Viewing friendship as sacramental didn’t really happen for me until a few years ago. And it has been so life changing and life giving! For me, friendship always felt a bit empty, surface level and based on common interests. When my view shifted to seeing Christ/showing Christ in my friendships, friendships became deeper, more real and more satisfying. And it became more vital to my everyday living!
You and your family have played such a huge role in that shift for me. Yay for friends!!!
I think you're right. Being Christian compels is to be good friends. But I'm also struck by the feeling that we don't have many good examples of friendship in the bible other than David and Jonathan. There's family, co-laborers, disciples, mentors/mentees, and of course the church body. But nothing that looks quite resembles my thoughts of friendships today. Perhaps the closest thing is the church body. But the context of Biblical teaching on church fellowship is about displaying the glory of Christ and practicing the one anothers. All of which strike me as and too spiritual to call friendship? Friendship feels too creaturely - like it's innate my earthboundness. I don't primarily see my friendships as a means to experience God. More as a way to feed my human needs and feed those of others.
Does this indicate a need to elevate my view of friendship? Or is the bifurcation of church and friendship just specific to this age and the Biblical authors would not recognize.such a difference?
It's true, there aren't very many great examples of friendship in the Bible, David and Jonathan being the great exception. Scripture doesn't give much in the way of instruction on how to be a good friend. C.S. Lewis makes a great point about why this might be in Mere Christainity:
"When [Christianity] tells you to feed the hungry it does not give you lessons in cookery. When it tells you to read the Scriptures it does not give you lessons in Hebrew and Greek, or even in English grammar. It was never intended to replace or supersede the ordinary human arts and sciences: it is rather a director which will set them all to the right jobs, and a source of energy which will give them all new life, if only they will put themselves at its disposal."
His basic point is that creation teaches us a lot about how to live and move in the world; the Bible, on the other hand, is there to tell us the purpose and meaning of life in this world. God's grace fulfills nature; it doesn't replace it.
So we learn to be friends when we're children, and we learn to be Christian friends as we grow up into Christ. You're 100% right: friendships ARE creaturely. But that's only because the Creator made them. And He made them very good.
One more Lewis quote for you on the question of elevating your view of friendship from an essay called "Learning in War-Time":
"All our merely natural activities will be accepted, if they are offered to God, even the humblest, and all of them, even the noblest, will be sinful if they are not. Christianity does not simply replace our natural life and substitute a new one; it is rather a new organisation which exploits, to its own supernatural ends, these natural materials.… The work of a Beethoven, and the work of a charwoman, become spiritual on precisely the same condition, that of being offered to God, of being done humbly ‘as to the Lord’."
To the extent that friendship is a natural activity, it absolutely can be done "as to the Lord," and therefore be directed to the glory of God (1 Cor. 10:31). Given that my neighbor is present in it, it's a venue in which I can love him/her as myself. The beauty of friendship is that, if it is a good one, the friend that I offer myself to in love will reciprocate that same self-giving in freedom, love and joy. Sanctified by Christ, that friendship can become a signpost of the Kingdom to a cynical and selfish world.
Viewing friendship as sacramental didn’t really happen for me until a few years ago. And it has been so life changing and life giving! For me, friendship always felt a bit empty, surface level and based on common interests. When my view shifted to seeing Christ/showing Christ in my friendships, friendships became deeper, more real and more satisfying. And it became more vital to my everyday living!
You and your family have played such a huge role in that shift for me. Yay for friends!!!
Thanks Megan! Yay for friends indeed!
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/24/opinion/friendship-loneliness.html?fbclid=PAAabd35zn0fTw0TB9aO_GDF6zt8mA_9QMqvdnmo4VMezjMXE3CbDHP4N53Hw_aem_AWGF3BjBNld1kUMYDQMY47bkKU5TpmGgRnI209LJfjEIVgE7JKY0TdZ4PVXVFgKUp3A
I think you're right. Being Christian compels is to be good friends. But I'm also struck by the feeling that we don't have many good examples of friendship in the bible other than David and Jonathan. There's family, co-laborers, disciples, mentors/mentees, and of course the church body. But nothing that looks quite resembles my thoughts of friendships today. Perhaps the closest thing is the church body. But the context of Biblical teaching on church fellowship is about displaying the glory of Christ and practicing the one anothers. All of which strike me as and too spiritual to call friendship? Friendship feels too creaturely - like it's innate my earthboundness. I don't primarily see my friendships as a means to experience God. More as a way to feed my human needs and feed those of others.
Does this indicate a need to elevate my view of friendship? Or is the bifurcation of church and friendship just specific to this age and the Biblical authors would not recognize.such a difference?
It's true, there aren't very many great examples of friendship in the Bible, David and Jonathan being the great exception. Scripture doesn't give much in the way of instruction on how to be a good friend. C.S. Lewis makes a great point about why this might be in Mere Christainity:
"When [Christianity] tells you to feed the hungry it does not give you lessons in cookery. When it tells you to read the Scriptures it does not give you lessons in Hebrew and Greek, or even in English grammar. It was never intended to replace or supersede the ordinary human arts and sciences: it is rather a director which will set them all to the right jobs, and a source of energy which will give them all new life, if only they will put themselves at its disposal."
His basic point is that creation teaches us a lot about how to live and move in the world; the Bible, on the other hand, is there to tell us the purpose and meaning of life in this world. God's grace fulfills nature; it doesn't replace it.
So we learn to be friends when we're children, and we learn to be Christian friends as we grow up into Christ. You're 100% right: friendships ARE creaturely. But that's only because the Creator made them. And He made them very good.
One more Lewis quote for you on the question of elevating your view of friendship from an essay called "Learning in War-Time":
"All our merely natural activities will be accepted, if they are offered to God, even the humblest, and all of them, even the noblest, will be sinful if they are not. Christianity does not simply replace our natural life and substitute a new one; it is rather a new organisation which exploits, to its own supernatural ends, these natural materials.… The work of a Beethoven, and the work of a charwoman, become spiritual on precisely the same condition, that of being offered to God, of being done humbly ‘as to the Lord’."
To the extent that friendship is a natural activity, it absolutely can be done "as to the Lord," and therefore be directed to the glory of God (1 Cor. 10:31). Given that my neighbor is present in it, it's a venue in which I can love him/her as myself. The beauty of friendship is that, if it is a good one, the friend that I offer myself to in love will reciprocate that same self-giving in freedom, love and joy. Sanctified by Christ, that friendship can become a signpost of the Kingdom to a cynical and selfish world.