by Fr. Richard G. Cipolla
You are my friends if you do what I have commanded you to do. Love one another.
(John 15:14)
For me those chapters of the gospel of St John that we call
the Farewell Discourse, parts of which are read before Pentecost, are remarkable
in their teaching about love with respect to Christ, and for me, defines what
friendship really means. We live in an
age in which the word friend has become debased. In the world of Facebook the word friend has
become a verb: to friend someone, to establish a cyberworld relationship that
has nothing to do with friendship as classically conceived and deepened in
Christian thought, ultimately grounded in the love between two persons that is
a gift from God and that finds its completion in the person of Jesus Christ.
When I taught the advanced Latin class in my former life as
a Latin teacher, a vocation graced in so many ways, I always chose Cicero’s
treatise on friendship as one of the works we read. Cicero’s difficult and elevated style and
syntax is a challenge for even the brightest students, but invariably De Amicitia, (On Friendship), and
Augustine’s Confessions were the two
works that the students seemed most interested in. This is how Cicero defines friendship: “Friendship is agreement in things human and
divine, with good will and charity”.
Based on that definition of friendship he claims that friendship is the
greatest gift of the gods to man. And it
is that definition of friendship, quite good in itself, that became the basis
of the Christian understanding on friendship, from St. Augustine to the medieval
mystics to St. Francis DeSales and St Jeanne de Chantal to St. John of the
Cross to Pope Benedict XVI.
In his treatise On
Spiritual Friendship Aelred of Rievaulx, a monk of the 12th century
and abbot of his monastery in Yorkshire, points out how the word for friend, amicus, comes from the word for love, amor, and it is amor as well that is the basis for amicitia, the word for friendship.
He places friendship at the very creation of man, in that longing to love
another: and God saw that it was not
good for the man to be alone. The very
first love song, as I always say in my sermon for a wedding , is when Adam
recognizes Eve as the one whom he can love and in that love complete himself. “Bones
of my bones, flesh of my flesh!”Thus the longing for friendship, to love the
other and be loved by the other, is a part of what it means to human. After the fall, friendship became distorted
by jealousy, control, possessiveness, egoism and so forth. But the longing for friendship was still
there, We think immediately of the deep
friendship between David and Jonathan in the Old Testament, and friendship
found the ground for its purification and the reality of its possibility in the
person of Jesus Christ.
We can say that there can be love without friendship, in
that as Christians we are called to love even our enemies. And there are those, especially in our
families and those in our communities that one must will to love. My admonition to many people including
myself: Love is an effort of the will. But
there can never be friendship without love, because it is love for one’s
friends that defines and is the essence of friendship. In a real sense two people are called to be
friends. They meet, they discover mutual
interests, in speaking they realize they understand important things in the
same way, there is a mutuality, so to speak, that promises to blossom into that
relationship of mutual love and affection.
And this relationship transcends sex and age. Cicero limited this deep friendship to
men. But that cannot be true in the
Christian understanding since the capacity and longing for friendship was there
at the very beginning. One of the great
friendships of my life was with my grandmother, Nonna Marietta. From an early age I knew that there was a
bond between us that the other members of the family did not have. I remember my visits to her when I was in
college, when we would sit and talk about her life as a young woman in
Galluccio, about my grandfather, who died before I was born, watching her cook
with love and instinct, watching her face that had a distinct beauty of its
own, not conventional but there. I
remember the silences in our conversations when we allowed each other to
reflect on what this all meant.
The enjoyment in
true friendship is a foretaste of heaven.
Friendship springs directly from God who created humanity, who created
them to share his love with each other:” Love one another as I have loved you.”The
human heart has impressed upon it the desire for friendship. True spiritual friendship perfects love,
perfects creation itself. CS Lewis
said: “Friendship is unnecessary, like
philosophy, like art…it has not survival value; rather it is one of those
things that give value to survival. “
There are friendships that are carnal, relationships that
exist to satisfy sexual and other such desires.
There are friendships based on
mutual use of each other to gain something worldly. But these friendships have nothing to do with
friendship as defined by the ancient Romans nor with friendship that is truly
spiritual. The book of Proverbs
says: “A friend loves always”. St Jerome also said: “Friendship that can end was never
true.” We talk about past friendships,
friendships that had their time and place and then we both moved on in our
lives and that friendship is now part of the past. But what St Jerome is talking about is a
truly spiritual friendship. Once again
Aelred says: “The one who remains in
friendship remains in God and God in him.”
And one of Aelred’s more startling statements is this: “God is friendship.”
This is my commandment that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not now what his master is doing; but I have called your friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you. You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit…This I command you, to love one another.
Those words define spiritual friendship in the Christian
understanding. They need to be read and
pondered and prayed over one’s whole life.
And they are followed by the promise of the coming of the Holy
Spirit. And why is this, why is this
necessary? Because the disciples really
do not know what he is talking about, they are thinking about themselves as he
is speaking--What do these words about laying down his life for them mean? They
will each betray him in their own way, they will be stubborn and refuse to
believe, even before the Ascension itself.
They need and receive the presence of the Holy Spirit in their lives to
understand what friendship in Christ means: to love the other at the expense of
one’s own self.
And this brings us to the relationship between spiritual
friendship and silence. Conversation
between friends is a part of what it means to be true friends. The delight in
sharing in conversation with someone you trust and love is a wonderful
thing. But It is also true that a number
of writers have said things like this:
two friends who are real friends can be happy sitting in silence with
each other, not being embarrassed to not be talking, not being threatened by
that silence that the world misunderstands as non-communication. Cardinal Sarah’s new book on Silence is
remarkable in so many ways. I recommend it to you all. And at the heart of the silence of friends in
the presence of each other is the Silence of God, that is the Silence of Love,
and all that that silence means. At the
heart of the silence of God is his infinite Love. That infinite Love is silent, it never
screams, it never entices, it never speaks except in the whisper that can
barely if ever really heard. And that is
the Silence of God letting be, and that part of that letting be causes
suffering for the one who loves and for the one he loves, the suffering of the
world, the suffering of men and women who find themselves in places in which
they feel abandoned, those places of sickness and of famine and of war and
pestilence, which the world translates as the non-existence of a God who really
cares. But remember this: that Jesus knew that each of his apostles
with the exception of John would deny him and flee from the Cross. And except for his oblique reference to Judas
in the farewell discourse he allowed them to betray him in silence. And it is out of that terrible silence of God
on the Cross that the cry of dereliction comes; and the answer to the cry of
forsakenness is the silence of God.
And in true Christian friendship, there must be that
silence, that silence that is from the love of God, that silence that lets the
other be, that silence that can cause suffering, but it is that silence that is
the silent sound of the Word of God who entered into this world from the
silence of his mother’s womb into a world that above all fears silence. “ I
call you friends and give you a new commandment: love one another as I have
loved you.” And then He is silent. And so must we be.
