friendship

God has willed that we should all depend on one another for our salvation, and all strive together for our own mutual good and our own common salvation. Scripture teaches us that this is especially true in the supernatural order, in the doctrine of the Mystical Body of Christ, which flows necessarily from Christian teaching on grace.

“You are the body of Christ and members of one another…And the eye cannot say to the hand: I need not thy help: nor again the head to the feet, I have no need of you…And if one member suffer anything, all the members suffer with it; and if one member glory all the others rejoice with it.”

So now is the time to tell a thing that I could not realize then, but which has become very clear to me: that God brought me and a half dozen others together at Columbia, and made us friends, in such a way that our friendship would work powerfully to rescue us from the confusion and the misery in which we had come to find ourselves, partly through our own fault, and partly through a complex set of circumstances which might be grouped together under the heading of the “modern world,” “modern society.” But the qualification “modern” is unnecessary and perhaps unfair. The traditional Gospel term, “the world,” will do well enough.

All our salvation begins on the level of common and natural and ordinary things. (That is why the whole economy of the Sacraments, for instance, rests, in its material element, upon plain and ordinary things like bread and wine and water and salt and oil.) And so it was with me. Books and ideas and poems and stories, pictures and music, buildings, cities, places, philosophies were to be the materials on which grace would work. But these things are themselves not enough. The more fundamental instinct of fear for my own self-preservation came in, in a minor sort of a way, in this strange, half-imaginary sickness which nobody could diagnose completely.

The coming war, and all the uncertainties and confusions and fears that followed necessarily from that, and all the rest of the violence and injustice that were in the world, had a very important part to play. All these things were bound together and fused and vitalized and prepared for the action of grace, both in my own soul and in the souls of at least one or two of my friends, merely by our friendship and associations together. And it fermented in our sharing of our own ideas and miseries and headaches and perplexities and fears and difficulties and desires and hangovers and all the rest.

Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain

I’m blessed enough to be able to say I have formed a group of close friends akin to what Merton describes here, a group where we can share “our own ideas and miseries and headaches and perplexities and fear and difficulties and desires and hangovers and all the rest.” I really have come to depend on these men, who have rescued me in some important ways. What a powerful and important gift friendship is, especially in an increasingly lonely world.