An Invitation to Friendship
The Background to This Book: The Death of Susan
Susan and I had married right after college, in a traditional Episcopal Church ceremony of “holy matrimony,” promising therein to have and to hold in sickness and in health “till death us do part.” I had loved her from the first time I heard her talk, which was in a Bible study at the decidedly secular St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico. It was fifteen years into our marriage when her brain tumor was found. The medical professionals successfully treated it—first with surgery and then, when the biopsy showed that her astrocytoma had a mid-grade malignancy, with radiation and chemotherapy. Her cancer never returned. But the treatments weakened her brain in ways that, although slow to manifest themselves, proved inexorable. She needed more sleep; she lost the capacity to initiate tasks and carry them through; she grew quieter as she found it harder to locate the words she wanted to say. These were some of the manifestations of her brain disease, which, although it took nineteen years, in the end took her life.
I had longed for Susan to love me and for me to be able to love her. In giving her to me, God, true to his promise, had given me what I most desired. So does one read in, for instance, Psalm 37:4, “Take delight in the LORD, and he shall give you your heart’s desire.”1 Yet I believe it is necessary to say that God also took my heart’s desire away. I don’t mean that at a particular moment (a Monday in late Advent, about 9 a.m. eastern standard time) God looked down from his seat in a distant heavenly abode and said, “I’m going to take Susan away from Victor and bring her home to me.” Such a view of God is crude and nonsensical. God is not in any place. And he is not in time. Which is to say, he is not an actor within the universe. God is not like the president of the United States, who could indeed say that he is going to remove his ambassador from Austria and bring her home to Washington. He is not like the CEO of IBM, who could say that she is going to close down operations in Houston and lay off workers there and leave them to their own devices to find other jobs. (Dear readers in Houston, this is a hypothetical. I write these words having no idea whether IBM has ever had operations in your fair city.) And God is not like the head honcho of a smuggling operation, who could decide that a particular individual is no longer of use but unfortunately knows too much to remain at large and therefore must be terminated.
No, God did not take Susan away in a fashion comparable to any possible action of an in-the-world actor. Rather, it is as the one responsible for the world being a world in the first place that he took her away. The world that exists—the world that God is responsible for—is, as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s little prince learns, ephemeral. Its character is marked throughout by transience, by loss. Susan has died; the flowers of last Easter have withered; the ancient mountains have been covered by the sea; you, dear reader, will one day yourself die and fade away like the grass and be covered over by all that follows you. This is the world. This is all God’s work. For all this, both giving and taking, God is responsible. As Job perceived, “Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return thither: the LORD gave, and the LORD hath taken away” (1:21). Not as president, not as CEO, not as boss, but as the strange creator: God is responsible. It is that strangeness that drives Job to continue the verse saying, nevertheless, “Blessed be the name of the LORD.”
So I was married to my heart’s desire. As I begin writing this book some years after Susan’s death, I find that I am no longer sad about her dying, nor am I angry with God. I do not deny that sad-like feelings may surface when, for instance, I come across photos of her with me in the early days of our marriage. On my mother’s desk, I see one that makes me wistful: Susan looks up with beauty and intelligence; it is just past her twenty-fifth birthday; she is holding our firstborn child. I pause before such a picture and know what time and disease will do; I see promise that I know will not be fulfilled. But today there is something else to see, something far from wistfulness and regret, something more important. It is the love of God, right there in the picture. It simply is the case that everything God gives us is finite and just so will have an end. But that the gift has an end does not take away the fact that it was a gift and that it was good, which is why Job does not say only “The LORD gave, and the LORD hath taken away” but also “Blessed be the name of the LORD.”
A couple of years after Susan died, I happened to be on a retreat, compliments of the far-seeing people of the Church Pension Fund who seek to encourage clergy wellness. This clergy retreat had talks and exercises on finances and spiritual practices and physical and psychological health. It surrounded these talks with prayer. So there we were, one day, in a “healing Eucharist.” Now I hope, patient reader, that it won’t stop you from going on in this book to learn that I have voiced curmudgeonly views about prayers for healing being made part of the Eucharist. I do not like them. It seems to me that people often get in line for such prayers without any illness in particular that they wish to have God heal. It is sheer superstition (the curmudgeon says) to ask for the laying on of hands and anointing with oil for healing when one doesn’t have something in particular to ask for. (I also have doubts about being anointed on behalf of someone else—after all, you can’t be baptized for someone else, or receive Communion for someone else, or get married or ordained for someone else. But that’s another sermon for another day.) Too many people, this curmudgeon says judgmentally, get anointed in these healing services for fear that they might have some unknown illness. They fear that if they aren’t anointed, God will let the hypothetical illness get them. That is superstition.
So I am sitting there, judgmentally, indeed self-righteously (“God, I thank thee that I am not like these other people, who get anointed out of sheer superstition”), when it comes to me that I have never asked to be healed from Susan’s death.
Chastened, I get up and shuffle into line.
When my time comes, I tell the two people who are there to pray for me that (as they already know) my wife has died and (what they don’t know) I have never asked to be healed from that loss. They put their hands on me, and after a bit of silence, one of them begins. “Lord, we thank you that you have given Victor something that many people never get to experience.” The tears flow freely from my eyes, for instantly I interpret her as saying, “God gave you a long marriage, which many people desire but do not have”—and I get it.
I can see now that it is good to thank God for everything, including evils like disease. As the Book of Common Prayer has put it—in words that go back to 1549, words that Susan and I heard as we grew closer together, kneeling or standing side by side—“It is very meet, right, and our bounden duty, that we should at all times, and in all places, give thanks unto thee.”2 “At all times and in all places” includes the hospital bedside and the grave. But what I heard in that prayer for my healing did not have to do with Susan’s long illness or her more recent death. I heard thanks being given for the marriage itself. It was held out there for me to see as if for the first time: God’s great gift to me of Susan for thirty-four years. Many people yearn for marriage but never receive it or, being married, find it ends after a short time. That our marriage had come to an end did not cause it to cease being a true gift of God. Although God had taken Susan away, it was still true that he had given her to me in the first place—and for an amazing stretch of more than a third of a century.
In those days I was theologian-in-residence of Saint Thomas Church Fifth Avenue in New York City. Suddenly one summer our world-class organist, John Scott, died. We all felt he was too young to die; he was truly at the peak of his powers, renowned and loved especially by our congregation and the boys of our choir school. Yet now he was dead. At the end of his sermon at John’s funeral, Andrew Mead, the rector who had brought John to Saint Thomas, spoke aloud the question we are often afraid to voice: “You may have asked the Lord, ‘Why have you done this, taking John away like this?’ For me, it has helped to widen the question: ‘Lord, why did you give John to us in the first place; why was there a John Scott at all?’ This provides room for gratitude within our grief. For what a privilege it is to have heard, seen, and known John Scott!”
Every gift of God is a finite gift: to be this gift means that it has a shape and limits. That a gift has an end does not take away its goodness. A rose is no less beautiful because it will fade; the lovely skin of a baby is no less lovely to us who know of future acne, weathering, and scarring; a painting loses none of its interest even though it terminates at the frame. Indeed, it is built into the very idea of a material creation that it be finite. Any thing whatsoever is a this and not a that, here and not there; it exists at one time—and not at another.
I grieved Susan’s brain disease, her diminishments, and finally her death. Yet she would have died at some time nonetheless, for every human life is finite. And every marriage is finite. It begins with vows. It ends, as plainly stated in those very vows, in the death of one or the other spouse.
There is much more to be said about God’s character as one who gives and takes away, and I have tried to explore those depths in my earlier book Losing Susan. Here I have written these introductory words so that you will know that marriage forms the background of the book in your hands. The author before you was married and now he is not. These days he finds himself in wonderment over friendship, about what its shape is, what might be its limits. He wants to have friends, indeed good friends, and hopes that somehow God might be a friend also. And behind all this wondering, he has a wee bit of worry (as you will come to see) that perhaps marriage has been too much in the forefront of our churches’ thinking, that perhaps in the life of our churches we need to move marriage a bit to the background and try for a while to foreground friendship.
For there is a signal difference between marriage and friendship. Although marriage might be a kind of friendship or might have a partial overlap with friendship (we will need to explore this), nonetheless friendship is clearly a different thing. One needs only to note the irreducible fact that friendship has no vows term-limited by death.
Will You Come with Me?
This book, then, is not an academic treatise but a journey into friendship, a quest prompted by a question. I start with perplexity about what friendship is and a hunch that it is more important than anything else. I have also a sense that our culture has lost something, that there is a hole in our reality where friendship needs to be. In the presence of such perplexity, what shall we do? It won’t do to try to have friends if we don’t know what friends are or why we need them.
The way forward is, in part, the way back. I will go first to the ancients, some pre-Christian thinkers of the West. My approach to classic writings is to skip over middle management (e.g., commentators and textbooks) and go straight to the source.3 If you come with me, we will dig into a few key sections of Aristotle—whose teaching about friendship, although immeasurably influential, ends tragically. We will turn to a short Platonic dialogue that is generally thought to be unsuccessful but which, I believe, actually shows the achievement of the beginning of friendship. And we will enjoy Cicero’s elegant prose, even though he shares Aristotle’s tragic elements.
But we will do all this probing of ancient wisdom as people who bear the scriptural narrative. The Bible itself can be seen as a text that is a journey into friendship (it will keep appearing throughout the book in your hands). We also need to take account of Augustine, the first Christian who gives a theology of friendship, and Aquinas, who has some breathtaking things to say about it. A hero of our journey will be Aelred of Rievaulx, a monk of the twelfth century who despite having had little time to write manages to point out ways to solve the Aristotelian/Ciceronian conundrum—to turn tragedy into good news.
Once we come to see how supremely important friendship is for our flourishing as human beings—and its centrality to our salvation—then we will want to ask further questions about our culture, not only in critique but also with an eye to finding hints of ways to practice friendship anew. For although this book is a journey in thought, it has in the end existential urgency. We just won’t be able to be really human if we do not have real friends.