Dear friends,
Over the summer I have found myself reflecting on friendship and the difference between choosing friends and making friends. Choosing friends implies that we consciously or sub-consciously select those we’d prefer to spend time with, get to know, and be associated with. Making friends, we could say, is about the process of opening ourselves up to and getting to know another person, and does not necessarily imply any selection or choice. Often friends are given to us through the circumstances of life and while making friends can be easy and natural, sometimes it can be a real effort.
As a mother, but also as a daughter, I know how much parents can worry over their children and the friendships they make or do not make. When I was 9 years old my parents chose to send me to a Church of England middle school across the other side of Leeds on the grounds that it was one of the main feeder schools for the nearby C/E high school. They thought it would be easier for me to make new friends at 9 than at 13. I thoroughly enjoyed my middle school, but it so happened that my best friends all went to different high schools and I ended up making a whole new set of friends at 13 anyway.
It’s a year since we moved house and our boys moved school and, like most parents, I’ve worried a little over the choices we’ve made on our children’s behalf. We decided to choose the much closer and smaller village school on my patch, over the larger catchment C/E school. While the caring family feel at Melsonby Methodist School was evident from the start I did worry that there would be fewer friends to choose from, especially for Laurence, who would be the only child in Year 1. What I think we’ve witnessed is both boys taking a big leap forward in the skill of making friends. It is so interesting to hear them talk about playground games, some of which seem to involve the whole school, and I’ve noticed that they’ve also become better friends with each other. I also have every confidence that my boys’ experience of making friendships with children who aren’t necessarily the friends they’d gravitate towards at a larger school, will stand them in good stead for the transition to high school.
Interestingly, when I look back at my own life, one of the deepest friendships I ever made was with my room mate at university. I think we both put that we like singing and walking and getting up early in the morning on our ‘accommodation forms’, but there wasn’t much else for the university to go on. You really had to learn to get on with your room mate, but on the other hand a room mate was a friend truly given to you, and while some room swaps were made during the year, it’s amazing how many room mates did become the best of friends.
There is plenty of theology out there to help reflect upon friendship and the importance of making friends. Dietrich Bonheoffer (1906 – 1945) German pastor, theologian, and anti-Nazi dissident, had a particular approach to friendship which emphasises concrete, personal encounter with ‘the other’ in community. Loving our neighbours means entering into the life of the other and accepting some responsibility for the neighbour’s history. And God is met and heard in the real world where human, personal wills encounter one another and God’s presence renews the personal and corporate life of human sociality.
In his doctoral dissertation, Sanctorium Communio, completed in 1927, Bonhoeffer wrote how in Christ ‘God gives himself as an I, opening his heart’. In turn, the person in Christian community ‘no longer sees the other members of the community essentially as a claim, but as a gift, as a revelation of his love, that is, of God’s love, and of his heart, that is, of God’s heart.’
In Bonheoffer there is an openness which stands in contrast to closed friendships and closed societies, which seek only to preserve themselves, and are not open to possibility of truth beyond themselves. This openness should be characteristic of church life where all are welcomed and valued, and where we should expect to spend time with people very different from ourselves.
In our communities and world today we desperately need to learn to make friends with ‘the other’ and to make peace. Contemporary society is fraught with social and political mistrust, anxiety over rapidly changing demographics, and the social isolation of virtual relationship. We need to learn again to make friends with our neighbour.
As our children and young people start another year of school, college, or university, I cannot think of any better lesson to learn, than the lesson of making friends with those with whom we are given; those with whom we simply happen to share our street, our village, our town or student halls or flat.
God Bless
Camilla