of selfishness, a certain lack of narcissism. It's not always all about me. Friendship asks us to be present with one another, to really be there whether we are taking a walk, building a birdhouse, cooking, or having a heart to heart discussion. To be a friend to another requires that we be a friend to ourselves. That means a certain acceptance of ourselves, a certain honesty with ourselves, a certain taking care of ourselves. We need to be able to befriend our selves; to befriend who we are right now. Not who we plan to be tomorrow, not after we've lost that 10 pounds, not after we've made $1 million, but befriending ourselves as we are right now. If we can truly do that we can be a good friend to another. Think of the friends you have had through your life. The character of our friendships goes through different stages depending upon our age and depending upon our circumstances. Friends pass through our lives; some stay for long time, some stay for a short time. Sometimes friendships need to end and sometimes they end even if we don't want them to and sometimes they simply peter out. The duration of friendship is not an indication of the quality of that friendship.
Who are your childhood friends? Important childhood friends of mine were Carol Ann Pagano and Caroljane Van Bell. We played dolls and rode bikes and roller skated on the city streets. Childhood friends are the friends we played with. "Friendship happened in neighborhoods and classrooms, and lasted for seconds and years. It turned trees into castles and marbles into coins, the streamers on a tricycle into wings of plastic glory." (Beth Kephart) Who are your friends as a teenager? Who are your friends from high school, from college? Who are the ones who shared that intense all-encompassing relationship with you? Those intense, formative years? I think of Stephanie Revesz, a friend from high school, who on my 16th birthday took me down to Broadway and introduced me to Barbra Streisand. Who are your friends as a young adult? The friends of your 20s and early 30s? This may have been a time when you focused on family and young children, or perhaps on career and being unpartnered. Friends at this time tend to be circumstantial; people who share the life circumstances that we find ourselves in. So if you are part of a couple sometimes your friends are other couples and if you have children sometimes your friends are people with children of the same age or if you are career minded sometimes your friends are the ones who work with you. I remember Sue and Clark Hamilton with whom we had dinner every week. Or Sol Packer and Faye Perri and Elliott Cohen from work with whom I played volleyball all year round. And who are the friends of your adult maturity, if you have reached that age? These are often the people with whom we share our passions, and our troubles, and our ideas. The ones whose company we enjoy. I think of Jamie Rusek who helped me paint my kitchen orange and yellow, my bathroom purple, and my office olive. And when I was feeling bad she said to me come and sit beside me in the sun. And when she was feeling bad I said to her hold on, it will pass. People claim that men and women have different kinds of friendships. That in general friendship between men tends to focus around doing things together while friendship between women tends to focus around talking and sharing. I don't know if that's true to the extent it is claimed. I have friends male and female with whom I like to do things and I have friends male and female with whom I really like to talk and share emotionally. No one friend can ever be all things to us. Think of the friends who have blessed your life. There is an old South African proverb which says that two antelope walk together so that one can blow the dust from the other's eyes. This sort of friendship enables joy.
We tend to think of friendship as something personal and private, as existing between two people or at most within a small group. I think there is also something in the nature of community friendship. I think our community is one of friendship: not necessarily a personal kind, but a communal kind. Let me explain. Much like a personal friendship, our community relationships rest upon a bed of respect for one another, acceptance of one another and the willingness to try to understand one another. We share a commitment to our congregation and, both in our Unitarian Universalist statement of principles and in our own congregational mission statement, we share a covenant of how we will behave with one another. There are many activities, events, groups, educational opportunities, social activism and the like in which one can find others who share our interests. Here we choose to be together. Here we endeavor to provide for one another a safe place to be who we are. Here we can misunderstand each other, mis-communicate, become angry and even cause each other pain, as in personal friendships. Here we have fun. Here we live in melody, to use Thoreau's phrase. Our song is the song of Unitarian Universalism, which feeds and clothes our spirits. So you see many of the foundations of our community are also the foundations of friendship. And while some of us also make personal friendships within this community and some of us do not, nevertheless we are all held together in a kind of communal friendship in which, I hope, it is understood that we will share ourselves in a mutuality of generosity and willingness.
Such friendship helps us to make sense of our world and to figure out how we are to live in it. It is especially helpful to do this with people who share an ethical approach. The writer Jane Smiley makes this interesting, somewhat provocative, observation. "Gossip is about the understanding and assimilation of daily events.... What I do is gossip. Now, I admit that gossip has a bad name. . . Ann Landers used to say in her column that only the pettiest conversationalists talked about other people -- normal people talked about things, and the great-minded talked about ideas. Pardon me....I frankly can't imagine how people could have moral lives without gossip – by listening to handed down religious or moral precepts? By reading great philosophers? By adhering to rules? The trouble with precepts, philosophies, and rules is that they don't often fit individual circumstances and, more importantly, they are abstract – they don't bridge the gap between knowledge and feeling. Let us say that I understand a prohibition against lying, and yet my mother gives me a pair of slacks for my birthday that are not only ugly but also unflattering. She is eager to know whether I like them or not – she loves them. In addition to a precept at this point, I need a way to integrate my concern for my mother's feelings, my sensation of abhorrence at the sight of myself in those toreador pants, and my desire to set a good example for my ever-alert daughters. The way we figure out what to do is to compare notes; in other words, to gossip – to use your own and others' previous experiences as a guide. Discussing incidents and motives refines moral decisions and makes one's moral life participatory rather than reactive." Certainly a participatory moral life is something we UU's are about.
Perhaps we can call this communal friendship a spiritual friendship. Our presence with one another tells us that we are all welcome here; that here is sanctuary. It tells us that we can let ourselves be known; we can take the risk of expressing our joys and sorrows. It tells us that we are not alone. To paraphrase Martin Buber, when people relate to each other authentically and humanly, God, or how everyone understands that word, is the electricity that surges between them. The authentic relation itself is the juice; is the sacred; is the good stuff.
Let the electricity of friendship surge – both personal and communal. I believe that we long for meaningful, genuine connection to break through the routine and the mundane, to inspire us in our living and to stimulate our ability to be truly present. This is the path out of loneliness and that path is open to us right here in this place. This place of friendship. "May we be reminded here of our highest aspirations and inspired to bring our gifts of love to all living beings." One of the fruits of those gifts is friendship. It is a most delicious and beautiful fruit. May it be so.
Closing words: Let Us Give Thanks by Max Coots
Let us give thanks for a bounty of people: . . . For generous friends. . .with hearts. . .and smiles as bright as their blossoms; For feisty friends as tart as apples; For continuous friends, who, like scallions and cucumbers, keep reminding us that we've had them; For crotchety friends, as sour as rhubarb and as indestructible; For handsome friends, who are as gorgeous as eggplants and as elegant as a row of corn, and the others, as plain as potatoes and as good for you; For funny friends, who are as silly as Brussels sprouts and as amusing as Jerusalem arti- chokes, and serious friends, as complex as cauliflowers and as intricate as onions; For friends as unpretentious as cabbages, as subtle as summer squash, as persistent as parsley, as delightful as dill, as endless as zucchini, and who, like parsnips, can be counted on to see you throughout the winter; For old friends, nodding like sunflowers in the evening-time, and young friends coming on as fast as radishes; For loving friends, who wind around us like tendrils and hold us, despite our blights, wilts, and witherings; And, finally, for those friends now gone, like gardens past that have been harvested, and who fed us in their times that we might have life thereafter; For all these we give thanks.