Outside the divine friendship all other knowledge of God is tainted by the ego’s sense of separation. Without friendship the spiritual path is distorted by the religious roles we play: fear, formal reverence, self-conscious submission, bargaining, flattery, guilt, forced praise. All of these are substitutes for true ways to the knowledge of God. Sometimes, of course, as AA members know, you have to ‘fake it to make it’. But when we fail to see God in the light of friendship it is because our own role-playing deceives us. These roles give the ego a stage for self-exhibition, to dress up in religious garb as saint, sinner, priest or martyr, philosopher or mystic. The friendless part of us clings to these identities in compensation for its loneliness. We even begin to enjoy it. Friendship, however, permits no pretence or deception. Nothing more is needed in friendship than fidelity. Even self-justification is irrelevant because no one knows us better than a true friend. If we fool a friend we fool ourselves. And without being known by a friend who can come to self-knowledge? By this high standard we can see how few real friends we make in a lifetime. How many are the misjudgements of friends we call betrayals. And yet, when we do find God in the gift of friendship and glimpse God’s friendship towards humanity, we have reached the highest goal, the ‘end of love-longing’.
Friendship has been devalued in our culture. In other times however it was recognised as the noblest expression of relationship. A life without a friend was less than human. One of the essential goals of life for a civilised person was to find and cultivate a person suitable to be a true friend, ‘another one’s self’ as Plato called it. Friendship was understood to develop in the sharing of self-knowledge. You cannot be friends without knowing it and knowing it means you know you are known. This rich classical tradition of friendship entered into Christian thought and one of its greatest exponents was a twelfth-century English monk, Aelred of Rievaulx. He wrote the only complete treatise on friendship in medieval Christian literature, Amicitia Spirituale. It is a psychological and spiritual masterpiece combining both passion and prudence. In his work he drew into Christian thought the main classical themes: the dignity of friendship and its ennobling effect, the different types of friendship, from the utilitarian to the most selfless and the need to balance emotion and reason by not forcing the pace of growth in the friendship. His unique Christian contribution however was the insight that all human friendships are born and grow to fulfilment in Christ. When two friends truly love one another as Jesus instructed, they would experience the wonder of recognising him as being present with them.
And thus a friend praying to Christ on behalf of his friend and for his friend’s sake desiring to be heard by Christ, directs his attention with love and longing to Christ: then it sometimes happens that quickly and imperceptibly the one love passes over into the other and coming as it were into contact with the sweetness of Christ himself, the friend begins to taste his sweetness and to experience his charm . . . Thus ascending from that holy love with which he embraces a friend to that with which he embraces Christ, he will joyfully partake in abundance of the spiritual fruit of friendship, awaiting the fullness of all things in the life to come. Then with the dispelling of all anxiety by reason of which we now fear and are solicitous for one another, with the removal of all anxiety which it now behooves us to bear for one another, and above all, with the destruction of the sting of death together with death itself, whose pangs now often trouble us and force us to grieve for one another, with salvation secured, we shall rejoice in the eternal possession of Supreme Goodness; and this friendship, to which here we admit but few, will be outpoured upon all and by all outpoured upon God, and God shall be all in all.17
‘Eternal life’–life free of all constraints–becomes humanly accessible in this great incarnational vision of God.
As with any human relationship, friendship with Jesus proceeds by stages. One of the first things we do when a relationship begins to deepen is to remember the history of the friendship from the moment of first meeting. It becomes one of the irreplaceable stories within the story of our life. It is inconceivable that we could be friends with someone without wanting and needing to know the basic facts about their life and origins. Their past in some way needs to be appropriated into the shared story the friendship is creating. This is why it is natural to want to know what Jesus of Nazareth was like, what influences formed him, what he really taught and did. A lot of time has passed and his contemporaries had different ideas about biography from ours. There is a lot we will never know about him but the gospels give all we need to know.
What Are the Gospels?
Early one glorious evening when the sun seemed determined not to set I stopped in at my cousin’s house and found his two young boys glued to the television. It was rare to find them indoors when the weather was so good unless it was to watch Ireland play football. I wondered what programme had proved stronger than their irrepressible instinct to have real adventures outdoors. They were watching Baywatch, a series set on the beaches of southern California with huge ratings and a low budget for the cast’s wardrobe. How these Bere Island boys would compare the fantasy world of southern California with the cold pebbly beaches of West Cork where any bathers attracted admiration more for their physical courage in undressing than for their defined physiques, I discussed later with my cousin. He looked pensive.
In the old days, he said, before twenty-four hour TV, people entertained each other with the recital of their family histories. Every evening, even in the worst weather, they would do the tour of each other’s houses to sit by the peat fire with a glass of the real stuff in reach and recount again the epic stories of each household. The same stories would be repeated continuously, often re-interpreting familiar facts. There would be frequent updates with news about those who had gone to America or Australia or England. Personalities, deaths and births, feuds and reconciliations. Powerful feelings tempered by time or the instincts of justice. Storytelling was a liturgy of the island community. It was also a way of entertainment, a characteristic Irish delight in the use of imagination and words for their own sake. But it was serious too: a way of making meaning of the close-knit world of Bere Island and its now dwindling population.
Privacy and the low whisper were important values among this community that constantly communicated itself to itself. People lived so closely to each other that mistakes were hard to undo. What was said in anger or bitterness today might take years to stop hurting. But nothing went unnoticed or uncared for. Privacy did not mean isolation. And in the perspective of history all events belonged to the community not only to the individual or the family. After the invasion of television people no longer braved the winter cold, the devil that prowled abroad to chase late-night card-players on their way home or the spirits that were older even than the church’s angels and devils. People no longer did the rounds of their neighbours to talk their own stories into the larger stories of the island. Now they stay indoors and watch soaps made in Hollywood for a global market. The ancient stories were dying for lack of telling, as friendships or plants die when they are not given the time needed to tend them. To forget is the unforgiveable sin.
The gospels were written only after they had long been talked. Even today their stories need to be spoken aloud and can only be properly read within the oral as well as a bookish tradition. Word of mouth is still their essential means of transmission. And the old wisdom of the islanders applies to this story-telling as well: to tell a story you have got to believe it, to put yourself and all that is important to you, into it.
To read the gospels through is to see that, to understand