On Friendship

I had an epiphany a few years ago where I was out at a celebrity party and it suddenly dawned on me that I had yet to meet a celebrity who is as smart and interesting as any of my friends.
Moby, quoted on CNN.com, March 2005


This does not exactly express my thought, but it does adequately express my sentiments. My "debate" (i.e. conversation) class this week was about friendship . . . this is my favorite class, one I always look forward to. It struck me while preparing for it (I actually have creative control of the lesson plans) what a miraculous thing friendship really is. My mind was taken back to Cicero's joy in contemplating the wonderful power friends have to heighten joys and ease hardships. Even more I thought of the mystery inherent in a relationship which has no natural necessity (as do parent-child or male-female relationships).

I still remember reading what C.S. Lewis had to say about it and thinking, "Man was he smart! I wish I could think so deep or so far." And everyone seems to have something to say about it. There isn't a work of fiction I can think of which doesn't, at some point or on some level, express an opinion about it. Just today I was reading Jane Eyre and came across the child Jane telling her friend, ". . . if others don't love me, I would rather die than live - I cannot bear to be solitary and hated, Helen." My debate class concurred, as would, I believe, anyone I've ever met.

Our need for friendship so elegantly seems to point us toward God that I'm rather stricken at the moment. Here is a relationship which does not meet any evolutionary need. All I can think is how wonderful, and awesome and, I'll say it, magical, it is that the God of the universe wants to be my friend. And that He planted in me a need for a relationship which has no need-love attached to it, and is for the sole purpose of enjoyment. Mmm.