On Friendship
Greater love hath...
I am convinced that our highest calling is discovered within the confines of friendship.
Another way of saying that might be that it is in friendship that we discover our own limits - the frustratingly finite capacity we have for grace, or to forgive.
In friendship we discover how little we are, and how much that little means to another person.
We remain unknown to ourselves. This is my favourite philosophical statement (it’s in Nietzsche’s The Genealogy of Morals, but is also a good lens through which to read all pretty much every serious piece of writing). In most circumstances the statement holds. Very few people know themselves beyond the superficial. And it applies to relationships, too, I think.
Most relationships are, after all, flukes of mutual interest or a happenstance of shared geography. But occasionally, from within the closed box of chance, the universe places two people together who do genuinely seem to see one another. It is no accident that these tend to be people who also see themselves quite clearly, too.
These friendships are rare, and they disrupt the general logic on which a capitalist culture is founded. They are not, like most other relationships, transactional. Transactional being a synonym for inhuman, of course.
[As a side note, I have a suspicion that whatever it is in us that operates beyond the merely transactional is what we project on to the sky and call God. God is goodness, beauty and truth, according to the philosophers. And this is a terrible problem: outsourcing the best parts of our selves because we think ourselves incapable of grace.]
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It is a shame that our culture prioritises work over joy. It has had a terrible impact on friendships, which have increasingly become back-scratching arrangements of convenience. Relationships, in this rendering, become the sediment that settles between the immovable rocks of career, child-rearing and semi-professional hobbies. It is no accident, after all, that the lycra-clad solicitors in the coffee shop don’t know the first thing about the men they spend hours on bikes with each week. Friendship is old fashioned. It’s networking we need.
In your late twenties and early thirties, you lose lots of friends. This is probably a natural pruning, but it’s a much harder experience in an online world where no one really ever leaves your sight. How odd it would be to have a looking glass from the 1990s to now, and watch people fall out of touch with school and university friends all the while looking at their latest photos of a holiday in Marbella or a new baby. I wonder what impact reducing actual people to occasional photos has done to our sense of other people, of friendship.
And a strange paradox of being a signed-up member of the WhatsApp generation is that instant communication has made staying in touch almost impossible. The reasons for this are unclear to me, but it is a pervasive phenomenon: friends falling out of touch while retaining an unprecedented capacity to talk every minute of the day. The sheer moment-to-moment accessibility of people has clearly reduced their significance.
All of this comes down to theology (because for me, everything does).
One thing all religions share is a commitment to ritual. Communion, confession, reciting of texts, prayer, feasts. And when our culture decided to stop being religious (for often very good reasons) we tended to throw out the ritualised baby with the homophobic and misogynistic bathwater.
De-mythologising religion also de-ritualised culture, and we lost an awful lot in the process.
But in the absence of bread and wine, or confirmation and intercessory prayer, surely friendship can be our sacrament of choice? Something we take seriously, set time aside for, bring our best selves to?
Intentional friendship might be one of the few ways we can counter the increasingly soulless nature of the AI dominated, transactionally organised world live in.
Commitment to seeing ourselves and another person in all their complexity is exactly the opposite of social media, after all.
As Jesus almost said:
‘Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his phone for his friends.’