Friends and Friendship

Much to the surprise of everyone who knows me well, I finally joined Facebook. I will never have as many “friends” as my much more sociable wife and son. Yet I am amazed and delighted by the invitations I have received so far, from people known and unknown. For the latter, I wish there were a category called “acquaintances,” but can you imagine the social consternation that could be caused by putting someone in that category?

Last Monday was the feast day of Aelred of Rievaulx, a twelfth-century Cistercian monk and the author of “Spiritual Friendship,” among other things. It’s a wonderful short work, an easy and appropriate read for someone who just joined Facebook. Aelred models it on Cicero’s essay on the same subject, something I never got to in high school Latin. Yet Aelred goes beyond Cicero, for he believes that Christ is always the foundation of true friendship – it ought to “begin in Christ, continue in Christ, and be perfected in Christ.”

True friendship certainly is God-given, “a stage toward the love and knowledge of God.” Aelred’s four qualities of a friend ring true: loyalty, right intention, discretion, and patience. Blessed are we when we have friends like that. These are not the “friends” of Facebook; a computer-mediated means of communication cannot long fill the need for human-to-human interactions that are programmed into us. Yet Facebook provides one more way of continuing the connection when we are distant from one another. For that I am grateful, even if my private self is still not sure about all this exposure!