Friendship as Sacrament
The Ocean Through a Funnel
Over the past five to ten years, I’ve spent hundreds of hours talking about, thinking about, and reading about subjects like community, civility, compassion, and friendship. This is a good thing. But trying to synthesize all that info into 500 or 1,000 word blog posts feels a little like trying to serve you the ocean through a straw.
Bits and Pieces?
To get off the blocks, I’ve decided to break down my own learning in different ways–sharing personal and cultural observations on Monday, for example, but then moving into research on Tuesday, and–for those interested, I’ll be sifting through faith & belief-y stuff on Wednesdays.
And my big goal for Thursdays (get ready!) is just to lay out some impactful sentences I’ve encountered in other authors’ work…and invite you to let them sit with you a while.
On With Thursday Number One!
For the first few Thursdays, I’m pulling some nifty sentences and paragraphs from a book called Sacrament as Friendship. It was written in the 1980’s by a Catholic spiritual director.
The book is an intense plunge into the idea of “spiritual friendship” for those of you who want to dive deep into the subject and don’t mind a little fanciful thinking here and there. But even for those of you who don’t want the title on your bookshelf, there’s some stuff here that is still rich and useful and I think you might love it in bits and pieces.
In Jesus, God incarnated himself in our history and in human flesh: in our mothers and in our fathers, in our brothers and in our sisters, in our children and in our friends, in the rich and in the poor, in the weak and in the strong.
We can look to some of our deepest relationships and find there a clue to the unfathomable love of God.
[God] sends us other people, friends, as sacraments of his presence, to bring us life.[Tweet “[God] sends us other people, friends, as sacraments of his presence, to bring us life.”]
There are people in our lives with whom we may spend a great deal of time–co-workers, neighbors, members of our family, etc.–but too often we do not seem to realize that we actually share life with them; that there is a sharing of the richness of persons that issues from the richness of God. When there is interpersonal union, there is a transfusion of grace, a special sharing in the very life of God. There is always something in a genuine love relationship that is larger than the relationship. It is not something we own, it owns us. That something is a share in God’s own life.
God calls us to life, to holiness and to intimacy with himself. But we never come to God in a vacuum. We enter into intimacy with God by relating body, mind, and soul to other human person’s. God’s love is operative in every experience of shared authentic human love.
So what do you think so far? Do any of these ideas from the book’s introduction describe how you have experienced God through others? Are there parts you’re cynical toward or have reservations about?