The Rough Edges of Holy Friendship
A few years ago, I saw a newscast about an 11-year-old girl in England who released a helium balloon with a note attached asking the finder to become her pen pal. The balloon arrived in the back yard of another 11-year-old girl, who turned out to have the very same first and last name as the child who sent the note.
The story captured the media’s attention because of what was labeled a “bizarre coincidence,” but the girl who found a friend had a different interpretation. Interviewed lying in a hammock next to her friend, one of the girls remarked, “I believe I have been chosen by God to have a pen pal who has my same name.”
The giggling stopped, and the other girl nodded. They seemed to know something the rest of the world did not. They had a holy friendship.
When we think about our friendships that matter most, we realize that we did not “make” friends. God did. The chance encounter at a child’s choir concert bonds two parents. A brief stint in a job creates a friendship that survives moves across the country. An assigned seat in a classroom, a random meeting on a bus, a neighbor who turns out to be a soul mate; these are the ways most of us “make” friends, which suggests we do very little of the “making.”
Perhaps the first step in understanding holy friendship is to see it as a gift from God. Holy friendship is grace undeserved, but also grace recognized.
Holy Friendships as Unexpected Alliances
To the world, friendship is based on “having things in common.” Fictional friends in the media tend either to work or live together and even look alike. In the television comedy Friends, the three women and the three men all happened to be beautiful. In The Drew Carey Show all the friends shared a certain ordinary homeliness. In television, friends are grouped as clearly as the alphas and the betas in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.
Certainly many friendships begin through work or school, which lends itself to a certain homogeneity, but not nearly as much as television suggests. Human friendships tend to be more surprising, and, as such, more challenging to the status quo. When friendships develop across political or economic lines, or across other boundaries, they have a revolutionary potential.
At its best, the church fosters such friendships. One of the pleasures of ministry is watching holy friendships develop in the congregation. From the pulpit each Sunday, I scan the church not just to see who is present but to see who is sitting with whom.
I watch new members move from single seats at the back to tentative pairings with other newcomers, to little groups whose only connection is the pull to share a hymnal. I watch the perpetually irritated teenage boy who no longer wants to sit with his parents drift down the row to a shy widow. Today they sit close to one another, his arm protectively around her shoulder. She embarrasses him with her constant straightening of his hair, but she is now his holy friend. Together they embody the One who really longs for them.
In my congregation in New Haven, Yale graduate students sit with secretaries near retirement, gay men sit with older married couples, and the wealthy sit with the unemployed. Less visibly, the saints sit with the poor in spirit, where an accidental tenderness can save a life.
In church, friendships are not chosen but discovered. My own United Church of Christ congregation--where half the members are still trying to figure out how they feel about organized religion--would bristle to hear their pastor say we have our belief in common, but we do. More accurately, our belief holds us in common.
To seek friendship in God’s community, rather than our own, is a counter-cultural act. By the world’s rules, holy friendships are unexpected alliances.
Clergy and Holy Friendship: Who’s In Charge Here?
Much of what I read and hear about clergy and laity friendships is presumptuous. In seminary the great debate was and still is whether or not clergy can have friends in their parish. In that debate, we spend a great deal of time focusing on whether or not to choose these relationships, when actually such friendships are already chosen for us.
Instead, we should acknowledge up front that friendships between clergy and laity will exist, and then talk about how to behave once we are in them. Clearly, holy friendship between clergy and laity will not be the same as holy friendship among clergy. But that doesn’t imply that one is privileged over the other, or that one deserves constant examination in its lofty complexity. After all, if friendships are a gift from God, they should all be treated with reverence and care.
We have different rules and guidelines for many kinds of friendship in our lives. We clean up our language around some friends; we avoid politics with others. Some friendships demand more than others.
