Episode Transcript
[00:00:05] The following is a legacy recording from the archives of the C.S. lewis Institute. While the audio quality of these recordings may vary, the content remains vital to the mission of the institute to develop disciples who can articulate, defend, and live faith in Christ through personal and public life.
[00:00:24] We have this, of course, wonderful precedent, the passage in John chapter 15 where Jesus calls us his friends. Let me just read it to you.
[00:00:36] John 15:9.
[00:00:39] As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you.
[00:00:44] Now remain in my love.
[00:00:46] If you obey my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have obeyed my Father's commands and remain in his love.
[00:00:54] I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete.
[00:01:01] My command is, love each other as I have loved you.
[00:01:05] For a greater love has no one than this, than that he lay down his life for his friends.
[00:01:12] You are my friends if you do what I command.
[00:01:16] I no longer call you servants because a servant does not know his master's business.
[00:01:21] Instead, I have called you friends for everyone.
[00:01:24] For everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you.
[00:01:29] You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last.
[00:01:39] Then the Father will give you whatever you ask in My name.
[00:01:43] This is my command. Love each other.
[00:01:49] One of our first students at the college, a young dramatist, his life was wonderfully blessed by the experience that he had there.
[00:01:59] And as a result of the time he wrote a poem, I haven't got it with Me, but basically what he was saying in his poem is that God has transformed a lonely eye to a glorious we.
[00:02:16] And that, of course, is what our spiritual friendship is all about.
[00:02:21] The friendship that we have in God that changes that lonely I to a we.
[00:02:29] Well, we've already in the discussion this afternoon, seen what are some of the cultural pressures on our time that would exclude the range of the personal, the dimension of the relational, the central importance of friendship from our lives.
[00:02:48] You have the choice. I have the choice. In the society in which we live, to live by two different standards.
[00:02:56] And if those of you who are making notes would like to jot down some of these alternatives, you can draw up two tables.
[00:03:05] Two ways of life.
[00:03:07] A commodity way of life is on the left side.
[00:03:11] A covenant way of life is on the right side.
[00:03:16] And in the commodity form of life that people in the marketplace in our culture today are all living is where values are grounded in things.
[00:03:27] In fact, it's a world that reifies. And this word reify means, literally means to make into things from the Latin res, a thing, so we can talk about the way we thingify. I don't suppose it's in the Oxford Dictionary, but the word reify is so values which are reified are for example, related to your markability in the marketplace, how much you're worth in terms of a salary and what people think of you in terms of your function and the job that you're performing.
[00:04:04] And so your worth is very much related to your production.
[00:04:10] And of course likewise the commodity form of such a reified life is focusing everything on consumption.
[00:04:19] You have the purchasing power to buy what you want.
[00:04:26] Now that commodity form of life of course also finds that knowledge is likewise reified.
[00:04:34] So the view of knowledge, of truth is that you observe and you describe, you measure, all of which you do to control.
[00:04:45] Ah yes, I understand is what you're saying, but much more subtly you're saying, and now I have the power behind that understanding.
[00:04:55] So the emphasis is always on derivative knowledge.
[00:04:59] It's not necessarily at all concerned with personal involvement and personal experience.
[00:05:07] And even our Christian bookstores are full of these how to books.
[00:05:12] And so the process of doing that of course is to technicalize everything.
[00:05:18] We live in a society that is technicalizing the whole dimension of life, the whole spirit of man is caught up with that attitude of life.
[00:05:32] And so the result of that is that the will is also reified.
[00:05:39] So that we live with a great deal of attitudes that this is all a question of chance and necessity, determinism and fate.
[00:05:49] And in the consequences, your role and my role is to dodge as much as we can in self evasion and in non commitment, because obviously you'll get trampled on if you don't.
[00:06:07] And likewise behavior is reified in many other ways.
[00:06:13] There are very violent forms of behavior, behaviour of domination, of manipulation, of retaliation, all in fact leading to a devaluation of personal life.
[00:06:31] Everything is competitive, everything is supply and demand.
[00:06:39] You can't expect that your own personal life then is not reified too.
[00:06:45] And so sex is viewed mechanically.
[00:06:50] The body is a machine, you operate by techniques in your behavior.
[00:07:01] But ultimately this whole transactional type of behavior and type of life is that we're all replaceable.
[00:07:10] Hire and fire operates in our business life.
[00:07:15] And it often and fortunately operates in Christian organizations as well, who are branch plants of General Motors too.
[00:07:26] So this is the picture that you have this kind of life. And so ultimately reality is also reified.
[00:07:36] And the reification of reality is everything is in terms of possessiveness, of having or having not.
[00:07:47] And in Despair, you're ultimately reduced to skepticism, to cynicism, human isolation, human alienation.
[00:08:01] And of course, the end of the road is death.
[00:08:07] If Paul was writing today that the wages of sin is death, this is the kind of road he'd be describing, the road of reification.
[00:08:19] Now, the biblical view of life is very different.
[00:08:23] The biblical view of life is that God is a covenant God and God has made a covenant with his people and that he values us as precious in his sight.
[00:08:40] Indeed, he's made us, as we've been reminded this weekend, in his own image and likeness.
[00:08:47] So the values of covenant life are grounded in the intrinsic worth and in the uniqueness of the person.
[00:09:00] And who you are is infinitely more significant than what you do.
[00:09:09] But of course, the obverse to this is, is that therefore you see life much more self sacrificially, much more giftedly.
[00:09:25] And your knowledge is personal knowledge.
[00:09:29] It is involved in involvement.
[00:09:37] It's founded on faith and trust.
[00:09:43] And you're much more concerned with the who questions and the why questions than the how and the what.
[00:09:54] And your emphasis is not on derived knowledge but on personal experience.
[00:10:01] The Christian life in such a perspective is a story. It's storytelling, it's a telling of the story of our own lives as experienced in the faith of God. We're not dealing with a doctrinaire view at all, we're dealing with a view that's based on personal experience.
[00:10:24] And the personal qualities of such a life are of course immeasurable, they're impossible to quantify.
[00:10:37] And you're finding life therefore is a life of freedom of choice and therefore moral responsibility.
[00:10:49] And you are in fact involved, so there's no self evasion.
[00:10:54] You're committed to a way of life that makes you a very responsible agent.
[00:11:02] Because if you live with covenant instead of non commitment, you are there for living morally a responsible life.
[00:11:13] But your behavior to others therefore doesn't take violent forms, but forms of peace.
[00:11:22] The acceptance of weakness, not the exploitation of weakness, the respect of freedom, not the manipulation of others.
[00:11:33] Forgiveness, not retaliation, healing, not punishment, vulnerability, not defence, the exaltation of the least, not the devaluation of all.
[00:11:52] You live by invitation, not demand.
[00:11:56] You live by sharing, not competing.
[00:12:01] You live by giving, not retaining.
[00:12:07] So your behaviour to other persons is just the antithesis of a reified life of people that are its objects.
[00:12:19] And so likewise, sexuality is a sign of uniqueness.
[00:12:25] It's not a mechanical thing and body is not a machine, but is the embodiment of the presence of the Holy Spirit, whose temple we are, and we live unpossessively and so fearlessly, not filled with all the threats of forfeiture.
[00:12:50] So it's a self giving life and it's operating towards an end, a telos, not operating pragmatically with techniques.
[00:13:05] And your journey is much more profoundly inward before God than outwardly before men.
[00:13:15] Your answer to the replaceability of being a reified object is your uniqueness, which is irreplaceable.
[00:13:26] And you live with emotions which are not mechanical but personal. Tenderness, gentleness, kindness, meekness, compassion.
[00:13:38] And you live therefore, not with an exchange mechanism, but with the prodigality of love.
[00:13:46] How much should you love? Well, forgive.
[00:13:49] Seventy times seven, our Lord tells us, isn't enough.
[00:13:56] And so your whole view of reality is that of personal being granted, as we saw this morning in Divine Fellowship, where your answer to human skepticism and cynicism is the exercise of faith and hope and love.
[00:14:18] And your destiny is not death, but eternal life.
[00:14:23] We're reminded then of the words of Joshua, choose ye this day whom you will serve.
[00:14:29] But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.
[00:14:36] And to serve Yahweh is to serve the covenant God and to live this covenant life.
[00:14:44] And so when we're talking this weekend about friendship, we're talking about friendship within this environment.
[00:14:52] Not the arctic environment of alienation, but that lush environment of personal life and personal growth.
[00:15:05] Now this evening we want to look at some of the exemplars of this whole quality of experiments of friendship in the history of the Church. Art drew our attention to the fact that.
[00:15:24] That there have been.
[00:15:28] There's been a sort of unwillingness or a chariness to express the Christian life in terms of friendship.
[00:15:36] We've had many models for the Christian life.
[00:15:39] The early church had the model of the martyr in the first three centuries that was a witness unto death.
[00:15:47] And there have been other models like the pilgrimage and the soldier.
[00:15:54] And in America today, we think the supreme model of the Christian is the entrepreneur for Christ Incorporated.
[00:16:01] So we have many models of what it is to be a Christian.
[00:16:06] But why is it that the model of the friend has been so parsimonious?
[00:16:12] Why is it limited?
[00:16:15] Well, one of the interesting discourses on this was given by Bishop Jeremy Taylor at the end of the 17th century when he wrote a letter, a rather long and somewhat bombastic letter from the bishop on the discourse of the nature, Offices and measures of friendship.
[00:16:36] And what he said was simply this.
[00:16:40] A friend, Mrs. Catherine Phillips, had asked him, how far is a dear and perfect friendship authorized by the Principles of the Christian faith.
[00:16:52] And he replied very disconcertingly.
[00:16:55] He says the word friendship in the sense we commonly mean, it is not even so much as mentioned in the New Testament.
[00:17:05] But what is said is that the friendship of the world is enmity towards God.
[00:17:10] That is to say, the only occasion when the word friendship is used, it is use of enmity towards God.
[00:17:19] Why should he be so mean as to say that friendship is not in the New Testament when we just read it in John 15?
[00:17:26] It's because, as Art was saying, that he says, Christian charity is friendship to all the world.
[00:17:36] So that when friendships are of this character, it's impossible for us to practice.
[00:17:48] He said, agape love, which is universal, is unrestricted, is what the Bible means by love.
[00:17:59] But friendship is choice, it's selection.
[00:18:05] And so he is indicating that therefore one should be very chary about using friendship is the model for the Christian life.
[00:18:15] And also, I think he was reacting against the classical indulgence in friendship because as we've heard, Plato advocates the importance of Platonic friendship that we know about as that spiritual reality that goes above any values of physical attraction.
[00:18:35] Aristotle in his Nicomettian Ethics, speaks of the possibility of another self being one's friend and the benefits of all of that.
[00:18:50] And Cicero, in his classical work on friendship, De Amicitiae, takes the theme further and distinguishes between useful friendship, which is to say a low form of friendship, somebody who is useful to me because he fits in with my scheme of things, all my plans and strategies, and what he calls true friendship that results where there's intrinsic mutual benefit to each other.
[00:19:17] But there has been a strong reaction in the Christian church to the possibility of such friendship.
[00:19:26] And as we think about it, there are a number of ways in which perhaps we can see the wisdom of this restraint about using the model of friendship in the Christian life.
[00:19:41] Friendship is a preferential love.
[00:19:45] It's a love that excludes as well as chooses.
[00:19:51] But God's fellowship, as we've seen, excludes no one who desires it.
[00:19:58] John 6:37 is a good text on this subject.
[00:20:03] So that's one halt in our enthusiasm for friendship.
[00:20:09] Friendship is also the least instinctive of relationships.
[00:20:15] It's unlike even family ties, which are to some extent instinctual bonds.
[00:20:22] And so one of the hazards of friendship is that it requires the most deliberate efforts on our part to cultivate, to sustain.
[00:20:35] And so we expose ourselves in all the psychic energy that we require to exercise friendship, to mis motive, to wrong attitudes.
[00:20:50] And so in the process, we have to ask ourselves, what are our motives for these friendships.
[00:20:58] And certainly we've got to ask ourselves, what resources do we have to sustain these friendships?
[00:21:06] So that also makes friendship very vulnerable.
[00:21:13] Another consideration is that friendship arises out of human companionship, having shared interests and perhaps activities too.
[00:21:25] So how can we keep that friendship pure so that together we're serving the glory of God?
[00:21:35] Is it possible that my friendships can distract me from the love of the Lord and the service of the Lord? Of course they can.
[00:21:45] Again, friendship can be very attractive because it can be extremely useful.
[00:21:52] So how can friendship be prevented from being degenerated into a utility tool?
[00:22:01] That friendship is in fact abused by self interest or by a false passion?
[00:22:11] Hard questions.
[00:22:14] Again, friendship can be a powerful radical force for change because it can evade public consensus.
[00:22:26] You know, I'm not crazy because I've got these friends around me who believe the same as I do.
[00:22:33] And even people who went with Jim Jones to Guyana believe that.
[00:22:40] And so there's a possibility that the immunization that we can so readily perform of self hiding can be reinforced by the friends that we choose.
[00:22:57] Birds of a feather do flock together, and it's quite possible for us, therefore, to seek those that will move in that direction.
[00:23:08] A great deal of the dynamics of church growth are based on that principle.
[00:23:14] If the church is a club, then church growth indicates how the club can grow by making sure that you have a form of community life that appeals to a majority, that attract yet more to add to that majority.
[00:23:35] Incidentally, I discovered in South Africa that Peter Wagner is certainly not viewed with any approval in the churches that are fighting apartheid.
[00:23:47] So this Californian vine wilts in the South African sun at the present time. But you can see why.
[00:24:00] Then again, friendship can cultivate close intimacy.
[00:24:05] But how is it to be prevented from degenerating into a club, into a coterie, into buddyism, that in fact excludes others that might want to be part of those relational bonds.
[00:24:26] Friendship is a reciprocal love, but agape love is not self seeking, as we read in 1 Corinthians 13. 5.
[00:24:42] Lewis makes a very curious observation or objection in one of his letters. He says friendship can perhaps be too spiritual.
[00:24:56] And what does he mean by that?
[00:24:59] What he means by that is that it can sometimes blind us from being realistic enough to the needs of life around us.
[00:25:12] So, in other words, the possibility of the Christian developing a healthy spiritual friendship is indeed hazardous, is very difficult.
[00:25:33] So we've all voted for friendship this weekend.
[00:25:37] What we want to say soberly tonight is that those times in the history of the church when it's flourished have been the exception rather than the rule.
[00:25:49] And that therefore, when we all go out here and desire to vote for friendship, let us know the cost of building the tower.
[00:26:02] Now, the advantages, of course, are enormous.
[00:26:07] In the book of Sirach we read that a faithful friend is a sure shelter, and whoever finds one has found a rare treasure.
[00:26:15] A faithful friend is beyond price.
[00:26:18] There's no measuring his worth.
[00:26:21] For a faithful friend is the elixir of life.
[00:26:24] And those who fear the Lord will find one, whoever are his friends.
[00:26:31] And of course, that's the key.
[00:26:33] It's the fear of the Lord that isn't only the beginning of wisdom, but we may say, is the beginning of spiritual friendship too.
[00:26:44] And so the focus that we want to make tonight is to see how the nature of spiritual friendship is certainly bound, as we were saying this morning, so profoundly, closely to the nature of our.
[00:27:01] Now, in order to reduce some of the content of our talk this evening, let me summarize in a few sentences and then expatiate on that summary what one's findings are in the history of the church.
[00:27:17] There have been occasions when you have a phenomenal development of a friendship or a group of friends like the Clapham sect at the beginning of the 19th century.
[00:27:30] And there's a great self conscious movement today, especially in Washington, to imitate the group of the Clapham friends and to say, you know, they did so much in English parliament and for English reform at the beginning of the 19th century.
[00:27:46] We can do the same at the end of the 20th century.
[00:27:51] That friendship is ephemeral.
[00:27:56] And although it may have done great things in the generation of one group of friends, God has no grandchildren and also there are no grandchildren's friends either that are maintained validly.
[00:28:13] And so one of the things I want to point out this evening is the transformation that took place between the Clapham sect in the early 19th century and the Bloomsbury Circle that developed in the interwar period.
[00:28:30] And really the contrast between the two is the contrast between those who did projects for God because they loved God and those who sought to dismantle all the Christian values of England in the interwar period and thumb their nose at all Christian faith and morality.
[00:28:52] Who were the Blooms recycle?
[00:28:55] They were literally the great grandchildren of the founders of the Clapham movement.
[00:29:02] So we have a contrast there, and it suggests the vulnerability and the precariousness of friendship based on projects, even projects for God.
[00:29:19] Now we're going to start, however, way back in the 12th century with a much more lasting movement that lasted Several centuries.
[00:29:30] And it's the beginning of the Cistercian monastic movement, the movement that was started by Bernard of Clairvaux and some of his friends, like William of Sanctuary. And Bernard's other friend is Elred of Riveau.
[00:29:50] And their basis of friendship was not on projects, not even building abbeys, not even draining swamps and developing agricultural land. That all was incidental later.
[00:30:01] And they got caught up in a remarkable agricultural revolution in the 12th and 13th century that really got them launched economically and exploded the movement from just one or two struggling small communities to over 450 very opulent monastic foundations that stretched from Syria to Scandinavia into Wales and even into Ireland.
[00:30:31] A remarkable spread that took place with the logistics of friendship.
[00:30:38] But the foundation for their movement was the contemplative life.
[00:30:43] It's what we were talking about this morning, that those who are most profoundly the friends of God are those who can most lastingly be the friends of each other.
[00:30:56] And there's a great classic that was published by one of these fathers, Aelred, his name is spelled A, E, L, R E D. And Rivault, where he was abbot in Yorkshire.
[00:31:10] The ruins are still visible on the walls of Yorkshire.
[00:31:16] He lived between 1110 and 1167, and he wrote this little book.
[00:31:26] It's rather grubby now, in my own hands, Spiritual Friendship.
[00:31:32] Unfortunately, it's out of print, but at the beginning of the year it will be republished.
[00:31:38] I've done a sort of abbreviated edition of it in my own anthology on Bernard called the Love of God that Multnomah Press have published.
[00:31:47] But you should look at the original edition.
[00:31:51] And so if you order it through Cistercian Publications or from the Catholic Bookstore here at Catholic University, the Newman Bookstore, you'll find it is a. Is a wonderful book to have.
[00:32:04] What is the nature of a classic?
[00:32:07] Well, the nature of a Christian classic, or indeed any classic, is a book that resonates with what is foundational to being a human being.
[00:32:17] That is what a classic is.
[00:32:19] It has a lasting quality because it's saying things that have to be repeated in every generation, because those things which are important to be repeated, those things which are intrinsic to what it is to be genuinely human.
[00:32:34] And so in that context, this is a classic and it's a beautiful reverie and in fact, a discussion because it's with three friends who are involved and the genre of the book is appropriate for talking about friendship.
[00:32:53] There's a sense in which we shouldn't be standing up here formally giving a lecture on friendship, the nature of friendship is dialoguing, not monologuing.
[00:33:03] And so the book itself is divided into three discourses.
[00:33:08] And the first discourse is when on one occasion Ilred went to visit another colleague who was an abbot of another monastery.
[00:33:17] His name was Ivo I v O.
[00:33:21] And they start off and they discuss what are the foundations for spiritual friendship?
[00:33:29] And we're going to look at that.
[00:33:31] But it's only after you've read it that you then discover that Ivo is dead.
[00:33:38] And so what Ilred is cleverly doing in the first dialogue is indicating that where there's friendship, spiritual friendship, the friendship's never lost, not even by death.
[00:33:53] And so Ilred remembers the words of his friend, and that has become embedded into his way of life.
[00:34:01] And so he's not lost his friend, because all the fruit of their relationship is now part of his own character.
[00:34:08] It continues, and it's very significant that it's a friend who's died.
[00:34:16] That, in a sense, is the friend who's built the origin of this spiritual friendship together.
[00:34:21] And these are the opening.
[00:34:24] Here we are, you and I. This is Elred speaking to Ivo, and I hope a third. You see, where there are two that are met together, where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I, in the midst is the promise of Jesus. And so here, Elred, here we are, you and I, and I hope a third Christ is in our midst that you can't start a discussion on spiritual friendship without celebrating the presence of the Lord in your midst while you're together.
[00:34:53] And there's no one now to disturb us. There's no one to break in upon our friendly chat.
[00:34:59] No man's prattle or noise of any kind will creep into this pleasant solitude.
[00:35:04] So come now, beloved, open your heart and pour into these friendly ears whatsoever you will. And let us accept gracefully the boon of this place and time and leisure together. Isn't that a beautiful start?
[00:35:17] You have that kindliness which is space to do all of this without knowing you're going to be criticized or cut off or misunderstood or scorned or ridiculed. None of that you're able to open expansively before the Lord.
[00:35:35] Now, one of the things that Aelred tells us is that he had read Cicero's book on friendship, so he knew about the classical view and the idealism that Cicero had talked about. And as a young man, when he was in the palace of David I of Scotland as a courtier, Ilred had been enchanted as a worldly young courtier with the wise words of Cicero.
[00:36:00] But now he knows Christ. And he knows differently.
[00:36:03] And he knows that Cicero is straw in comparison with the presence of Christ in one's friendship.
[00:36:09] And so he says, it is evident that Tullius, who is of course Cicero, that Cicero, was unacquainted with the virtue of true friendship, since he was completely unaware of its beginning and end in Christ.
[00:36:26] So in the midst of our understanding of friendship, this is what is the foundation. It's Jesus Christ that makes spiritual friendship possible.
[00:36:36] And so in the first place, he says, let's look at the nature of friendship.
[00:36:41] And he has to confess that I am convinced that true friendship cannot exist among those who live without Christ. That's a harsh statement you were asking this morning. You know how you could be a friend with non Christian friends? Well, you can have a relationship with non Christian friends, and you can, in the eyes of the world, be a friend to them.
[00:37:01] But when it comes to the ultimate understanding of spiritual friendship, spiritual friendship begins and ends with Jesus Christ, is what Aylward is telling us.
[00:37:11] And so he then goes on to indicate he that is a friend loves at all times.
[00:37:19] Indeed, friendship is eternal if it is true friendship.
[00:37:25] There's this awareness, therefore, that we can look for something of lasting significance and lasting value in this kind of relationship.
[00:37:37] And he quotes from Jerome, who says, one of the early fathers, friendship, which can cease to be, was never a true friendship.
[00:37:51] So this is a high standard for friendship, but it's a rock of friendship too.
[00:37:59] And so that's how Ilred begins his dialoguing. Then the next two treatises are dealing with the stages of the formation of friendship, the prudence that we need in the cultivation of friendship.
[00:38:24] And then finally we're given in the third section, what are the qualities of what it means to be a friend? How do you practice this kind of friendship?
[00:38:35] Is what Ilred is discussing.
[00:38:37] Now. Here we have three friends. And I was saying to you this morning how significant it is for us to think of spiritual friendship as threefold, not twofold.
[00:38:47] A friendship that is given, a friendship that is shared, received, and a friendship that is shared.
[00:38:55] That this is like the Divine Trinity, this giving of the Father, this receiving of the Son, and the sharing of the Holy Spirit in our lives.
[00:39:08] But in a human friendship, you will get the idealist and you'll get the realist.
[00:39:15] And so we have Gratian, who is the gushing enthusiast, and wow, he's in for us. This is a terrific thing to have.
[00:39:26] And then there is Walter, who is just a little bit cynical and he's seen a bit more of life.
[00:39:34] And he's telling Gratian just to not to over indulge and not to overplay and to.
[00:39:43] As we tend to do in America. One of the marks of American culture is it's an excessive culture.
[00:39:50] You see, somebody discovers jogging, and the nation goes crazy at jogging. And if after a meeting like this, we've discovered spiritual friendship, we'll want to make a tremendous organization out of spiritual friendship.
[00:40:04] And so we do need the Walters of this world, who, by the way, later did write a biography of appreciation of his friend, to just keep us in tow and give us a bit of a break.
[00:40:20] Thank you.
[00:40:21] As to how we view friendship, well, to summarize this wonderful classic as to the stages of such friendship, Hildred says, in the first place, one has to lay a solid foundation for spiritual love itself.
[00:40:41] In other words, it's the love of God in Christ through the Holy Spirit that is the foundation for our friendship.
[00:40:48] And that's why prayer is so important in the cultivation of spiritual friendship.
[00:40:55] Why it is that we might say that prayer is the breath of friendship.
[00:41:00] And that therefore, if you are living a life of friendship with each other and you are praying constantly with each other, then you have a good control and a good basis for the formation of that friendship.
[00:41:19] But he says, before you get there, there are four steps to spiritual friendship.
[00:41:25] And the first step is selection.
[00:41:31] The second is probation.
[00:41:36] The third is acceptance.
[00:41:40] And the fourth is that harmony in matters which are both human and divine, with benevolence and with love.
[00:41:53] Now, in the first stage selection, we all have to be prudent. We just can't say yes to everybody.
[00:42:03] And so one of the first correctives that many of us need in our relational life.
[00:42:08] That if we readily say yes, then our spiritual growth will be by learning to say no.
[00:42:17] And if our automatic reaction is no, then we have to learn to say yes. So we have to reverse our natural tendencies to cultivate spiritual friendship.
[00:42:27] Person who's all gushing and all enthused and very much outward directed, thrives on a whole litter of broken relationships, is a neurotic, isn't a friend at all.
[00:42:42] And likewise, the person who is sullen and totally withdrawn and never makes a friend needs to be healed of that cellarage or imprisonment of one's own relational life.
[00:42:54] So either way, our own selection of friendship is also part of the healing of our own psyches.
[00:43:03] The two go together.
[00:43:05] And then the second stage is a stage of probation.
[00:43:14] And you can have friends for five or ten years perhaps, and you're still in A probationary stage.
[00:43:23] And it may be that you will find that those friendships last or they may not last.
[00:43:32] Now, it's not that we are deliberately setting them up to be in probationary incubation.
[00:43:40] It's the whole process itself is in the testing.
[00:43:45] And it may be that many of us might have had very wonderful real friends earlier in our life, but emotionally and spiritually, we were not mature enough to enjoy them and to have them.
[00:44:00] And so we lost them.
[00:44:03] And we lost them, as we'll see in a minute, for sometimes evidences of sinful weakness in our own life because of that.
[00:44:12] And then we move then into a stage of acceptance.
[00:44:16] And some of us have been so long without a friend that it's awfully difficult to accept a friend into one's life.
[00:44:22] Have you ever thought about that?
[00:44:25] There are many husbands and wives who live together, and they're not friends.
[00:44:30] They're husband and wife, but they're not spiritual friends.
[00:44:34] The fear of intimacy by many men or an overindulgement in feelings on the part of many women may keep a husband and wife apart from that kind of spiritual friendship that Ilred is talking about.
[00:44:53] And this, of course, will then lead to this perfect harmony that Ilred is idealizing about in matters which are human and divine together.
[00:45:06] Well, in the cultivation of friendship, which is very much part of also the trial and error of probation, there are four qualities that Elrey talks about.
[00:45:18] How do you know that you've got a real friend, A real sole friend?
[00:45:23] Well, there's the criterion of loyalty.
[00:45:27] Nothing is more explosive and destructive of a friendship than a break in confidence.
[00:45:35] And so if we are a chatterbox, the odds are we'll never have a real friend.
[00:45:44] We can't curb the tongue and control the tongue, as James writes so strongly about in his epistle.
[00:45:52] We won't be able to have real friends because nothing is more divisive and breaking of a friendship for quite some time, but then it will light, then the intent will be exposed.
[00:46:12] That's why wealthy people have very few real friends.
[00:46:18] They never know when they're being related to for their money or whether they're really being related for their own intrinsic worth.
[00:46:27] And it's often difficult for them to make out their mind who their friends are because of that reason.
[00:46:34] And one of the problems that we have in Christian ministry that I've certainly experienced very strongly in my own life is that no way can you be a fundraiser and have friends at the same time.
[00:46:51] You may have lots of buddies and lots of associates, but you're really ultimately a politician. And so I really do believe strongly that one thing that college president should not be is a fundraiser.
[00:47:04] And what most board members determine is that the first thing that a president of a college should be is a fundraiser.
[00:47:12] Because to be a fundraiser is to be a politician.
[00:47:15] Especially when you have a double role as a spiritual leader as well as also having to think about the dollars.
[00:47:24] And so right. Intention is a very important second factor or quality for friendship.
[00:47:33] The third quality is discretion.
[00:47:41] And what we mean by spiritual discretion for a friend is learning to understand how we can best serve the friend in our friendship.
[00:47:56] And obviously what is significant about such a relationship is that we have courage with discretion.
[00:48:06] If everybody knows that my friend has a weakness for arrogance and I never say anything about that to him, I'm an unfaithful friend.
[00:48:15] But it takes a risk because we have to speak the truth in love.
[00:48:20] And do we have enough love to speak enough truth.
[00:48:24] So our problem is often not to speak the truth, but our problem is how we can communicate the truth with that love that does not threaten the communication of the truth that has to be with light love in the illumination of a relationship.
[00:48:42] And so discretion is something again, that is an art, not a science that we have to learn on our knees before God.
[00:48:52] And the fourth quality of cultivating friendship is patience.
[00:49:03] So that you have to bide your time in making changes in the relationship or you may, as you know full well, the needs of change in the other person.
[00:49:17] You have therefore to see how this can be done prayerfully and appropriately.
[00:49:25] Now, why is it that it's our natural tendency to know where our friend needs to be corrected?
[00:49:33] And it's simply because indwelling sin in our lives is always so self deceptive.
[00:49:40] But one of the fundamental needs of a spiritual friend is someone who will point out my shadow self that I cannot see myself.
[00:49:49] The role of a spiritual friend is precisely to help me to grow in my shadow area of life.
[00:49:59] I don't need a friend for my strengths. I do need a friend for my weaknesses. I and I do need my friend above all in the area of self deception.
[00:50:11] And so all of us therefore have to look to a friend for correction, for admonition, for accountability, so that in these areas that I cannot see as my blind spot, we will have someone who is faithful and alongside of us in those kind of relationships.
[00:50:33] And of course there's a rough and tumble in the middle of all of this that says Elred.
[00:50:38] But how in the world, says Elred, can true friendship be tested without toughness and struggle and suffering as well.
[00:50:50] That's how our loyalties proved that we've stuck to a friend through thick and thin, in spite of all the adverse circumstances that may surround us.
[00:51:05] One of the practical things, and we have to leave this now that Ilred also talks about at the end of the book, is, but what about those friendships that obviously have not gone through the probationary period and will not last?
[00:51:22] Well, he said, as Christians, it's important for us. When we see that it's inevitable that there should be a dissolution of friendship.
[00:51:33] Don't do it suddenly.
[00:51:36] Do it gently.
[00:51:38] It's as if we have to sort of fade out of the picture rather than just simply guillotine the relationship.
[00:51:48] Well, there are many other practical things that Aylward is saying in his book now. It was out of this monastic friendship of the contemplative life that the Cistercian movement really developed as schools of love.
[00:52:09] The whole movement of the early Cistercians in the 12th century was really saying that it's really schools for friendship.
[00:52:20] And there was, of course, a far greater risk of cliques in a monastery than there are in our much more mobile society today.
[00:52:28] And so it was a big risk that Ilred, as an abbot of a monastery, or indeed Bernard, in his cultivation of a similar school of love, was advocating in his own community.
[00:52:40] And so with these risks and all that we just said earlier on about the ambivalence that we have in relational life, there's therefore no greater need of God than the cultivation of our spiritual friendships.
[00:52:57] If we see that, then it gives us both the value, the preciousness of friendship and also the precariousness of friendship. At the same time, in the 14th century, there developed two other movements of friendship that were very remarkable in Europe.
[00:53:20] One of these movements is called the Brethren of the Common Life, and this developed in Flanders. First of all, there were godly men and women who saw that the revival of the church in their time was needed and who sought the revival in friendships. Together they met in home Bible study groups, prayer groups, and out of these groups of praying together, reading God's word together, a movement called the Brethren of the Common Life began.
[00:54:06] What was the common life that they had, that they had all their goods in common that we read off in the Acts of the apostle? No, it was the common life of the triune God that they were talking about.
[00:54:18] And the great theologian of this movement is a man called Jan Ruysbrook.
[00:54:26] I would look out his name and get some of his books, if you can get them. His name is spelled J A N S Yans Roosbrook is R U U S B R O E C K or R U Y S B R O E C K.
[00:54:46] And the Divinest Puzzles by Rosebrook is one of the most remarkable books on the devotional life that is spelling out the reality of what we were talking about this morning.
[00:55:01] In other words, here was a theologian of the Trinity who had a deep understanding of the triune God as the source of divine communion.
[00:55:14] And it was from that background and that source that he and those who followed in his teaching were seeking to have this common life, this unity that Jesus prays for in John 17, that they may be one even farther, as we are one.
[00:55:32] The union of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit is shared among his brethren in Christ Jesus.
[00:55:41] And it was out of that movement, and I'm not going to spend time this evening talking about it, but one of the great exemplars of the movement was Thomas A. Kempis.
[00:55:52] And so when in the first quarter of the 15th century, Thomas A. Kempis wrote the Imitation of Christ, he is celebrating this common life that we have through Christ our Lord.
[00:56:08] And if you haven't read Thomas a Kempis book, sometimes you should, because next to the Bible, there's no Christian book in the west that has circulated more than the Imitation of Christ.
[00:56:25] Today There are over 2,500 editions of Thomas A. Kempis. Well, I say not two and a half thousand a day. But since the first issue of the book in the 1420s, there has been this extraordinary continual fervency in this book. Well, one of the secrets for it is it's saturated with Scripture. There are over a thousand references to the Scriptures, and each of the meditations that we find in the book is starting with a scripture, and then there follows a meditation on that scripture, then another scripture, further meditation on it.
[00:57:04] So Thomas is saturated with the Bible. He's sharing the word of God to others in his beautiful work.
[00:57:13] On the continent, in the Rhine Valley, there was another movement called the Friends of God.
[00:57:22] Now, it could well be that they called themselves the Friends of God because Jan Ruysbroek had spoken of the devotees, the spiritual life as Friends of God.
[00:57:34] And in other words, people who are taking God seriously in their lives are God's friends.
[00:57:40] And the Friends of God was a movement that spread from Strasbourg into Switzerland.
[00:57:45] One of the leading figures in this movement was a banker in Strasbourg called Roelman Merzwin. M E R S W I N and throughout the whole of Southern Germany, in the latter part of the 15th century, there was a great development of this network of friends.
[00:58:10] And there were literally thousands of letters written among friends cultivating the spiritual life.
[00:58:19] There was one friend called the Great Friend of the Oberland.
[00:58:25] He was an unknown figure. He never declared himself, he remained incognito. He was known only to Merswin.
[00:58:34] But he was the friend of the popes and of the kings of Europe at that time, and had a tremendous influence again in his letter writing.
[00:58:47] And it was out of that movement, of course, that pietism was later to re emerge in the late 16th and into the 17th and 18th century in Germany. So that the pietistic movement that developed after Reformation is in fact going back to these roots of these Friends that we find.
[00:59:07] Perhaps one of the most eloquent exemplars of this movement is a man called Johann Tauler. T A U L E R.
[00:59:15] And his sermons had a great influence on Luther.
[00:59:19] In fact, Luther edited a new edition of Taulus sermons in 1517, just at the time that he was being nurtured and growing in his own reformed faith. So that before he stood up before the world and said, here I stand, I can do no other in his declaration, he was being nurtured by the spirituality of the Friends movement of a previous century.
[00:59:47] Another man, whose name is unknown, wrote a German theology, it's called the Theologia Germanica, that is also expressive of this movement of the Friends of God.
[00:59:57] They held hands together as devotees of Christ.
[01:00:02] They were the kind of people who were nurturing each other in this spiritual friendship.
[01:00:09] These qualities of character that going to hear about now from Bill this evening, those were the kind of qualities that they saw necessary for the logistics and the cultivation of their friendship.
[01:00:23] And I'll close, as we think of these people, by the story of Albrecht Durer, who, as a young budding artist had a friend called Franz Nix, died.
[01:00:41] They were both struggling apprentices and they came to the conclusion that they couldn't make ends meet in trying to study by day and work at the same time. And so they decided that one of them would have to go to work and support his friend through art school.
[01:01:00] They tossed for who should start, and Albrecht Durer won the toss.
[01:01:06] So Franz went to work to support Albrecht Durer when he went to the various academies in Europe to learn more about the gift of his brilliant gift of etching that he developed. Later, after Durer had qualified and was ready now to take up his profession, he came back to keep his promise to France.
[01:01:32] And he found France on his knees.
[01:01:36] And he saw that those hands had worked and had become gnarled and had become useless for the fine brushstrokes of art.
[01:01:46] He had ruined his future for the love of his friend.
[01:01:51] Those are the praying hands of Durer that all of us know so well.
[01:01:58] Those are the hands of loyalty and spiritual friendship that embody, symbolize the whole of this movement that was started in the 14th century.
[01:02:13] And so it's wonderful to think of the logistics of such a wonderful friendship that can continue.
[01:02:23] Well, I told you at the beginning about the Clapham sect. I don't think we're going to have time now to deal with them. But the contrast between them and these other movements of spiritual friendship is primarily that as one examines their life, they were very active, prominent people. They were businessmen.
[01:02:46] One of them had set up a man called John Thornton, had bought a property several miles out of London in what is called Clapham, which was then out in the fields in the country.
[01:02:59] They nicknamed it the Village of the Nightingales because it was away from all the city and it was living really in a kind of cornucopia rurality.
[01:03:10] And it was there that later a famous preacher called John Venn went to the parish church of Clapham and his son later succeeded him in that same pulpit.
[01:03:23] And at the end of the century, in 1497, Wilberforce, William Wilberforce, who became the leader of the group, joined in that community.
[01:03:35] And so by the beginning of the 19th century, there must have been a score or more friends who had all bought property close to each other.
[01:03:46] They would spend their evenings in brilliant discussion, having dinner together.
[01:03:52] First thing in the morning they would have family prayers and they would talk about things that they were not having to go up to Parliament that day.
[01:04:00] And of course, a number of them who were parliamentarians then commuted to the city and wonderful projects took place out of their friendship.
[01:04:11] The colony of Sierra Leone was established and in fact sustained for over a decade by them before it was taken over by the British government as a colony.
[01:04:21] And the Sunday School movement was started in that circle. Hannah Moore was encouraged by William Wilberforce to get involved in this movement. She herself was a well known pamphleteer and, and writer and she became one of the most famous writers of England in the first part of the 19th century.
[01:04:43] And so as a propagandist for the movement, she did a lot of work.
[01:04:50] So great things happened from that movement.
[01:04:53] But what I've also said is that the great grandchildren of that movement are the Bloomsbury circle, Virginia Woolf G.E. moore, the philosopher, Keynes, the economist at Cambridge, E.M. foster, the novelist.
[01:05:15] All of these people were people who had lost their faith.
[01:05:22] In fact, their fathers had lost faith.
[01:05:27] The Trevelyan, the historian.
[01:05:32] It was Zedekiah Trevelyan who was one of the first members of the Clapham sect.
[01:05:39] And so literally, you can trace family after family in the two movements.
[01:05:46] But what had happened in the second movement was that friendship had now been corrupted into homosexuality, into promiscuity, and everything had been thoroughly debased. It became one of the most influential immoral movements of England in the 1930s, but concealed because it was all in the interest of art for art's sake.
[01:06:11] And it was that movement that brought in the canker into the relativism of our contemporary sexual revolution, as far as England was concerned after the war.
[01:06:26] And so it's a solemn lesson to us that friendship can be a den of thieves as well as for the kingdom of God.
[01:06:38] One of the things today that is significant in South Africa is that the whole movement of apartheid in South Africa, how has it been built up?
[01:06:51] How has it been so solidly established in the country? Was it the military that did it? No, they're reinforcing it now.
[01:06:59] What built it up was the Bruder Bond was a fellowship of friends, African nationalists, who began in 1910 and determined that they would kick out the British and they would have revenge on all the indignities that they had suffered in the Boer War.
[01:07:21] And in the process, who, brick by brick, built up all the structure of this diabolical system of apartheid that is still operating in the country.
[01:07:34] What our Christian friends and our recognizing in South Africa is we need a second Bruder Bond to knock down what they built up.
[01:07:44] That there are no sanctions from outside and there's no international controls that are going to do this.
[01:07:51] That the possibility of really demolishing apartheid will only arise from the same logistics of friendship that built it up in the first place.
[01:08:02] And when we think about America today, and we think of the impoverishment that we have, in fact, the very disillusion, the ungluing of our culture because of individualism and narcissism, the only serious reform that we can advocate for the future is a recovery of community life, is a recovery of the reality of the body of Christ, is a recovery of spiritual friendship for our generation.
[01:08:39] And so to know the hazards is surely not to discourage us from going forward for its building.
[01:08:50] So may God help us as we think about these things, to be faithful to our Lord. Shall we just close in prayer as we think of these things.
[01:08:58] Dear Father, we thank you for the lessons of history, for their inspirations, and for the fact that we don't need to reinvent the wheel.
[01:09:10] And so we know that long before we were ever thinking about spiritual friendship, we've had wonderful exemplars who practice far more than we know about even now.
[01:09:21] So help us, we pray thee, in the light of their example, to recover the central truths by which they lived and died, and that we too may be your friends, as Abraham was, as indeed your disciples were, dear Lord, and as you would have us be today.
[01:09:41] So encourage us and build us up, dear Lord, and help us to build one another up with the reality of what it is to be truly spiritual friends that love one another.
[01:09:54] We ask it through Christ our Lord.
[01:09:57] Amen.
[01:10:01] The proceeding was a presentation of the C.S. lewis Institute in the legacy of C.S. lewis. The institute endeavors to develop disciples who can articulate, defend and live faith in Christ through personal and public life. For more information, please visit our website at www.cslewisinstitute.org. thank you.
[01:10:22] SA.
