Friendship

Last weekend we headed north to the little town of Cobram on the Murray River. We had arranged with a group of long-time friends to meet there for the weekend. It was good. Extended time to just hang out with those important to us is in short supply these days. It certainly is for me.

I don't always do friendship well. It's a sad confession, and one I often regret. The weekend was a good reminder that spending unhurried time with friends--those with whom I share significant history--is, in its own unique way, life-giving. I recall Eugene Peterson claming it as sacramental: “Friendship is a much underestimated aspect of spirituality," he says in his book Leap Over the Wall, "It’s every bit as significant as prayer and fasting. Like the sacramental use of water and bread and wine, friendship takes what’s common in human experience and turns it into something holy.”

In the same vein, I remember being bowled over when I first read Saint Augustine's Confessions and came across his own very moving description of friendship:

“All sorts of things rejoiced my soul in their company--to talk and laugh and to do each other kindness; to read pleasant books together; to pass from lightest jesting to talk of deepest things and back again; to differ without rancour as a man might differ with himself; and when, most rarely, dissension arose, to find our normal agreement all the sweeter for it; to teach each other and to learn from each other; to be impatient for the return of the absent and to welcome them with joy on their homecoming; these and suchlike things, proceeding from our hearts as we gave affection and received it back, and shown by face, by voice, by the eyes, and by a thousand other pleasing ways, kindled a flame which fused our very souls together, and, of many, made us one.”

I hazard a guess that I/we can over sentimentalise the notion of friendship, render is so statuesque as to be constantly out of reach in our daily rounds. Perhaps its real beauty is more in its ordinariness than its profundity. Regardless, it's a gift and one I need to treasure more intentionally.