I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father
from John 15.15 (NRSV; and see also James 2.23)
Most excellent Theophilus (friend of God; Luke 1.3, Acts 1.1), consider your friendship with God. How do you relate to God as you would relate to a friend? What makes a good friendship?
Spending time – If you are good friends with someone, you would want to spend one-on-one time with them. How do you spend time with God?
Honesty and openness – Friendship where honesty and trust have broken down grow cold and distant. Are you honest in your prayer about your struggles and your anger, and equally your joys?
Listening – I wouldn’t consider someone who talks at me all the time as a close friend, or vice versa. Are you spending time listening in your life and prayer? And are you as comfortable with a companionable silence walking side by side as with conversation over dinner, say?
Equality – Aelred of Rievaulx, the 12th century Cistercian monk and abbot, took great joy in his friends. In his book Spiritual Friendship he wrote: “there is in human affairs neither a superior nor an inferior, a characteristic of true friendship.” (1.57). And later, perhaps drawing on our creation in God’s image and our calling to grow into our true selves: “the friendship of [human beings] could be easily translated into a friendship for God [Godself] because of the similarity existing between both.” (3.87).
I like to imagine Andrei Rublev’s icon of the Trinity as a depiction of three friends sitting round a table enjoying each other’s company. They might be simply sitting in silence, or chewing the cud, or maybe the Father sitting on the left has just told a bad dad joke. But always they are holding the fourth side of the table open for their fourth friend – you – to join them.
For Aelred, the highest kind of friendship is a selfless communion of hearts. He didn’t quite write that ‘God is friendship’, but in replacing one instance of ‘love’ with ‘friendship’ in 1 John 4.16, he comes close: “God is love, and those who abide in friendship abide in God, and God abides in them.”
So a final word from Julian of Norwich:
I saw very clearly that our eternal friendship, our home, our life and our being are in God.
Revelations of Divine Love, Chapter 49
