Friendship colors the very air we breathe. It is everywhere around us. We can see it in the eyes of old
women in the kitchens of the women they love. We can hear it in the voices of one young woman giggling to
another over a telephone. We can feel it beating in our own hearts on lonely rainy days in far away places
when, most alone, we are haunted by the memory of those who have walked through life with us and walk
with us still. Friendship binds past and present and makes bearable the uncertainty of the future.
“Two are better than one,” the Book of Ecclesiastes teaches, “for if they fall, the one will lift the other up; but
woe to the one that is alone….” It is a simple statement, a profound one, this biblical commonplace. But
the conventional wisdom of a highly mobile, basically anonymous, totally fragmented society affects, at
least, to ignore it. “No one is indispensable,” we say so flippantly, so unfeelingly in a massified culture. But
the words grate like sandpaper on the soul of the wizened and the loving.
There is indeed one thing that renders all of us, any of us, indispensable. As long as there is someone,
somewhere whose life breathes in time with my own, I know down deep that I am indeed needed, that I
have no right to die. I know that I am truly indispensable, irreplaceable, vital to a life beyond my own. To that
person I am indispensable. Whatever my own needs, the love of the other has greater claims on me than I
do on myself. Our friends depend on us.
To have a friend is to acknowledge that some part of someone else’s life which we have held tenderly,
trustingly in our own hands might well die with us. Where does grief for the dead come from, in fact, if not
from the anger and sense of abandonment that emerges from the realization that some part of ourselves
has been taken away from us without our permission? Grief is simply a measure of the joy, the depth that
comes from growing to know another and letting them know me in ways in which I am exposed to no one
else.
Indeed, to lose a friend is to be cast back into the insularism that is the self. It is a dark and sniveling place
to be, narrow and confined by the limits of the self. Only friendship can really save us from our smallness.
“My friends,” writes the poet Emily Dickinson, “are my estate.” Friends are, in other words, the only thing I
will have at the end. My friends will be the treasure I accrue in life and a measure, perhaps, of my own
worth, as well.
– from The Friendship of Women: A Spiritual Tradition By Joan Chittister (BlueBridge Press)
women in the kitchens of the women they love. We can hear it in the voices of one young woman giggling to
another over a telephone. We can feel it beating in our own hearts on lonely rainy days in far away places
when, most alone, we are haunted by the memory of those who have walked through life with us and walk
with us still. Friendship binds past and present and makes bearable the uncertainty of the future.
“Two are better than one,” the Book of Ecclesiastes teaches, “for if they fall, the one will lift the other up; but
woe to the one that is alone….” It is a simple statement, a profound one, this biblical commonplace. But
the conventional wisdom of a highly mobile, basically anonymous, totally fragmented society affects, at
least, to ignore it. “No one is indispensable,” we say so flippantly, so unfeelingly in a massified culture. But
the words grate like sandpaper on the soul of the wizened and the loving.
There is indeed one thing that renders all of us, any of us, indispensable. As long as there is someone,
somewhere whose life breathes in time with my own, I know down deep that I am indeed needed, that I
have no right to die. I know that I am truly indispensable, irreplaceable, vital to a life beyond my own. To that
person I am indispensable. Whatever my own needs, the love of the other has greater claims on me than I
do on myself. Our friends depend on us.
To have a friend is to acknowledge that some part of someone else’s life which we have held tenderly,
trustingly in our own hands might well die with us. Where does grief for the dead come from, in fact, if not
from the anger and sense of abandonment that emerges from the realization that some part of ourselves
has been taken away from us without our permission? Grief is simply a measure of the joy, the depth that
comes from growing to know another and letting them know me in ways in which I am exposed to no one
else.
Indeed, to lose a friend is to be cast back into the insularism that is the self. It is a dark and sniveling place
to be, narrow and confined by the limits of the self. Only friendship can really save us from our smallness.
“My friends,” writes the poet Emily Dickinson, “are my estate.” Friends are, in other words, the only thing I
will have at the end. My friends will be the treasure I accrue in life and a measure, perhaps, of my own
worth, as well.
– from The Friendship of Women: A Spiritual Tradition By Joan Chittister (BlueBridge Press)
WHAT ARE FRIENDS FOR?
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