Deserting Friendships

Faithful friends are a sturdy shelter; whoever finds one finds a treasure. Faithful friends are beyond price, no amount can balance their worth. Faithful friends are life-saving medicine; those who fear God will find them. Those who fear the Lord enjoy stable friendship, for as they are, so will their neighbors be.

– Sirach 6:14-17

This text– the first reading at the funeral of a Jesuit who interviewed me eight years ago when I applied to join the Society– struck me deeply, and continues to echo in my prayers and thoughts in these early days of Lent. I agree wholeheartedly with the wisdom of Sirach about the gift and power of a strong friendship, yet also heard these words as a genuine challenge to examine the health of my own friendships, both within and beyond the Jesuit community to which I belong.

I've long considered myself to have the qualities of a good friend– I tend to be a good listener, I'm relatively generous in sacrificing my time and attention to attend to someone in a time of need, and I place importance on sustaining regular contact with friends, whether they live near to or far from wherever I happen to call home at a given time. Yet I'm also increasingly aware– and not without some unsettling honesty and troubling realizations– that I tend to be hesitant, sometimes even afraid, to avail myself of the same in return, even when such treasures are generously offered. It's as if I come upon the sturdy shelter of a friendship yet prefer to remain exposed to the elements, or find myself ill in mind or spirit yet shun the medicine and healing that a friend's care can provide.

Atacama Desert, Chile

Whereas I've long found comfort, even solace, in the pursuit of prayerful solitude in physical and spiritual deserts, when I eschew or remain apart from friendships, I feel isolation and loneliness instead. Although I may find value and wisdom in the former, I am certainly not called to the latter, yet I easily fail to heed and recognize the difference between the two. Unfortunately, finding and following the journey that leads to the welcoming embrace of treasured and faithful friends– after no small period of wandering away from these graces and likely diminishing in my ability to convey them– does not seem as straightforward as I would like, and has not come to me readily in recent months.

This is not the sort of direction that I expected at this point in Lent, yet I do feel that Jesus, no stranger to the harshness of the desert as well as the growth and wisdom gleaned from sojourning there, is inviting me to travel this path. And I certainly desire to not only offer, but also to truly enter into, the rich friendship that Sirach praises.

Answer me, Lord, in your generous love;

in your great mercy turn to me.

Do not hide your face from your servant;

hasten to answer me, for I am in distress.

– Psalm 69:17-18