Faith Today - May / June 2013

a Few Good Friends
True companions add meaning to life.

The art of true friendship is something of a mystery. Anne Morrow Lindbergh famously observed how “men kick friendship around like a football, but
it doesn’t seem to crack. Women treat it like glass and it
goes to pieces.”
A lot of us men will connect with that image. We’ve
seen our wives, girlfriends and daughters have conniptions
over seemingly innocuous comments and small glances.
Meanwhile, some of us will head out for brotherly beers
on a Friday night with the grinder who an hour earlier
was rubbing our face along the boards.

But male friendship harbours its own mysteries, not least the strange ability of many men to keep relationships at surface levels. Many of us never actually acknowledge the hurts and slights our “friends” inflict on us. We shuck off the wounds of unkind words or thoughtless actions as if they don’t matter at all. We fail to respond gently to an upset friend. We have learned to suck it up and sail on.

By guarding ourselves this way, we settle for lesser forms of friendship. And the truth is we can’t be best friends with everybody. Our capacity for relationship has natural limits.

The level of friendly relationship with your regular bar-ista or bus driver, for example, is different from your potential for deep camaraderie with a boyhood buddy who attends your church. A Facebook “friend” can be anybody. A real friend is a man who gets where you’re coming from, and hangs with you through thick and thin.

Another natural limiting factor is time. While it’s generally true that so-called “quality time” requires at least some measure of “quantity time,” it is possible to cut through the clutter and connect without devoting a great deal of time to the relationship.

But that takes trust, which doesn’t come easy for many men. In his classic 1965 hit “I Am a Rock,” Paul Simon explores the theme of the loner who spurns friendship of any sort to protect his emotions – “And a rock feels no pain / And an island never cries.” His point is, of course, ironic.

Friendship is necessary, even though it creates op-
portunities for grief to take hold. Poet John Donne put it
eloquently when he wrote, “No man is an island entire
of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of
the main.”
Isolation can prevent certain types of hurts, but it cre-
ates larger problems. Our very DNA calls out for connec-
tion. We cannot go it alone. The possibility of pain that
any relationship produces is part of what it means to be
human.