Losing Touch with a Friend

Peter Sanlon

In a tedious meeting I noticed the blinking light on my BlackBerry. Disinterestedly I glanced at the e-mail that had landed in my inbox—the sender’s name evoked memories. Years had passed; we had vacationed together, shared meals, talked of hopes and fears. The e-mail was from a friend I lost touch with. Last I had heard from him he was heading to college, excited but slightly fearful of what the future might hold. It was a joy to discover that he has since graduated and established his own art business, selling his work via the internet.

Cicero asked himself what the most important thing in life is, concluding that, “Virtue (without which friendship is impossible) is first; but next to it, and to it alone, the greatest of all things is friendship.”

One of Cicero’s greatest admirers was Augustine of Hippo. He preached, in sermon 299D, “There are two necessities in this life: health and a friend.” It was only after he was impacted by the transforming grace of God that he began to experience what Cicero had more dimly glimpsed in his praise of friendship.

In his Confessions, Augustine contrasted his early friendship based around common interests with the type of friendship that grows out of God’s work in us:

“When I began to teach rhetoric in my native town, I had acquired a dear friend, from association in our studies, of mine own age. He had grown up with me from childhood, and we had been both school-fellows and play-fellows. But he was not then my friend, nor, indeed, afterwards, in the true sense of friendship. For it is not true friendship unless you join together, unless there is a clinging to You by that love which is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit, which is given unto us.”

The idea that apart from God, human creatures are unable to experience true friendship, may at first appear to be a mean dismissal of the goods commonly experienced in the secular world.

Yet consider what often passes for friendship today. We enjoy social activities with those wealthy enough to access our circles. Is this real friendship? Augustine preached, in Sermon 41, “If my friend was a friend when rich but is not a friend when poor, then he was not my friend but his money was.”

The reason Augustine could value friendship as highly as Cicero, but dismiss the friendship practiced in secular affairs, was that he had discovered that God truly is at the centre of his universe. To engage in any action—commerce, preaching, sport, reading—without due reference to God who created and upholds that action—debases the action to something else than it was created to be.

Augustine was a good friend to many people; through his writings he can be a good friend still today. The reason he was a good friend is that he realised that God deserves to be at the centre of all human activity, including friendship. As he urged in Sermon 336, “You only love your friend truly, when you love God in your friend, either because he is in him, or in order that he may be in him.”

Is there a friend you have lost touch with?  

Peter Sanlon is writing a doctorate at Cambridge University on Augustine’s preaching. He is married and has some good friends.

1 Responses (comments are closed) • Provocations, Character and Ethics, Global Culture, Thu 03 Jan 2008