Friday of the Seventh Week in Ordinary Time

Fr Ken Gering
Fr Pius Poff

Let your acquaintances be many,

but one in a thousand your confidant.

Facebook is only the latest chapter in the story of people searching for love among strangers. When I was a kid there was a TV program, Queen for a Day. I was permitted to watch this dreadful daytime fare when I was homebound with the mumps, measles or chicken pox. Several contestants would cry their hearts out before a studio audience, each one telling stories more pathetic than the other. Each day a winner was crowned “queen” and awarded a pile of prizes. As I remember she was rarely happy about it. She continued to weep wretchedly as a stole was wrapped around her shoulders, a crown placed on her head, and a band played Pomp and Circumstance.

Today there is a plethora of reality programs to watch troubled married couples, troubled unmarried couples, unhappy gay partners, and victims of various sorts recount their miseries. They seem to be people looking for love in all the wrong places.

The electronic village is not all that different from the ancient city. Sirach was probably a resident of Jerusalem. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of people crowded together into what we would consider unbearable density. There was no word for privacy and public space was anywhere outside your own body. If there were thousands of acquaintances and innumerable companions, friendship was no easier to find then than today.

Friendship is a gift available for those with the courage to seek it. I am often amazed at the quantity and quality of friendships I find among people who, on first encounter, don’t appear very attractive. Eventually I realize it has nothing to do with physical attraction, intellectual acumen, financial status or religious piety. Friendship ignores all those qualities.

Rather, God gives friends to people wherever they might live. I met a fellow years ago whose best friends were still in prison; he wondered how he would manage without them now that he was free.

Friends cannot be bought, managed or manipulated. They must be welcomed. Friendship requires skill, courage, and tact; perseverance, patience and generosity. It’s not about me; it’s not about you; it’s about us.

Sometimes married couples develop a deep friendship as they work through the difficult issues of their life.  It doesn’t happen necessarily or automatically, and should never be taken for granted. Many people think that marriage is about friendship, but I am not sure of that. As a couple matures they may work out a satisfactory relationship of loyalty, respect and compassion but friendship may be more than their relationship can bear. If they realize that soon enough, and make the necessary adjustment to their expectations, they can find happiness.

It seems impossible to say friendship must happen here, and it cannot happen there. It seems impossible to say exactly which two persons should be friends, or cannot be friends. Like grace, it is often discovered in unlikely places. Like grace, it is received with gratitude for the mercy of our endlessly surprising God.

A faithful friend is a sturdy shelter;
he who finds one finds a treasure.
A faithful friend is beyond price,
no sum can balance his worth.

A faithful friend is a life-saving remedy,
such as he who fears God finds;
For he who fears God behaves accordingly,
and his friend will be like himself.