Surviving friendship's winters

(first published July 30, 2009 in Cebu Daily News Life!)

“Friends are like wine: the older, the better,” says an oft-quoted proverb, laying a firm foundation to build on for classical writers on the subject of friendship, like the Englishman Aelred of Rievaulx. He bade readers to be wary of too quickly welcoming a new acquaintance into their confidence, lest that person turn out to be no more than a mercenary seeking the pleasures and conveniences but not the essence of friendship, which is that of a man’s joyful and unconditional gift of self to his friend, and which often goes hand in hand with the joyful sacrifice of his own pleasures and conveniences.

One can hardly disagree. Friendship takes time spent on shared noble and meaningful, exhilarating, challenging, or tear-jerking experiences to grow. The deeper and more frequent the experiences friends have in time, the more their friendship grows, until Love should judge it worthy of perfection amid eternity, which is time and space freed by unadulterated Faith from the clutches of decay and the limits of distance, and mingled by Hope with forever that rejuvenates.

What does one make then, in this life, of the wintrier seasons of friendship? What to do when a bosom friend moves with his family to a new home, when a high school friend has to study at a different college or university, when a college friend finds work in a faraway country or within an extremely hectic industry? Does one let friendship wane with the dying years and be enclosed by separate spaces?

Easy answers might not be available. Lifestyle gurus can, without second thoughts, rattle off a list of ways to keep rekindling the fire of the love that binds friends, but more than these, friendship’s winters also call a person to wear warm coats of understanding for his friend, the better to shield him from the chill winds of resentment when the recommendations of the gurus have been exhausted and prove futile.

Do your handwritten letters and electronic messages to your friends elicit no response? Do your phone calls to them remain unreturned? Do your scheduled trips or meetings with them get cancelled or indefinitely postponed? Be grateful. The situation invites you to grow in patience and be imaginative in thinking of the many possible reasons for any of your friends’ apparent (and perhaps strictly apparent) failure to communicate. It invites you to the humility of learning that you alone cannot be the fulfilment of any person’s existence but that you have been privileged to be appointed by Love to be part of the circle of significant people around your friend.

Further, the situation invites you to examine if you have done anything to offend your friend. Was it something you thought, said, did, or did not do? Promptly apologize and make amends. If your conscience finds you innocent of any misdeed, rejoice, not because you perceive yourself the pious victim of an unjust punishment but because what suffering you may be experiencing on account of his silence purifies your love for your friend: your love has become persevering in the face of apparent—not necessarily wilful—apathy, and is in its perseverance paying the price for the times when you have been unconsciously unloving towards your friend.

It also helps if you think of it this way: The season of friendship’s silence is also the season of sharing your friend with more people. How selfish of me if I alone should experience my friend’s greatness all the time. I should instead let my life without her or him be a transmission of the goodness I have received from my friend, brightening the dark corners of the world I find myself in, and being the better person I have become because of my friend to many more who are in search of true friendship. I should believe in the power of my prayers and hopes to keep me connected at heart with the one who is nowhere near me yet.

All these cannot be without some struggle with oneself. But one can always choose to struggle, for the love of one’s friend, with an attitude of hope, extreme and realistic as in Ron Atchison’s poem:

“We will meet again my friend, / A hundred years from today / Far away from where we lived /And where we used to play. / We will know each others' eyes / And wonder where we met /Your laugh will sound familiar / Your heart, I won't forget. / We will meet, I'm sure of this, / But let's not wait till then… /Let's take a walk beneath the stars / And share this world again.”