Q&A 103
[Unusually, I will not copy out the questions to this concatenated answer that I've broken down into several parts. It has too many sad and sometimes tragic personal details to edit comfortably… But the questions themselves got me thinking about the topic of friendship.]
A. The last four weeks – almost to the day – have been for me an incredibly loud lesson on friendship. And I've wanted to write on this while the echoes of that lesson still ring loud and clear.
It is against the backdrop of those echoes that I’m more and more convinced that many of us have precious few friendships if at all; at the same time we have a gazillion other relations that I would much more comfortably call acquaintances or accomplices.
Marcus Cicero died just 40 years before Jesus was born. Who he was and what he accomplished can be a whole semester’s unit… Among the great jewels of wisdom he bequeathed mankind is a dialogue (available online) precisely on friendship. And after thrashing rather exhaustively through the topic, he concluded that the most important characteristic or hallmark or trait of true friendship is most certainly loyalty.
Let that sink in a moment… Loyalty.
Let that sink in against a backdrop of those relationships you consider friendships proper. Do you already begin to feel or perhaps even realise you’ve failed in measuring up to what a true friend is in this one regard?
But I don’t want us to walk down that path just yet. Let's take a step back and appreciate the enormity of what Cicero is saying. Loyalty. Consider that special type of friendship called marriage that also has loyalty – or fidelity– at its core. If this be missing in theory (temporary marriages) or in practice (divorce), then there is no true friendship or true marriage. What you have instead is an accomplice.
And there’s that other type of special friendship – with God. And it too has a type of loyalty at its core. We call it faith.
These three: loyalty, fidelity and faith are – drawing from Cicero – the hallmarks of friendship. Without them, there is no friendship, or marriage or religion.
End of Part 1
Wishing you an awesome week!
24th July 2016