20. My spiritual community is a cluster of spiritual friendships which have taught me much about what friendship really is.
(Before looking at the questions below, take a few minutes to think about this statement. Invite Jesus to speak to you about what He would like you to notice.)
How would you describe the difference between everyday friendship and spiritual friendship?
What could be the benefit of each?
How would you describe the difference between meeting a spiritual friend one-on-one, and gathering with a group of people who are all spiritual friends with each other?
What deep longing do you have that a spiritual friendship might help meet?
In classic western culture, one of the highest virtues was friendship. Both Plato and Aristotle give much attention and value to friendship. Friendship was seen as one of the primary virtues that held Greek society and culture together. Later, Cicero writes on the topic of friendship, in a dialogue style, and gives his advice on the virtue of friendship. More than a thousand years later, Aelred of Rievaulx, a twelfth-century spiritual writer and leader who had a deep love for Jesus, in a style similar to and drawing from Cicero, wrote a treatise called “Spiritual Friendship.” All of these thinkers understood the immense importance of deep friendships for a fulfilling life.
In our day, in a post in Psychology Today, Neel Burton says, “The ideal of perfect friendship may strike the modern reader as being somewhat elitist, but Aristotle is surely right in holding that the best kinds of friendship are both rare and demanding. If the best kinds of friendship are those that are based on virtue, then this is above all because such friendships call upon the exercise of reason and virtue, which is the distinctive function of human beings, and which amounts to happiness. However, it could be that the distinctive function of human beings is not the exercise of reason and virtue, but the capacity to form loving and meaningful relationships. If this is the case, then friendships that are based on virtue are even more important to the good life than Aristotle thinks.” (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/hide-and-seek/201204/the-philosophy-friendship).
Aelred of Rievaulx would agree with the idea that the primary goal of human beings is the “capacity to form loving and meaningful relationships” but he would add that this kind of life-giving friendship is not possible without Jesus. “For what more sublime can be said of friendship, what more true, what more profitable, than that it ought to, and is proved to, begin with Christ, continue in Christ, and be perfected in Christ?” he says in Spiritual Friendship(p. 33). We were created with a longing and a necessity for deep and meaningful relationships. Friendship, deep friendship, especially spiritual friendship, is the best example of a life-giving relationship.
Our modern world has created many substitutes for the kind of friendship that Aelred speaks about. He rightly understands that our longing for friendship with others is deeply connected to and facilitated by our friendship with God. The two are symbiotic; they depend on each other and make each other possible. The purpose of spiritual communities is to create space for this kind of friendship to happen. Spiritual communities could even be defined as a cluster of these deep friendships.
Spiritual communities create the environment for this “triangle of friendship” with another and with Christ to develop and when it does, God is honored and pleased, and man’s ultimate destiny is fulfilled.