"Companions on the Journey: The Spirituality of Friendship"

Rev. Tony Lorenzen

First Parish Church in Weston

July 8, 2007

Copyright, © Tony Lorenzen, 2007

Lesson: Exodus 33:8-11

Gospel: John 15:12-17

Responsive Reading: "We Need One Another" -- George E. Odell

Minister: We need one another when we mourn and would be comforted.

People: We need one another when we are in trouble and afraid.

Minister: We need one another when we are in despair,

and need to be recalled to our best selves again.

People: We need one another when we would accomplish

some great purpose, and cannot do it alone.

Minister: We need one another in the hour of success,

When we look for someone to share our triumphs.

People: We need one another in the hour of defeat,

When with encouragement we might endure, and stand again.

Minister: We need one another when we come to die,

and would have gentle hands prepare us for the journey.

People: All our lives we are in need, and others are in need of us.

"Friendship demands a religious treatment," wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson in his essay on the topic in 1841. "We talk of choosing our friends," said Emerson, "but friends are self-selected. Reverence is a great part of it ... should not the society of my friend be to me poetic, pure, universal, and great as nature itself?" [1]

Emerson took friendship seriously. Friendship he says demands religious treatment and is poetic and as great as nature itself. Not only do we undervalue friendship today, but what we call friendship in our time I dare to say often isn't friendship at all. How many people we call our friends are but acquaintances? People we recognize, but do not truly know. People with whom we are friendly, but who are not friends. As the writer of the proverb states: "Some people play at friendship, but a true friend sticks closer than one's nearest kin" (Proverbs 18:24).

We know God -- I am convinced -- through the people, places and events of our lives. Friendship therefore is a sacred and holy calling. It is not showy, it is not often recognized with liturgy and ritual, it is an everyday thing. But it is friendship's cup-of-coffee-ness that makes it holy; it's everydayness that makes it sacred. The holy, the sacred and the divine are not reserved for the desert, the mountaintop, the temple, the monastery, and the ornate ritual.

Friendship has taken a hard hit in the post-modern world. Our lives our full of acquaintances, people we know from work and school and even church, but friends, people who do the heavy lifting of relational life who are not family, are harder and harder to come by. This is a shame says Pastoral Psychologist Robert J. Wicks "because friends are not only important for support, but are also necessary for psychological and spiritual growth -- if you will, for holiness." [2]

This sermon series for the rest of July is based on the work of Robert J. Wicks of Loyola College of Maryland. He deals with the theme of friendship in two books: Touching the Holy: Ordinariness, Self-Esteem and Friendship and A Circle of Friends: Encountering the Caring Voices in Your Life, the second co-authored with Robert M. Hamma.

Wicks suggests that friends play four chief spiritual roles in our lives and he names these roles The Cheerleader, The Prophet, The Harasser and the Spiritual Guide. These roles or voices are self-descriptive. The Cheerleader gives us positive reinforcement, picks us up when we're down, encourages us to keep going, and tells us we're okay. The Prophet tells us what we need to hear, but don't want to hear and points out to us what we don't want to see, but need to see. The Spiritual Guide points the way to our deepest beliefs, helps us see the light and find a way out of darkness. The Harasser keeps at us, won't let us give up, and puts things in perspective when we blow things out of proportion, keeping us from getting too full of ourselves by throwing us a dose of humility.

Wicks also suggests that these spiritual friendship roles may be better termed voices because a friend may speak in one or more of these voices or fulfill one or more of these roles for us (and we for them) at different times in our lives or at different times in our relationships.

Over the next three weeks, I will explore these various roles or voices in some detail offering examples from my own friendships, the work of Wicks and Hamma, reference to the scriptures and other spiritual writers. I will also ask you to reflect on who fills these roles in your life, who speaks to you in these voices and on the flip side, for whom do you fill these roles, to whom do you speak in these voices of friendship? Are the answers to any of these questions God?

We hear this morning that the Lord used to speak to Moses "face to face, as one speaks to a friend." Interesting. How many of us would claim to speak to God so directly? How many of us would want to? As if God couldn't be such friend? As if it were crazy to assume God could?

In a world where so many people encounter each other online at websites such as MySpace and Facebook, and online encounter is almost normative, we need to remind ourselves that face to face relationship hasn't lost it's place. Virtual, on-line communities have grown exponentially in recent years and have left us on the shores of a vast new world, with immense digital horizons to explore. These new virtual villages are not without their merit and usefulness for outreach and their ability to help people to connect to each other in a genuine fashion, but we still need to enter the tent of the presence, not just of the presence of God, but of the presence of each other where we encounter each other face to face, servants no longer, but friends.

Sometimes in my previous work as a hospice chaplain and volunteer coordinator, I would arrange for volunteers to visit hospice patients. Not only to play cards, or to read to a patient or to help with grocery shopping or cleaning the house, but sometimes just to sit with someone dying of cancer or liver failure. The patient just wanted someone to be there; just wanted someone to be present. Sometimes the greatest role we can play as friends is just to be there. That's something all the friends on your MySpace.com page can't do is be at your side, even if their photo can be on your desktop.

Jesus tells his followers in this morning's Gospel reading that he calls them servants no longer, but friends. A passage with many levels of meaning for us -- The people in our lives are not for our utilitarian purposes, to serve our needs, but for deeper relationship. The disciples are being called to more intimate relationship not just in service to the mission of the Good News, but in relationship to their teacher and to each other.

Today I will focus a bit on the role or voice of the Harasser. Next week on the Cheerleader, the week after on the Prophet and conclude by looking at friends as Spiritual Guides.

"A spiritual friend," filling any of these roles or speaking in any of these voices, is, according to Wicks and Hamma, "someone with whom we can celebrate God's presence and action in our lives. There is a freedom in the relationship to talk about what we hear God saying to us, how we discovered God anew, or where we feel God is present in our lives at this moment." [3]

The great and oft-quoted Greek sage Anonymous said of friendship that a "friend is a person who knows the song in your heart and can sing it back to you when you've forgotten how it goes."

Wicks and Hamma put it this way, "A spiritual companion is someone with whom we can discuss the motivations that keep us going in life, someone who helps us remember why we are doing what we do." [4]

I also think that a friend of this nature is in it for the long haul. Not that a casual acquaintance can't offer valuable insight or be of great help, but a relationship you turn to and re-turn to that someone who is a companion on the journey. Often the voice of the friend is the voice of God, the voice of Christ, the voice of the divine speaking to us, if we have ears to hear.

Wicks and Hamma admit that the term Harasser isn't a very positive one for spiritual friendship and in their book they ask the question, "How can we harass people in a positive way?" Their answer is that positive harassment is "harassing back." They note that people have a habit of putting themselves down, blowing a negative experience out of proportion and generally slipping into habits of poor self-esteem. They state it this way: "Positive harassment is not degrading, but upgrading; rather than demeaning it helps us find meaning; instead of humiliating us, it points us toward humility." [5] The way I like to think of it is: Am I bugging you? Good. You're full of yourself.

My friend John owns the gym in town where I work out. He's a harasser. "Are you sure that machine won't go any slower?" is one of his favorite lines. "Heavy day?" he'll ask, if he sees one 45 pound plate on each end of the bar bell, knowing I can lift more. He knows the struggles I've had keeping my weight down and coming back from a couple of injuries. He's never sarcastic, always light hearted, but always reminding me about taking care of myself.

My friend Jill is a doctor, a M.D. "How's your asthma?" It's always one of the first questions out of her mouth. How's Tina? How's Zackary? How's your asthma? It's like asthma is a part of the family. I'd like to forget about asthma. If you have asthma, you'd probably like to forget about it, too, but my friend Jill is a M.D. and she has asthma, and cares about how I'm taking care of myself.

My Zen teachers Melissa and David are harassers. I think spiritual guides have it in their contracts to double as harassers. If you've ever been to a meeting with a zen teacher, you know what harassment they can cause. Does a dog have Buddha nature? What's the color of mu? What does mu sound like? What's the sound of a single hand? Show me, don't explain it to me? When you hear the sound of the single hand, you become the Buddha. How do you become the Buddha? It's hard to be full of yourself as a holy person minister type with the teacher throwing it at you that you aren't so enlightened after all. Oh, the harassment of it all!

Sometimes friends offer us a harassing voice, calling us to true humility and don't even know that they've done so. I have such a friend. She used to preach from this pulpit in the summers. The Rev. Dr. Suzanne Spencer, now a novice in the Episcopalian order of women religious The Community of the Holy Spirit, would often pray using the words, "Jesus came so that we might have life and have it more abundantly." This became almost a mantra to Sue Spencer's prayer, at least that's how I heard it. When I first started on the staff at First Parish Church, I wanted to run away from this line. It sounded too high church -- too, well Catholic for this old Catholic boy. But this line called to me. What does it mean to have life? To have it more abundantly? It invited me, called me, made me reflect. What did Jesus ask of his followers, but in the words in of the prophet Micah, "to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God."

In time, I came to relish the moments of prayer when Sue Spencer would speak these words about Jesus coming so that I could have life more abundantly. She was harassing me, pointing me toward true humility.

Jesus, himself was a pretty good harasser, too.

* "Why do you see the speck in your neighbor's eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye?" (Matthew 7:3, Luke 6:41)

* "If any place will not welcome you and they refuse to hear you, as you leave, shake off the dust that is on your feet as a testimony against them." (Mark 6:11)

* "For truly I tell you, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there,' and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you." (Matthew 17:20)

I'm telling you, Jesus just kept harassing his friends with this stuff. Over and over and over again. Upgrading them and helping them find the meaning in it and pointing them toward a true humility that doesn't just blindly subjugate the self, but sees the self in healthy relationships and seeks to serves others. He harassed them again and again and again.

They needed harassing. They argued about who would get to be his right hand man. They were always asking follow-up questions that would make a high school teacher say something like "weren't you paying attention, Matthew? You really must take better notes."

There were no digs, no retorts, no sarcasm, no biting humor or inside jokes. He just kept on being there and reminding them and teaching them and laying it out again and again until he could call them students and disciples and servants no longer; until he had to call them the only word that really fit, the word that described a relationship of presence and mutuality; a word that spoke of a relationship that was poetic, pure, universal, and as great as nature itself. He finally had to name them something that demanded spiritual and religious definition: Friends.

So the task for us becomes to discern who speaks with this harassing voice in my life? Who fills this role in my life? And for further discernment, for whom do I fill this role, to whom do I speak in the voice of the harasser?

Let me ask you: Who calls you to humility? Who reminds you not to blow things out of proportion? Who calls you to find meaning again and again and again when you are in a pattern of missing the point. AND ... is there anyone in your life you help with these things? Think about it. This is your task for this week. Am I buggin' you yet?

Maybe so. You can just think of me as a companion on the journey, a harasser, that's how Robert Wicks would put it. Or as James Taylor would phrase it, You've Got a Friend.

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[1] Emerson, Ralph Waldo, "Friendship" 1841 from The Essential Writing of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Brooks Atkinson, Ed. Modern Library/Random House, New York, 2000, pp. 201-214.

[2] Wicks, Robert J., Touching the Holy: Ordinariness, Self-Esteem, and Friendship, Ave Maria Press, Notre Dame, Indiana, 1992, p. 94.

[3] Wicks, Robert J. and Robert M. Hamma, A Circle of Friends, p. 23.

[4] Ibid, p. 23.

[5] Ibid, p. 78.