FRIENDSHIP

I would like to talk about ‘Friendship’ today. Friendship is something greater, deeper, and more vital than mere companionship. Today men are frequently traveling companions, companions in work, in play, and even in the apostolate. But it is a companionship that does not touch the depths of the soul: the heart is not opened up to friendship. It is merely the growth of one day, a superficial liking and it can sometimes lack the most elementary courtesy.
True friendship presupposes a pact of fidelity, a capability of giving without looking for a return. Friendship is above ideas; nor is it broken by adversity. Once born, it can never die. Even the remembrance of it is eternal. It does not know treachery. It is always as fresh as new-grown grass; as genuine and warm as milk fresh from the udder; as sweet as honey in the honeycomb.
Friendship is virginal in its effects.
Friendship was the first gift that the Creator offered man.
Friendship will always be the first word of that poetry which God will go on writing every morning for humanity.
In today’s world man is in danger of feeling that he is more alone than ever. At the same time as he is conquering nature and enjoys the greatest freedom to love, he finds that he is increasingly powerless to give an answer to the question of his own existence. The solitude that threatens modern man is rather an inability to reach God. It is not the “echoing solitude”, of which the mystic St. John of the Cross speaks; rather it is the solitude of an Arctic wasteland cold, bitter, gnawing. It is the cruelest sort of solitude, one in which man asks himself if love is reality or myth, if God is really somebody or only a theory. It is a solitude that closes the door on hope.
And when one is confronted with this solitude, which is due in great part to the conditions of modern life, I am of the opinion that one’s road to God, one’s path of faith, must of necessity pass through the pleasant fields of friendship. Today man needs to reach out and touch his neighbour, so that he will not feel alone. And it is necessary to touch him as ‘a neighbour,’ as one who is ‘near’, as ‘someone’ on whom one can lean and with whom one can share one’s doubts and hopes.
I am convinced that modern man will find God especially through other men, and through other men seen as friends, as second selves in whom he can affirm his own existence, on whom he can lean, in whom he can find himself, discover himself, realize himself, and contemplate himself.