The Ministry of Friendship

I beseech Euodias, and beseech Syntyche, that they be of the same mind in the Lord. Phil. 4:2

The real work of the spiritual life is not done on mountaintops or monasteries, but on the road in the company of our friends.

The biographies of these two women, Eudias (“Prosperous Journey”) and Syntyche (“With Fate”), are lost to history, but Paul’s personal reference to them is one we all can identify with. Friends fall out – and friends forgive – and it is in that dance that we do most of the work of the spiritual life.

Jacquie and I just returned from a quick visit to our friends, Duane and Ida, in Rochester NY, and we are preparing for our friends, Jim and Cathy – and their dog, Henry – to stay with us for a few days before they return to Key West. Jim and Cathy have been friends for more than a decade and we actually shared a house with them for about 18 months. Duane and Ida have been friends for almost four decades and they have seen us grow from young parents starting new careers to grandparents thinking about retirement.

We have other folks we like and admire and whom we have known for years – even decades – and we connect with Christmas cards, and now, on Facebook, but these four friends seem to be in a different class entirely.

Last summer, I picked a passage from Lewis Smedes’ book, Caring and Commitment to be read in our worship services. He has this meditation on friendship:

Not even mutual admiration is, by itself, enough to keep a friendship alive that long. For one thing, we discover that even people we admire have feet of clay. The best of us is flawed. Our flaws show through eventually; we disappoint our friends, and sometimes their disappointment hurts enough to wound our friendship.

Besides even friends who admire each other a lot drift apart when one of them moves to another part of the country. If I do not see my friend for five years and do not stay in close touch, our friendship is likely to die of malnutrition.

I feel a good deal of melancholy when I think of it, but it is true that we cannot count on mutual admiration to make friendships last forever, any more than we can expect friendships to last because friends like each other or are useful to each other. If friendships like these do last a lifetime, it is probably because they are more than friendships of affection or usefulness, or admiration. Most likely, they are held together because the friends are committed to each other.

Commitment over the long haul is the key and there is a great difference between the people who have made those kinds of commitments and those who haven’t.

In this community where people live rooted for generations, I often do funerals for people who are mourned by friends they have had since grade school.

A real friendship takes time and energy. The actor, Peter Ustinov, once wrote: "Your friends are not always the people you like best, more likely they are the people that got there first."  He then goes on to say that we may meet people along the way whom we like better, but we decide we just can’t fit more friends into our busy lives.

The same can be said for spouses, of course.

Emily Dickenson put it this way:

The Soul selects her own Society--
Then--shuts the Door--
To her divine Majority--Present no more--

Unmoved--she notes the Chariots--pausing--
At her low Gate--
Unmoved--an Emperor be kneeling
Upon her Mat--

I've known her--from an ample nation--
Choose One--
Then--close the Valves of her attention--
Like Stone.

Israel pondered this mystery of choosing. God does it, too. Although God may be like Mrs. Baker, my wife’s 3rd grade teacher, who convinced every kid in her class that he or she was the teacher’s favorite.

The point is that we choose friends. We choose a spouse. We choose people with whom we will walk through life. We choose to stick with these people through all their ups and downs and, miracle of miracles, they choose to stick wth us.

All it takes is a lifetime of forgiving and being forgiven; a lifetime of searching for the truth about what makes that other person tick and a lifetime of letting go of that question. 

Room 101 and the Empty Tomb

Even people who never read George Orwell’s 1984, know about Big Brother. He isn’t a person –he’s a system of oppression that uses two-way TV’s to watch you while you watch them in the kitchen, in the living room, at work in and in the bedroom.

Toward the end of the novel the main character, Winston Smith, is held by Big Brother’s minions for treason. Winston is told that he must betray the person he loves most in this world. This love is the one true thing that Winston has experienced. It is his one claim to integrity. So he bravely refuses.

Big Brother’s enforcers tell him that, if he refuses, he will have to go to Room 101.

What is in Room 101? Winston asks.

The thing you hate and fear the most.

Winston is shoved into Room 101 and finds it filled with rats. He was bitten by a rat as a young child.  He has nightmares about rats. Soon he is screaming that he will do anything to escape the rats – including betraying the person he loves.

What is in your personal Room 101? What do you fear the most? My guess is that you can’t even answer that question because most of us are afraid to even think about what scares us the most. As Orwell knew, what we fear the most isn’t the loss of a loved one. What we fear the most are those things that keep us from loving our loved ones. What we fear the most are the kinds of things we would try to avoid even if it meant betraying  the people we love the most.

In the Passion story, Peter betrays Jesus, the person he loves the most,  because he is afraid of being crucified.

I am afraid of being poor - of being drained of my financial and emotional resources - so I keep my distance from people whom I might love, but for whom I don’t want to be responsible.

Jesus tells me that if I care for the sick, the imprisoned, the homeless, the hungry, I will be doing it for Him. (Matthew 25) The trouble is that  I’m not going to risk getting sick or imprisoned or becoming homeless or hungry.

In every relationship that I have that has become estranged I am convinced that the easiest way to fix it is for the other person to change. However, there are those who tell me that it might work if I changed. That would mean facing aspects of my personality that I spend a tremendous amount of time and energy covering up - stuff I'm so ashamed of that I can't even admit that I do those things.

So Room 101 for me contains poverty, suffering, sickness, failure, shame, and death. That’s exactly what the tomb contained. Jesus suffered pain and failure and poverty and shame and loneliness and above all, he was dead. His tomb is Room 101.

The good news of Easter is that the tomb is empty. Jesus has opened it up and nothing is in there. The Risen Christ and all angels say to us: Fear not!