Friends in Christ

Friends in Christ

“I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father.”  John 15:15

The Reverend Luther Zeigler

Christ Church Cambridge

6 Easter 2012

I take as my text this morning the 15^th verse of the 15^th chapter of John, where Jesus for the first time calls his disciples “friends” and invites them into friendship with himself and with each other.  No longer are they servants, bound by a law that constrains, but now they are friends, bound instead by a love that abides.  Jesus reminds his disciples that long before they chose to follow him, he chose them as his beloved friends, not because they deserve such favor, but rather out of an extravagant and indiscriminate love that desires nothing other than their complete joy.

There is a great risk here, I realize, of falling into an easy sentimentality with all this talk of love and friendship, as countless country and western songs with titles like “You’ve got a friend in Jesus” can attest.  I hope we can avoid that danger, and probe just a bit deeper into the nature of Christian friendship, but the proof will be in the pudding, as they say.  My aim is to suggest that something really quite revolutionary is taking place when Jesus creates a community of “friends” in John’s gospel, that Jesus is using the word “friend” in a radically new way, and that the “friendship” Jesus has in mind for his followers is nothing less than a glimpse of the Kingdom of God.

But let me start with a more modest observation:  When Jesus uses the word “friend” in the first century of the Common Era, he was by no means writing on a blank slate.  The Hellenistic culture that shaped Jesus’ time in fact had a rich and nuanced understanding of “friendship,” expressed nowhere more eloquently than by Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics.  Indeed, the vital role of friendship in the ancient world is evidenced by the simple fact that Aristotle’s classic treatise on ethics devotes two of its ten books to the topic.  “No one,” Aristotle writes, “would choose to live without friends even if he had all other goods.”  Or, as Cicero was to put it a few centuries later, the great joy and importance of friendship is that it “improves happiness, and abates misery, by doubling our joys, and dividing our grief.”  The literature of the Greeks and Romans is, of course, replete with many examples of noble and virtuous friendships, and conversely, the great sin of that culture was to betray the loyalty of true friendship.  The plots of many of the great tragedies are premised on just such betrayals.  Classical writers by and large regarded friendship as the single highest form of human relationship.

Today we value friends too, yet I fear that our Facebook culture of friendship pales in comparison to the heights of Athenian or Roman civilization.  Mark Zuckerberg may in some Facebook-sense of the word have more friends than anyone in the history of the world, but I seriously doubt that either Aristotle or Cicero would be impressed. 

And this brings to mind a story:  Prior to coming to Harvard, I spent several years as a chaplain in an Episcopal school and, among my assignments, was the task of teaching ethics to middle schoolers.  As any parent knows, adolescence and moral reasoning go together about as well as oil and vinegar; and yet, there is possibly no time in life when it is more important to figure out how to make good choices, and that is particularly true when it comes to choosing friends.  And so, I would spend a good couple of weeks in my ethics course exploring the nature of friendship, using both classical and Christian sources, in an effort to convince my students that long before “friend” became a verb involving the click of a mouse it was a noun denoting a certain quality of human relationship involving face-to-face encounters over time.  One of the simple exercises I asked my students to complete was to compose a short essay in which they were to name their best friend and then explain what precisely made this person such a good friend.

The results were usually both funny and instructive.  A young seventh grade boy whom I will call “Tim” once submitted this wonderfully succinct essay:  “I love Sam as a friend because he gets me free tickets to Orioles games.  I love Sam because he plays lacrosse with me.  I love Sam because he is kind.  I love Sam because we like helping each other.”

What Tim’s little essay lacks in sophistication it more than makes up for in pedagogic utility because it perfectly illustrated for the class the key points of Aristotle’s theory of friendship.  Any bond, Aristotle writes, that gives people something in common and brings them together is a form of philia, or friendship.  Sometimes we make friends with people simply because they are useful to us; they give us something we need.  Thus, Sam is a friend because he gets Tim into Camden Yards.  This may be a slight and meager form of friendship, Aristotle notes, but it is a type of philia nonetheless.  At other times, we make friends with people because they share an interest with us, a somewhat firmer and more enduring basis for friendship.  Thus, Sam is someone with whom Tim can enjoy the game of lacrosse.  And then there are people with whom we become friends because of some appealing aspect of their character – kindness in Sam’s case – and this, for Aristotle, is the firmest foundation for true friendship.  We choose friends well when we choose them not merely for pleasure or advantage, but because of their character.  And finally, Aristotle observes, true friendship requires reciprocity, a give and take between two persons of commensurate if not identical gifts.  Tim and Sam are well-suited as friends precisely because they enjoy the back and forth of teaching and learning together, caring for and sharing with each other, and being content in each other’s company.  In Tim’s words, they enjoy helping each other.

Aristotle’s theory of friendship, as even this simple summary shows, is deservedly famous for its rich insights into why we need and treasure friends, and why friendship is at the heart of human well-being.  And yet, you do not need to study the Nicomachean Ethics long to see that, from the perspective of the gospels, there is a problem.  For Aristotle’s account of friendship fundamentally rests on a theory of preferential love:  we choose friends based on their very particular qualities in relation to who we are.  We love our friends when they are able to meet our particular needs, share our particular interests, and embody the qualities of character we find most appealing.  But when we do that we are necessarily excluding everyone else who do not meet those needs or criteria.  Indeed, Aristotle is quite explicit about this implication, arguing in terms that we today find offensive that broad categories of folk are “obviously” incapable of the highest form of human friendship, including women, slaves, the illiterate and uneducated, the disabled, the physically unattractive, and other broad bands of humanity failing to conform to Hellenistic ideals of intelligence, ability, and ethnic and social station.  In this sense, however beautiful Aristotle’s vision of friendship may be within its own narrow orbit, it is a theory of “contented exclusivity.”  And this is exactly what the Anglican thinker, Jeremy Taylor, was getting at when he quipped:  “When friendships were the noblest things in the world, charity was little.”

In contrast to Aristotle, Jesus’ conception of friendship in today’s gospel is wildly different:  it rests on an invitation to love our neighbor, whomever he or she may be, as ourselves; to love even our enemies; and to love all such persons in the same manner as Christ has loved us.  The Good Samaritan does not rush to the aid of only those persons with whom he has a preferred relationship; indeed, the whole point of the parable is that he loves and cares for whomever is in need.  Our neighbors are defined by their need, not by their character, qualities, or interests.  In short, the broad trajectory of the gospels, and of our specific text today, seems to call us to be “friends to the world”:  to love indiscriminately, non-preferentially, and with abandon.  For this is the nature of divine love, or agape.

Here, then, is the crux of the problem for any Christian account of friendship.  On the one hand – and as to this Aristotle appears to be right – the most precious good in human life seems to lie in our very particular relationships with those relatively few people we hold close to our hearts and call our friends, those people with whom we prefer to share ourselves, to the exclusion of others.  And yet, on the other hand, there is no question that Christ calls us to love everyone without preference, and extravagantly so.  How do we bring these twin ideals together?

The beginning of an answer to this conundrum is suggested in a famous exchange recounted in Boswell’s Life of Johnson between Dr. Johnson and a Mrs. Knowles.  Mrs. Knowles was of the view that friendship is a praiseworthy Christian virtue.  Ever one to like a debate, Dr. Johnson challenges her:  “Why, madam, how can that be when all friendship is preferring the interest of a friend to the neglect of another?  Does not Christianity teach universal benevolence, that we are to treat our brothers and sisters equally well?  And isn’t that contrary to classical theories of friendship?”  Pausing, Mrs. Knowles replies:  “yes, that is true, but it is also true that Jesus picked only twelve to be his disciples, and of those we are told that one was especially beloved.  What does that tell you?”  Taken aback, and uncharacteristically tongue-tied, Dr. Johnson responds:  “You have spoken well, Madam.  I had not thought of that.”

Mrs. Knowles is on to something.  While the gospels certainly teach unconditional and indiscriminate love of neighbor, these teachings must be read together with the many stories where we see Jesus expressing such love in the context of particular and very human relationships:  with the twelve; with the beloved disciple of John’s gospel; with the inner circle of Peter, James, and John; and with the small group of women disciples with whom Jesus has specific and different kinds of loving relationships. 

The resolution of this tension between the universal and the particular dimensions of divine love is more formally explained by St. Augustine in the Confessions.  Because we are finite human beings living at a particular place and time, Augustine observes, our opportunities to love are necessarily through the particular relationships of the family and friends we are given.  These particular loves are the means God uses to lead his creatures toward a deeper love of Him and all humanity.  We cannot leap over particular, preferential loves to a love more universal in scope; indeed, to think we can is a form of hubris, as if we could love just as God loves.  In this sense, our particular friendships school us in love; they are a sign and a call by which God draws us to a love more universal in scope.  They are the school in which learn what it would be like to love anyone, and in which, as we mature, we learn to become increasingly open and available to receive others in love. 

Importantly, our particular loves are transcended but not destroyed in the love of God.  It is not as if our closest relationships are merely a means to an end, to then be discarded.  Rather, there is a triple movement:  God uses these relationships both to draw us more deeply into relationship with Him and then to return us to the delight of loving our particular friends.  But at the same time, we are constantly beckoned to enlarge our circle of loving, pushing past the contented exclusivity of Aristotle’s view, in a continuing effort to draw everyone into God’s love and to eradicate the barriers of gender, race, class, economics, and other socially constructed systems we humans inevitably erect in our sinful attempts to contain a divine love that knows no boundaries.

The love of my family and friends sustains and nourishes me.  But these loves also point me to the love of God that makes them possible.  And that love of God in turns invites me to open myself to love still more and still others.

Augustine may well be right in his analysis of friendship, and I think he is, but I also appreciate that all of this high-falutin’ theology is sorely tested when we suddenly lose a friend and experience the anguish of death.  I witnessed this for myself again last week when I attended the memorial service of Wendy Chang, a Harvard senior who lived not too far from here in Lowell House and who, just three weeks ago, ended her own life.  Wendy’s heartbreakingly tragic death has cast a long shadow over the otherwise joyful festivities surrounding the end of the year on Harvard’s campus. 

I did not know Wendy, but showed up at her service merely to offer what little support I could for those who mourned her loss.  Hundreds of her friends were there, and shared beautiful and often funny stories of the joy friendship with Wendy brought.  Although Wendy was a Buddhist with a very different understanding of life and death from mine, as I sat there and heard one poignant story after another from her friends, and listened to them sing and chant songs of remembrance and lamentation, I could feel the abiding love that animated her life and that sustained all of those relationships, even in the midst of the intense pain and awful mystery of that moment.  The vast web of friends that encircled her that day in Memorial Church was a reflection, I am convinced, of the heavenly choir of angels who sing to her now.  Surely, I prayed, as I sat in my pew, a love powerful enough to make such friendships possible in this world, and to sustain these dear friends in their grief, is also powerful enough to overcome death itself.  That, at least, is the Christian hope.  And, that is, I think, what we mean by friendship in Christ.  Amen.

A Note on Sources:  I am deeply indebted to my former teacher Gilbert Meilaender for much of what I know about Christian friendship, particularly Gil's gem of a book Friendship: A Study in Theological Ethics (South Bend, Ind.:  University of Notre Dame Press, 1985).

Feast of St. Mark: Both Helter-skelter and Significant

Wednesday is the Feast of Saint Mark, and we give thanks to God for “this witness” of Mark’s Gospel, and we “pray that we may be firmly grounded in its truth.”

In celebration of his feast day, I’d like to share with you some thoughts on Mark’s writing, from an article by John Drury in The Literary Guide to the Bible (ed. Robert Alter & Frank Kermode). 

Drury says that the opening fifteen verses to the Gospel are like a prologue, which “introduces us to, among other things, the rapidity and condensation of Mark’s style, and to his hectoring narrative intensity . . . ‘Straightaway’ is Mark’s favorite adverb; ‘run,’ ‘arise,’ ‘shout,’ and ‘amaze’ are among his favorite verbs” (409).

For Mark, “genuine understanding . . . is supernatural. So within the continuities of this world, and within the continuities of a narrative set in this world, it is discontinuous and sudden” (405). Because of this, the “shuttle” of Mark’s narrative “moves fast through present moments, back and forth between precedents and effects. Events follow upon one another apparently helter-skelter. But they are linked by deliberately concealed significances” (409).

This coexistence of apparent chaos and true significance might’ve been simpler for Mark’s first listeners to grasp, as they were a people who “believed the timetable of another world to be pressing upon mundane time. Each touch of its pressure was a promise of its eventual triumph over ordinary time,” as understood in their traditions of apocalyptic Judaism (405). For them, “God was the master storyteller, the ultimate referent of every moment” (405).

Many of us in the Harvard Episcopal community are in the midst of discernment—we’re wondering about next year, or this summer, or our far future, and (hopefully) praying about what shape it will take. We can certainly see the helter-skelter and discontinuity, but the hidden significance of all the round-abouts escapes us.

Thankfully, like Mark’s listeners, we can believe that God is “the master storyteller,” and that God’s time presses in on ordinary time. It may not be the final cymbal crash, the “divine ending” (405) of apocalyptic literature that waits in the wings of our decisions—but certainly the kingdom of God, built with the quiet drama of our everyday choices and relationships.

With this in mind—and with so many choices and options and futures hanging over our heads!—I hope you might pray with me this prayer of Thomas Merton, given to me by my own college chaplain:

                 My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the 
                 road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor
                 do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your 
                 will does not mean I am actually doing so. But I believe that the 
                 desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope that I never 
                 do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you 
                 will always lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing 
                 about it. Therefore, I will trust you always, though I may seem to be 
                 lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with 
                 me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.

 

The first image is a detail from an icon by Emmanuel Tzanes; the second is from an 1845 collection of medieval alphabets.

A Holy Anger

A Holy Anger

“Making a whip of cords, Jesus drove all of them out of the temple, both the sheep and the cattle.  He also poured out the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables.  He told those who were selling the doves, ‘Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace!”  John 2:15-16

The Reverend Luther Zeigler

3 Lent 2012

I come from German-American stock, and my family life growing up pretty much fit the ethnic stereotype:  I was taught the value of order, discipline, and quiet obedience to authority.  “Children are meant to be seen and not heard” was a line frequently whispered in our household, and my brother and I were expected do as we were told, without having to be asked twice, and without complaint.  And we did, more or less.  Indeed, we didn’t think we had any other option.  For these reasons, and for better or worse, the Zeigler house was a peaceful place with little to no emotional volatility.  I can count on one hand the number of times either of my parents, God rest their souls, raised their voice or otherwise expressed anger.  To this day, I confess, I am a bit overly sensitive to outbursts of emotion.

Perhaps because of this upbringing and delicate sensibility, my ears perk up when I hear Jesus getting angry.  And for the past two weeks, Jesus has been nothing short of furious.   In last week’s gospel text, you will remember, it was Peter who set Jesus off.  Peter has his own idea of what a Messiah should look like.  Peter wants a “winner”:  a wise teacher, a great leader, a powerful ruler, someone who would rise to the top and reclaim Israel’s true destiny in the face of a brutally oppressive Roman Empire.  The Messiah Peter yearns for is nothing less than a new and improved King David. 

So, when Jesus begins to disclose to his disciples, as he did last week, that his future will be that of a suffering servant who will be humiliated, mocked, and ultimately crucified, Peter cannot believe his ears and openly chastises Jesus.  “Get behind me, Satan!,” Jesus blisters in reply, letting Peter have his due in no uncertain terms.  Jesus’ anger is provoked by Peter’s complete misapprehension of God’s fundamental character.

Peter thinks that God’s redemption of the world is to be achieved through powerful coercion; Jesus reveals that God redeems through tender vulnerability.  Peter thinks that God’s destiny for his Son is glory and kingship; Jesus reveals that God wants his Son’s future to be one of humility and selfless sacrifice.  Peter thinks that discipleship will be riding on the coattails of an inevitable coronation; Jesus reveals that our true identity as his followers comes only when we are prepared to take up our cross and die to our selves.

Hence Jesus’ righteous anger.  This is not the distorted anger of human sin that lashes out at another for selfish motives, or out of the weakness of insecurity.  This is a purifying anger fueled by love.  Jesus rebukes because he needs to break open Peter’s fundamental misunderstanding of who God is and what it means to follow God.   While anger is more often than not a manifestation of sin, at times it can be an instrument of grace that saves people from their own folly.

In today’s gospel – the famous cleansing of the Temple scene – Jesus’ anger is equal in intensity to last week’s but different in its object.  Here, the question that gives rise to Jesus’ ire is how should we faithfully worship God.  By overturning the moneychangers’ tables and chasing the animal vendors out of the Temple Court, Jesus leaves no doubt that something is fundamentally amiss.  “Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace!,” Jesus shouts.  But what precisely is the problem?

It is tempting, but I think ultimately wrong, to conclude that the problem here is merely that some profane lenders and merchants got a little too close to the sacred space of the Temple, defiling its integrity.  For the truth is that both the moneylenders and the animal vendors were in fact integral to Temple worship at the time.  The reason moneylenders were required is because Roman denarii and Attic drachmas were not an acceptable means by which to pay the required temple tax because of the pagan images they bore.  For Jewish pilgrims to pay their appropriate share of financial support to the temple, the imperial coinage first had to be exchanged for legal Tyrian coinage having no graven images.  So, moneychangers were necessary to the system.

Likewise, because animal sacrifice was part and parcel of Temple worship at the time, animal merchants were needed.  The faithful had traveled long distances to get to Jerusalem for the Passover, so they could not reasonably be expected to carry clean sacrificial animals with them.  They needed animal traders near the Temple to make their sacrifices through the Temple priests.

Thus, Jesus’ wrath is not about the presence of moneychangers and merchants per se, but to the whole Temple system of worship, which had lost its bearings and had become corrupt and corrupting.  What began in Solomonic times as a holy attempt to create a sacred space in Jerusalem within which faithful Jews could encounter, praise, and be transformed by their God, had by this time degenerated into something very different.  What had once been a relationship was now an exchange; what had once been authentic prayer was now a negotiation; what had once been a gathered community of the faithful was now a highly stratified bureaucracy of priests, scribes, and others coopted by imperial authority.  These distortions in the religious life of the Temple were the real focus of Jesus’ outburst.

Another tempting, but I think equally misguided, interpretation of this text is to view it as a story about the triumph of Christian over Jewish worship, as if Jesus’ anger reflects a criticism of Jewish institutions and practices that Christians have somehow moved beyond.  The truth, of course, is that these very same critiques can and often do apply with equal force to Christian church life.  The Protestant Reformation was just one historical chapter in that ongoing and never-ending renewal of authentic human worship.  Jesus did not come to replace the Temple with other buildings, as if swapping out a bema for an altar or a menorah for a cross would do the trick.  As our gospel text today teaches, Jesus’ aim is to instill, what Catholic writer Gary Wills calls, “a religion of the heart, with only himself as the place where we encounter the Father.”  (emphasis added). 

Jesus’ willingness to confront the abuses of institutionalized religion is, of course, a big part of the reason he ends up getting killed.  And to some extent, institutionalized religion keeps trying to kill him.  As the great American preacher Harry Emerson Fosdick used to quip, people have for thousands of years been trying to get rid of Jesus. First, they crucified him.  And when that didn't work, they started worshipping him. Worship can be just another form of crucifixion when we use it to get ourselves off the hook of answering the real question Jesus poses.  For the truth of the matter is that Jesus asks not so much to be worshipped, as he asks to be followed. 

There is a danger, though, in taking this last point too far.  Some read Jesus’ critiques of Temple worship, and his stand-offs with hypocritical religious leaders, as an invitation to chuck institutionalized religion altogether.  Often in my life I have heard friends say:  “Yes, I try to follow Jesus, but I really don’t need the Church to do that.”  Indeed, there have even been times in my own life when I’ve felt that pull, and that sense of disappointment with the church.

But as messy and imperfect and hypocritical as the Church sometimes can be, we musn’t forget that it was Jesus himself who first gathered his twelve followers into a community, who prayed and sang psalms with them, who instituted the common meal we now know as our Lord’s Supper, and who allowed himself to be baptized into the community he created.  And it was Jesus himself who commissioned his followers at the end of his earthly ministry to build more communities just like that first one.  So, it would be a mistake, I submit, to read too much into Jesus’ righteous anger in cleansing the Temple.  Let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water.

Lent is a purifying time.  It is a time of honest self-examination, when we inventory our own spiritual lives to clear out the debris so that we keep only that which matters.  We read this gospel text this third Sunday in Lent because this should be a purifying time for the Church as well. Jesus’ righteous anger should catch us up short, should take our breath away, and should prompt us to ask whether what we are doing every Sunday in Church is ultimately faithful to His life and teachings.  Why are we here?  Why do we do what we do?  When Church becomes empty ritual or just another comfortable space or just some pretty music, we are in trouble.

Today’s gospel invites us to take a hard look at everything we do here in church and to ask whether it is an authentic expression of our devotion to Christ such that when we leave this place we are strengthened in our commitment to follow Jesus and do His work in the world.  The genius of Anglicanism, I would submit, is that over the centuries we have developed a liturgy whose elements of prayer, word, sacrament, music, and beautiful space, work together to draw us into a deeper and fuller relationship with Christ.  But there is an ever-present danger in our common worship of becoming so caught up in its beauty that we neglect its aim.  The risk is one of complacency, of allowing ourselves to become so comfortable and content in our time together, that we forget that the ultimate purpose of this time with Christ is for it to change us so that we might follow and do Christ’s work in the world.

Let us take this moment, then, to hear anew the holy anger in Christ’s voice so that our worship today, and every day, may be purified of all hypocrisy and cleansed of all self-satisfaction.  In the beautiful words of one of our Eucharistic Prayers:  “Deliver us, Lord Christ, from the presumption of coming to your Holy Table for solace only, and not for strength; for pardon only, and not for renewal.  Let the grace of your Holy Communion make us one body and one spirit, so that we may worthily serve the world in your name.  Amen.”

Series on Prayer 1: Praise

In the next several weeks, as we enter Lent, we'll be directing you on this blog toward a classic series of post and sermons which the Brothers at SSJE put together. Called "Teach Us to Pray: teaching on the seven classic forms of prayer," it was series which I found incredibly

Here's a link to the first sermon in the series, by Br. David Vryhof: "Praising God: Our True Vocation." And, here's a sample.

In the Rule of our Society, we echo that truth when we say, “Human beings were created to bless and adore their Creator and in the offering of worship to experience their highest joy and their deepest communion with one another. In our fallenness we continually turn in upon ourselves to seek fulfillment without self-offering. We squander on lesser things the love which is due to the one source of all being” (SSJE Rule, chapter 16).

It’s not about us. It’s about God, who created and redeemed us, and who sustains our life day by day. We have been created by God and for God, and we will find our deepest joy and satisfaction when we live in union with God.

One of the early Church Fathers, St. Irenaeus, commenting on Genesis 1:26, suggests that the primary meaning of humanity’s being made in the image of God is that God has made humanity sufficiently like himself for communion between God and human beings to be possible. Being created in the “image” of God, says Irenaeus, expresses the possibility of human communion with God. Being created in the “likeness” of God stands for the existential or moral similarity with God into which humanity is to grow as it actually lives in communion with God. We are to become more and more like God as we live in union with him.

“Our hearts are restless, O God, until they find their rest in You.” (St. Augustine)

Celebrating Saints, and Aelred's Feast Day

The ruins of Rievaulx Abbey (englihheritage.org.uk)

            After I wrote about Alfred a while back, a non-religious friend asked me, “How do you celebrate a saint, or a feast day? Can I do it too?” I imagine historians and theologians will have more specific and technical answers to that question; my own answer comes via an Evangelical background, plus four years at Princeton following the feast days at midday Eucharist and Evening Prayer.

            I think "celebrating a feast day" means celebrating how God has been shown to us in the life of a particular person. It is a natural extension of taking happiness in another’s happiness, feeling joyful because someone is joyful, being pleased at another’s pleasure. In the lives of the saints and holy people we commemorate, we take both pleasure and instruction from the aspects of their lives which make them holy. In them we see one specific way in which a portion of the great array of virtues can be arranged into a life.

            A feast day does this in two ways: first, in the way it tells us about the person we’re celebrating; second, in the pieces of Scripture it selects for our attention.

            It tells us about the person indirectly in the Collect, in the context of their virtues which we hope to emulate; it tells us about them directly in the summary of their life in Lesser Feasts and Fasts. And the Scripture readings are small focalizations of the Bible—from many voices and many ideas and many times and languages, they pick a few which explain, enlighten, and/or complicate the life and virtues of the saint. Although we know the Bible is bigger and even more complicated than the few pages of text collected for the day, we’re invited to see the whole through this one small window.

            Which, if you think about it, is an awful lot like how we see God through the life of a holy person.

            Today is the feast day of St. Aelred, whose life and Collect narrow down the broad command “Love your neighbor” into the specific “Love your friends.” Today we pray for “the Holy Spirit’s gift of love,” so that we, “clasping each the other's hand, may share the joy of friendship, human and divine, and with [God’s] servant Aelred draw many to [God’s] community of love.”  

            Aelred was born in 1109, and in 1133 he became a Cistercian monk (and later the abbot) at the abbey of Rievaulx, in North Yorkshire (located sort of in the center of that big lovely island). The Church’s Lesser Feasts and Fasts tells us that he “soon became a major figure in English church life”; on his way back from Rome, he stopped at Clairvaux, where St. Bernard (abbot of Clairvaux and church reformer) “encouraged the young monk to write his first work, Mirror of Charity, on Christian perfection.”

And why do we connect Aelred with friendship? Lesser Feasts says that his most famous work is called On Spiritual Friendship, a long dialogue in which Aelred teaches that friendship “is both a gift from God and a creation of human effort. While love is universal, freely given to all, friendship is a particular love between individuals, of which the example is Jesus and John the Beloved Disciple.” For Aelred, true friendship has a “sacramental essence”—as we love one another, we may be united with Christ in this life, and know beatitude in the life to come.*

The readings today offer us specific visions of what it might mean to love our friends. We hear first in Philippians a plea to “[d]o nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others.”

In John, Jesus says that we can continue to “abide in his love” if we “keep his commandments”. More specifically: “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you.”

            Growing up, this sentence—“No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends”—was thrown about at every opportunity. Reading it again this week, I find I had now the same question I had then: What does this mean for me, a privileged person in the United States, who has no fear for her safety or the safety of her friends—what does it mean, to lay down my life?

            Philippians offers us an answer: laying down our lives might mean that we give up our own “selfish ambition,” our self-regard, the things in our life that seem (incorrectly) to be deeply important. Aelred says that “[true] friendship can last only among the good” (2.41), and “the good” are those “who within the limits of our mortal life live sober, upright, and godly lives in this world” (2.43). A friend, says Aelred, is one “with whom you may talk as freely as with yourself, to whom you neither fear to confess any fault nor blush at revealing any spiritual progress, to whom you may entrust all the secrets of your heart and confide all your plans. And what is more delightful than so to unite spirit to spirit and so to make one out of two?” (2.11).**

This whole-hearted and honest friendship leaves little room for pettiness—for grudges, for passive aggression, for resentment, or all the niggling forms of selfishness which can easily creep into our relationships. Instead, Aelred points us towards a generosity and commitment to those we love, which in turn leads us to God.

Pour into our hearts, O God, the Holy Spirit's gift of love, that we, clasping each the other's hand, may share the joy of friendship, human and divine, and with your servant Aelred draw many to your community of love; through Jesus Christ the Righteous, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.

*From the Introduction by Marsha L. Dutton to Lawrence C. Braceland’s translation of On Spiritual Friendship, pages 22-23.

*From the translation of On Spiritual Friendship by Lawrence C. Braceland, SJ, published in 2010 by Liturgical Press as part of the Cistercian Fathers series. The “2” refers to Book Two.

Christmas Translations 2:

I know it's hard to believe, but the Twelve Days of Christmas are hardly over yet. In honor of this ongoing feast, let me offer you another brief reading from the patristic tradition, this one from the work of the Venerable Bede about the "peaceful" circumstances of Christ's birth. Just follow this link to the original post on my own blog.

Posts on Another Blog

Dear friends,

In case you find yourself itching for something brief and spiritual to read during these Christmas holidays, I'll be posting some of my translations of Christmas sermons from the Church Fathers on my own blog. The first one is here.

ZG