During one of my first summers in Hawaii, I taught a course at church using Larry Crabb’s Soul Talk.  The basic premise of the book was that Christians should be able to communicate with one another in such a way that the Holy Spirit can bring real encouragement and even healing through how we listen and what we say.

I am convinced more now than then that Crabb was on to something.  Unfortunately, many Christians aren’t at a place where they can imagine such things as possible.  Our busyness is a big part of of our lack of imagination.  Our anemic language is another.  As I mentioned yesterday in the quote from Bonhoeffer, I can’t help but feel that the biblical story can help us move in a better direction.

In No Man is an Island, Thomas Merton attempts to articulate the struggle people might experience trying to live by the “supreme importance that we consent to live not for ourselves but for others.”  This is a struggle because

Man is divided against himself and against God by his own selfishness, which divides him against his brother.  This division cannot be healed by a love that places itself only on one side of the rift.  Love must reach over to both sides and draw them together.  We cannot love ourselves unless we love others, and we cannot love others unless we love ourselves.  But a selfish love of ourselves makes us incapable of loving others.  The difficulty of this commandment lies in the paradox that it would have us love ourselves unselfishly, because even our love for ourselves is something we owe to others.

And so what of love?  How do we learn to talk about love?  Merton speaks of love (charity) and friendship in a way that I think is illuminating.

Charity must teach us that friendship is a holy thing, and that it is neither charitable nor holy to base our friendship on falsehood.  We can be, in some sense, friends to all men because there is no man on earth with whom we do not have something in common.  But it would be false to treat too many men as intimate friends.  It is not possible to be intimate with more than very few, because there are only very few in the world with whom we have practically everything in common.

Many of us do not think of friendship as anything like something holy.  And while we might not be able to hold many close in the embrace of intimate friendship, there still is something to consider when it comes to how we relate to one another in the church.

There is, however, one universal basis for friendship with all men: we are all loved by God, and I should desire them all to love Him with all their power.  But the fact remains that I cannot, on this earth, enter deeply into the mystery of their love for Him and of His love for them.

Merton is, of course, writing from a monastic perspective.  From what I understand of such traditions, there is a sense of spiritual advocacy in how monastic orders view their work between God and the world.  Perhaps their particular stations help them be acutely aware of God’s love for His creation.

When all has been said, the truth remains that our destiny is to love one another as Christ has loved us.  Jesus had very few close friends when He was on earth, and yet He loved and loves all men and is, to every soul born into the world, that soul’s most intimate friend.  The lives of all the men we meet and know are woven into our destiny, together with the lives of many we shall never know on earth.  But certain ones, very few, are our close friends.  Because we have more in common with them, we are able to love them with a special selfless perfection, since we have more to share.  They are inseparable from our own destiny, and, therefore, our love for them is especially holy; it is a manifestation of God in our lives.

And so we must learn to live in the balance of those we love because they are like us (and like us, presumably) and those we may not know well but are loved by God regardless because they know the love of Christ.  Both are a kind of friendship; both are a kind of love.  And both have a precarious place in a society where marriage is seen as the ultimate sign of blissful maturity and where those outside of familial bonds are meant mostly to be used as receptacles for whatever message we are offering or as pawns for whatever task we might need done.

(image from amazon.com)