Last week, I offered up Thursdays as a day to share some of the best musings on friendship I’ve encountered.

For the first few weeks, I’m sharing stand out quotes about friendship from Sacrament as Friendship.

If you enjoy these, I hope you’ll also check out what’s going on here the other days of the week: cultural observations about community and connectedness (Mondays), research about friendship (Tuesdays), a look at how relationship is woven through the Bible (Wednesday), and things people are currently writing that prompt a more compassionate and connected world (Friday).

Quotes About Friendship

Our human relationships, if they are based on genuine love, are necessarily bound up with our relationship with God who is love.

One of the primary ways we see and touch God is through those who he sends us. In them he is enfleshed.

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God is not only a personal God who is deeply involved in each individual life, but he is also interpersonal. He not only exists in me and in you, but also between me and you, in our relatedness to one another. The love we share in human relationships is part of the grandness of a God who cradles us tenderly in his all-loving embrace. Whenever pure, selfless love is shared, we experience God.

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The only way that we are able to live meaningfully within the complex web of the daily busy-ness of the world is by recognizing God especially in every face, in every pair of eyes and in every hand extended to us in charity.

Put simply, God uses our human relationships to reach us; we experience him by loving and being loved by another. God reveals himself in the real life presence of those around us. The God of all history, the God of Abraham and Sarah, the God of Moses, the God of David, the triune God is enfleshed in those we call friends.

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There is often deep inner truth to many of the simple things we encounter in a relationship: a big bear hug, an understanding glance, a special letter…or even a painful confrontation. Often they are vehicles through which we grow closer to one another, and in so doing come to know God better.

If one of these quotes strikes you, I’d love for you to leave a comment telling me about it.

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