Thanksgiving for Friendship

 Interfaith, Love, Spiritual Formation  7 Responses »
Nov 222011
 

Friendship is the theme that has arisen for me in this time of thanksgiving,  a time for offering and sharing our gratitude.   For much of my life I considered the highest blessings to be those exceptional ecstatic or contemplative moments in which consciousness fills with, or is blown out by, awareness of God’s immediate presence.  However, with time  I came to see that the blessing of friendship is even more important.  If we would only realize it, friendship is one of the most direct and beautiful ways that God is present to us, whether or not we are engaged in any “spiritual” practice.

And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them.  1st John 4:16

It’s that simple!  Yet some of us have the notion that the more enlightened, illuminated, sanctified, holy, or, well, “mystical” we are then the less regard we give to friendship as an important and worthwhile experience in human life.  Doesn’t it seem odd that sometimes our obsessions with things like philosophy, theology, and mysticism should lead us into places where we feel a need to justify enjoying something as natural and beautiful as friendship?  Yet it happens, and it happens because somehow we come to believe that our great teachers are pointing us in that direction.  With the rest of this post I hope to show that this is not actually the case, and that friendship is not only okay, it’s highly recommended!

As someone who feels a certain affinity with Buddhism, and who values the dialogue between Christianity and Buddhism, I lament that people often consider the Buddha and his followers as models of this disregard for friendship.  I find a number of things in Buddhist scripture that challenge that belief.

Consider this conversation between the Buddha and his disciple, attendant, and friend, Ananda, where Ananda begins:

This is half of the holy life, lord: admirable friendship, admirable companionship, admirable camaraderie.

The Buddha replies:

Don’t say that, Ananda. Don’t say that. Admirable friendship, admirable companionship, admirable camaraderie is actually the whole of the holy life. When a monk has admirable people as friends, companions, & comrades, he can be expected to develop & pursue the noble eightfold path. http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn45/sn45.002.than.html

On another occasion, the Buddha teaches:

With regard to external factors, I don’t envision any other single factor like admirable friendship as doing so much for a monk in training, who has not attained the heart’s goal but remains intent on the unsurpassed safety from bondage. A monk who is a friend with admirable people abandons what is unskillful and develops what is skillful. http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/kn/iti/iti.1.001-027.than.html#iti-017

And again:

And what is meant by admirable friendship? There is the case where a layperson, in whatever town or village he may dwell, spends time with householders or householders’ sons, young or old, who are advanced in virtue. He talks with them, engages them in discussions. He emulates consummate conviction in those who are consummate in conviction, consummate virtue in those who are consummate in virtue, consummate generosity in those who are consummate in generosity, and consummate discernment in those who are consummate in discernment. This is called admirable friendship. http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/an/an08/an08.054.than.html

Yes, friendship does, at least for most of us, include greater attachment, and the Buddha acknowledges this when he says to a grieving woman, “’Those who have a hundred dear ones have a hundred pains.”

He then sings:

The sorrows, lamentations,
the many kinds of suffering in the world,
exist dependent on something dear.
They don’t exist when there’s nothing dear.
And thus blissful and sorrowless
are those for whom nothing
in the world is dear anywhere.
So one who aspires to be stainless and sorrowless
shouldn’t make anything
in the world dear anywhere.
http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/kn/ud/ud.8.08.than.html

Notice that he did not tell her to give up having dear ones.  Rather he solemnly reflects on the profundity of what we all know in common sense, which is that personal suffering accompanies personal love.  If you aspire to be free of that suffering, he says, then you have to free yourself from personal love, and I swear I can hear the Buddha in the subtext saying, “So, is that the kind of bliss you really want? Hey, if it is then knock yourself out.”

With these scriptures in mind, listen to the poetry written by Ananda after the death of his friend and teacher, the Buddha:

All the quarters are bedimmed
And the Path is not clear to me,
Indeed my noble friend has gone
And all about seems dark.

The friend has passed away,
The Master, too, has gone.
There is no friendship now that equals this:
The mindfulness directed bodywards.

The old ones now have passed away,
The new ones do not please me much,
Today alone I meditate
Like a bird gone to its nest.
http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/kn/thag/thag.17.03.hekh.html

We can hear both Ananda’s suffering and his awareness that his suffering points him back toward the practice of mindfulness, acceptance, and letting go; it bears awareness of both his personal love and a transcendent love.  For all of Buddhism’s apparent renunciation of personal attachment, it is not an effort to induce psychological denial.  It is not an either/or dichotomy in which attachment is a “wrong” to be avoided at all costs and an emotionally disconnected detachment is a “good” to be purchased at any expense.  Rather, I hear an acknowledgment that all at once we can know both the suffering of our personal losses and the bliss of that which transcends holding and losing.

As followers of the Judeo-Christian tradition, we have a number of scriptures that actually extol friendship.

The seeds of good deeds become a tree of life;
a wise person wins friends.  Proverbs 11:30

The heartfelt counsel of a friend
is as sweet as perfume and incense. Proverbs 27:9-10

Jesus speaks of friendship as a special relationship:

Greater love has no one than this, to lay day one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you.  No longer do I call you slaves, for the slave does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all things I have heard from my Father I have made known to you.  John 15:13

Both the Gospels and the apocrypha also allude to Jesus having closer relationships with some of his disciples than others, perhaps even what we might call “favorites” or “best friends,” such as Peter, John, Mary Magdalene, Lazarus, and James.

And there is this classic teaching from St. Paul about the kind of friends Christians should be with each other:

Love must be sincere. Hate what is evil; cling to what is good. Be devoted to one another in brotherly love. Honor one another above yourselves. Never be lacking in zeal, but keep your spiritual fervor, serving the Lord. Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer.  Share with the Lord’s people who are in need. Practice hospitality.  Romans 12:9-13

In the first sentence, agape is the word Paul uses for love.  Christians conventionally understand agape to be a love that is unconditional and charitable in the broadest sense.   The word translated as “devoted” is philostorgos, which means to love each other like family, which is emphasized by the word philadelphia, the love of siblings or the closest of friends.  Koinoneo, meaning “to partner with,” is translated here as “share with” pointing to the commitment and depth of hospitality, philoxenia, we should practice even with those we would regard as strangers.

The writers of the New Testament epistles often speak with terms of warmest affection and personal endearment for their colleagues and followers, frequently referring to them as friends, siblings, and children.   They apparently found no shame at all in this, and even saw the cultivation of such relationships as central to living their faith.  As John says at the end of his third letter:

Peace be with you. Your friends here send you their greetings. Please give my personal greetings to each of our friends there.

Can you imagine the feelings that our earliest siblings in Christ must have felt for each other?  It seems to me that the apostles must have missed each other dearly as they each headed off on their missions to spread the Good News of God’s infinite love and grace. They suffered the cruelties and injustices inflicted upon each other, celebrated each other’s accomplishments, and grieved sorely when they heard of each other’s passing, even as they rejoiced at the ascension of their souls.  They were human after all, and they loved as humans filled with faith in a love that transcends but does not negate the temporary joys and pains of personal affections.

So, I close this post with gratitude for the blessings of friendship by sharing the words of one of my favorite mystics of the 19th century, Albert Pike:

That I can be a friend, that I can have a friend, though it were but one in the world: that fact, that wondrous good fortune, we may set against all the sufferings of our social nature.

May you all enjoy a beautiful Thanksgiving, whenever, wherever, and with whomever you may celebrate it.

On the Meaning and Transformation of Suffering

 Love, Psychology, Spiritual Formation  9 Responses »
Feb 062011
 

jesus-sweating-blood-in-gethsemaneThis is a perennial topic in spirituality, and Christian devotion is certainly no exception. We have our ascetics who have glorified the value of suffering to the point of practicing the most extreme forms of mortification.  We’ve had clergy and elders who have directed the faithful to always quietly submit to whatever abuses, cruelties or injustices they may have suffered as trials of faith.  I’ve heard of Inquisitors who went into raptures of ecstasy at hearing people cry out to God as they burned at the stake.  Mother Teresa allegedly did not allow patients in her care to receive pain medication because she believed it was so important for people to suffer with Christ.

As mystics we seek to know union with God, and to live in accord with our faith in and knowledge of that union. How does suffering, our own and that of others, fit into this context?

The Roots of Suffering

Let’s avoid the temptation to slip into distraction with ontological tail-chasing about why suffering exists at all.  My preference is to begin by simply accepting the existential reality, and from that place begin considering what meaning it has for me.  And, before going further, it may be helpful to note that there are two general classes of suffering:  The first is the basic experience of physical and emotional pain immediately resulting from loss, injury or disease,  and the second is the additional suffering we create for ourselves with our mental responses to the fact or possibility of such things.  While this post has relevance to the first class of suffering, it is actually the second class that is of primary concern.  That sort of suffering is something we have more opportunity to prevent or transform, and not only for our own benefit but also because it so often spills over into the lives of others.

It first occurs to me that suffering reveals our illusions, or at least our attachments to them.  It is actually our resistance to accepting illusions for what they are that causes so much of our distress and dis-ease in life.  Sometimes this happens when we get what we thought we wanted, only to find the reality is significantly different from our dreams.  Sometimes it happens because of the experience of impermanence and our vain struggles to preserve what was.

“Attachment” and “impermanence” seem to be key words here.  It’s simple enough to see how our desires to keep and hold what pleases us must always be thwarted by the reality of impermanence here in this world.  A deeper truth of this is that we tend to define ourselves through our attachments, though we might not realize it, either on the whole or with specifics.   But anyone who has experienced a significant loss – like the death of a loved one, the breakup of an intimate relationship, the loss of a career, an ability, a reputation, a home, or even membership in some group – to some degree knows that anxious sense of having lost something of the self.  Sometimes in these situations we even ask ourselves, “Who am I now?”

So we can see how in the depths of such suffering one often, if not always, perceives a blow to one’s own self-concept, and there is little to nothing we want to protect and preserve more than the self-concept; it is simply the survival instinct, if nothing else.  The truth, however, is that the personal self is temporary.  It is always changing and, despite a more or less constant sense of a “me”, that “me” is obviously never precisely what it was a little while ago.  It is memories of “me” that largely form the collage each of us habitually relies upon for a self-concept, the patchwork emblem we have of the present “me”.  So at best the self-concept is a fluid theory or working hypothesis of who and what we have been and are becoming in this world.  At worst it is an illusion we mistake for a concrete actuality, the psychological equivalent of an idolized statue standing on fragile clay feet, destined to eventually be broken.

The Transformation of Suffering

I think this issue is close to the very core of the mystical impulse.  On the one hand suffering urges us to desire the eternal, to identify with it no matter how paradoxical that may seem.  On the other hand we are drawn to the fleeting unique beauty of impermanent things.  Is there an unresolvable opposition here that begs us to abandon one for the other?  There are many ways we can respond to this juxtaposition, but it seems the general tone of Christian mysticism is to focus on Love.  For us, the value of suffering can begin to be found in its revelation of our illusory attachments and reminding us of our obsession with protecting and preserving the self-concept.  We are thus provided the opportunity to transform temporal suffering from something to be fled at all costs into a catalyst for more fully knowing eternal Love.

Among other ways, people have tried to define Love as the very principle of union itself, the reintegrating power that resolves oppositions and dissolves separation into oneness.  However, when two or more join in love, another one often arises from them.  So it is with all forms of Love as we know it, and so it is that the principle of union is never the last word on the meaning of Love.  Love transcends the duality of separation, union, and the birth of the new.  It is in Love that we know and rejoice in both the eternal, transcendent mystery of non-duality and the temporal ever-becoming, ever-passing wonder of the relative world.

So, for Christian mystics, what are the implications about the suffering of others?  First and foremost it is a reminder of our shared humanity, and that awareness combined with the focus on Love naturally delivers us to compassion, kindness and service.  Yet, as the human heart and mind strive to express something of Love, it is often said that one can only love another to the extent that he or she loves self.  It’s easy to get the idea that one must place self-love first and foremost on some sort of love agenda, as if we would otherwise have less Love to offer others. On the other hand, much has also been said about forgetting self in the love of others, as though time spent in loving self always robs others of Love. But these distinctions reveal our fear that there is some absolute limit to our ability to express Love, if not a limitation in Love itself; it is an assumed lacking that reduces infinite Love to a temporal commodity rather than an eternal good.  Notions such as these are veils on Love’s transcendence of all dualities, for genuine love of self and genuine love of others each have the effect of magnifying the other, despite the suffering that may be intertwined with them.  Like mirrors facing one another, notions of giver and receiver evaporate into the infinite depths of their shared reflection. And so it is that in expressing compassion and kindness in response to the suffering of others, we become a unique temporal flowering of the transcendence of eternal Love; we actually participate in the mystery of the Incarnation, and thus, in the language of our tradition, shine as the light of Christ in this world.