Better than normal ships

"I wish you could make a friend of me, Lizzie. Do you think you could? I have no more of what they call character, my dear, than a canary-bird, but I know I am trustworthy... I know quite enough of myself," (continued) Bella, with a charming air of being inclined to give herself up as a bad job, "and I don't improve upon acquaintance." 

  Bella Wilfer, Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend (1865)

In January I was hit by a flood of nostalgia (and lots of other things, that were less fun, like a large flapping bird and insomnia). Due to having a lot of time on my hands I indulged the nostalgia to quite an impressive degree. I called up a lot of my favourite people and subjected them to trundling down memory lane with me. I got a bit obsessed with the origins of friendship. I wanted to dig my heels in, grab hold of the roots of the relationships I prize the most and tug at them - to feel that they would hold and to understand how they’d been formed in the first place.

Friendship is such a mysterious, organic, precious thing. I got some fantastic answers to my slightly garbled, ‘Could we just go back over...where...how....when and why we are friends?’ Turns out my friendship narratives have some recurring themes - (me being slightly idiotic in my over-excitability, music, cows, and being awake too early in the morning are some choice examples) - but though you can often pinpoint the moment you met your friends, the friendship itself is in a way nothing to do with you. You didn’t create it. It discovered you and you welcomed it with the gratified grin of a small child who’s just walked into their own surprise birthday party.

C S Lewis is an inspiring man to read on friendship - his take on where friendships begin is that the ‘typical expression of opening friendship would be something like, "What? You too? I thought I was the only one." 

I love that. I’ve been there so often. Granted, in my internal monologue it sounds more like: ‘NOOOO WAY! You too? You’ve heard of that book too...let alone read it? Let alone love it? You like that song too? You’ve struggled through that too? Been hurt by that too? You’ve made that mistake...too...? You actually find that funny...too? Wa-hey!”

It’s pretty cool that friendship just erupts around you - often when you least expect it. It flicks up its head at the recognition of a shared experience. It clocks the common ground. And that foundation of “There I was, thinking I was the only one, but I have found an ally” leads to a deep responsive trust because you know that the person is not going trample on the things that are most important to you: they get it. To go back to Lewis - love between friends does not hinge on the question ‘Do you love me?’ but rather ‘Do you see the same truth?’ Love between friends is unique in that it isn’t obsessed with itself. It’s not romance. It’s grounded on a shared conviction, something that goes back further and deeper than the friendship, something that’s enough to support it even if it looks like an unlikely pairing to the rest of the world. (The Four Loves, Ch4 on Friendship, 1960)

Which makes real friends wonderfully safe people. In a crisis, you could fall on them. In fact, in a crisis, you will want to fall on them because they can be relied on to rally around the same truth as you. And when the truth they are rallying around is the truth that we are terminally broken people but that the gospel brings real hope, help and healing - well, that is a very good place to fall. 

And so friendship stretches. It solidifies into a steady companionship that rises above all the calculating self-interest that plagues a lot of relationships. Because its foundation is strong enough to handle openness: it frees you up to admit to your actual feelings, passions and struggles. When something happens that needs to be celebrated, your friends will recognise its worth and demand to celebrate it with you. They get it. They get you. There’s a whole landscape of things you don’t need to explain - but then again if it just so happens that you want to try and explain, your friends will be the ones who are best placed to understand what you’re trying to say and then nudge you, gently, nearer to your perfect friend...

I have a suspicion that our fast-paced, Facebook-frazzled world only serves to aggravate people’s loneliness even as it connects us to an ever-increasing web of people with ever-increasing ‘ease’. That shouldn’t surprise us. Friends, we have been made for something greater than a high-speed internet connection. We've been built for friendship. And friends of mine who are reading this - I am soooo soooo thankful that you won't let me settle for less...

Coming soon: On being friends with Jesus. So much to say.....