“True Friendship (only exists among good people) Nov. 6, 2022
Cicero, a Roman orator in the 1st century BCE, on friendship:
But I must at the very beginning lay down this principle - friendship can only exist between good men. I do not, however, press this too closely, like the philosophers who push their definitions to a superfluous accuracy. They have truth on their side, perhaps, but it is of no practical advantage. Those, I mean, who say that no one but the "wise" is "good." Granted, by all means. But the "wisdom" they mean is one to which no mortal ever yet attained. We must concern ourselves with the facts of everyday life as we find it - not imaginary and ideal perfections. . .
We mean then by the "good" those whose actions and lives leave no question as to their honor, purity, equity, and liberality; who are free from greed, lust, and violence; and who have the courage of their convictions. The men I have just named may serve as examples. Such men as these being generally accounted "good," let us agree to call them so, on the ground that to the best of human ability they follow nature as the most perfect guide to a good life. . .
Now friendship may be thus defined: a complete accord on all subjects human and divine, joined with mutual good will and affection. And with the exception of wisdom, I am inclined to think nothing better than this has been given to man by the immortal gods.
I have recently returned from a three week-long trip to Asia. It was a long-delayed journey that had been postponed until I could be away long enough to justify the amount to time that it takes to get there and back. I thought that I had timed the trip well but the one thing that I had not factored in was the monsoon season in Thailand.
We have all heard of monsoons but if you have never been in one, it is difficult to describe. The rain was coming in from Vietnam which was experiencing a hurricane and so, I’ll allow Forest Gump to description southeast Asian rain.
One day it started raining, and it didn't quit for four months. We been through every kind of rain there is. Little bitty stingin' rain, and big ol' fat rain, rain that flew in sideways, and sometimes rain even seemed to come straight up from underneath. Shoot, it even rained at night.
I had a good trip. I saw a lot and I learned a lot but what I saw more than anything else was the inside of my hotel room where I watched the Asian news in English where they talked incessantly about the rain and the flooding right where I happened to be. I didn’t have a computer, a book, or access to any programs in English other than the Asian news, so I had a lot of time to think.
Now that I am in this transition from my more than 40 year long career as a parish pastor, through this period of being part time and evolving towards being a fully retired minister, I spend a lot of time thinking about my life in the church. As with many other professions, there were high points and low spots. There were successes and accolades that I did not deserve, and there were heart-breaks and disappointments, most which, I also am convinced, that I did not deserve.
Captured by torrential rain and flooded streets in a small apartment in Phuket, I can say that I was haunted by ghosts . . . the memories of friendships that had failed . . . relationships with people I had once thought would last a lifetime, that were closer than blood kin, and more vital than even parents or siblings, but which, almost always with an element of shock and disbelief, came to an end.
I don’t say this to get sympathy because I know that everyone who has managed to live beyond middle school has experienced the broken heart of losing a close friend. But, I am speaking about friendship from my own perspective and, in my life as a minister, friendship has taken on some unique twists and turns. Also, all that time I had alone during the monsoon in Asia, it was my ghosts that haunted me, not yours. I just hope that my story has familiar touchstones for you.
My reflections included a lot of time going back to the decision I made when I was 21 years old, to go to seminary rather than law school. Back then I had a lot explanations that had to do with God’s call, and the greater good, but I realize now that I primarily did it because I wanted to be loved.
I have always believed that I had one of the less miserable childhoods of almost anyone I have known. I wasn’t molested and while my parents were not afraid of using corporal punishment, it wasn’t frequent and typically wasn’t much. But, it is true that in the 1940’s my parents had two children, that they meant to have, were happy to have, and, they were convinced, were all that they would have.
In the 1950’s, they had two more sons which they distinctly and obviously did not mean to have and that they did not want. I was the second of those two mishaps. Still, unlike so many of the people who have scheduled appointments to come talk to me through the years, my home was stable. There was no fighting, there were no loud arguments, no talk of divorce, there was no drinking or substance abuse, and we wore clean clothes, ate three meals a day, we were driven to school, and we were taken to the doctor when we were sick. And most of the people who have had reason to come talk to me about their family of origin could not say about their family what I just said about mine.
What was missing from my family home, at least from my end of the birth order, was any sign of affection, of approval, acceptance, or even anything that might have passed for either love or joy. It wasn’t a dysfunctional family. In fact, it was a family that was really really good at functioning. We had our assigned duties, and the house and lawn were kept with a kind of military precision.
The saving grace for me in that sterile environment was the fact that my family went to church. My mother was the church secretary, so I walked to church every day after school, and we were there for every Sunday morning, Sunday night, and Wednesday night service they ever dreamed of having. Being in church at least 6 days a week was not just my career, it was also my childhood.
Church had a lot more dimensions to it than my home did. The organist was an alcoholic, the choir director was a teacher with a taste for adolescent boys. There was the deacon who owned the dive-in theater that showed X-rated films, visible from just the right part of state highway 31. There was, for a time, the governor of Kentucky, and a few less honorable politicians, a few well known criminals, and no small amount of philandering.
I wasn’t aware of all of that when I was young but with each new revelation, church continued to be more interesting to me than almost anything else in my life.
Church was where we talked about important things. It was where we read books, we even, to a certain degree, experienced the arts, and it was in church that I heard the war in Vietnam condemned. It was in church that I heard a demand for the integration of our public schools, for decent working conditions and pay in our local factories, and even an absolute rejection of capital punishment.
Our pastor, Brother Duncan was a powerful, tall, lean, white-haired preacher, and as a child it seemed to me spoke with confidence as if God was whispering in his ear every time he stepped into the pulpit. As it turned out, it wasn’t always God that he was in conversation with. When he didn’t get satisfaction from the managers of the local sewing factory, he also called in his brother, who was a labor union organizer. And in that little town, they succeeded in unionizing the largest employer in the region. A nearly impossible though courageous accomplishment.
But that was southern Kentucky in the 1960’s, so the church fired Brother Duncan, and he got revenge by promptly dying of a heart attack; but not before he had planted a seed in my heart. The church, the town, my own parents had turned on him, but I knew something that they didn’t know . . . I knew that Brother Duncan was right. I didn’t know how to be loved, but I had a role model in how to be a prophet.
The church was always more of a family to me than my family was. They could be messy and cruel but there was love there, and honest debate, and when, at a very young age, I became a preacher, I was certainly challenged and criticized but I was also nurtured, encouraged, and loved and those were things I had never felt at home.
I was only 23 years old when I started writing opinion pieces for local newspaper, taking on a corrupt city government that was protecting bootlegging, prostitution, and drug sales in the black neighborhood of Russellville, KY. I put them out of business by getting that rural community to vote in legal liquor sales which closed down the bootleggers and their related illegal industries, increased the tax base which increased the size of the police force, and though I didn’t get fired, that started my long history of getting death threats and suffering humiliating attacks in the press. But I was probably the only 23-year-old preacher who got police protection every Sunday morning . . . which is not relevant to this story.
I had experienced an intensity of friendship in my college campus ministry. There were endless conversations, warm hugs, there was compassion, empathy, and opportunity to serve, to make mistakes, and to grow and mature. It was easy to fall in love and to get married too young in that environment, as many of us did, because that was a context in which we had found meaning and purpose for life, even if we had little appreciation for how brief that whole college experience would be.
In graduate school, I became aware of how I had been shaped by the emotional vacuum of my home. How I longed to turn my congregation into more than a mere faith community. I wanted it to be a loving family. I wanted friendships that became fraternal, life-long, loving, and joyful.
Cicero said more than 2000 years ago that real friendship was impossible except among truly good people, and as soon as he said that he began to back pedal, acknowledging that you couldn’t expect good people to be perfect people. He never really cleared it up but what he meant was something like “good-ish” people.
What I became aware of, over and over again, is that everyone is broken. There is hardly a person who is old enough to leave the backyard and who kept walking until the clothesline was no longer in sight, who didn’t have a few exposed nerves.
It is a lot easier for church members to make friendships and keep them because they don’t know all or even much about what each other really believes, whereas the minister is always holding the talking stick. My ex-wife liked to say, “You have no unpublished thoughts.” Some of my professors at Vanderbilt would occasionally say, “Now, you can’t say this in your churches, but….” And I would start to take notes furiously because whatever I was not supposed to revel from the pulpit was going to be my next sermon.
I think that the academics in schools like Vanderbilt assume that church folk really are more like sheep than they are thinking people. They assumed that church people couldn’t stand too much truth. I wanted to end the centuries of teaching successive generations myths that did not serve their real lives. I wanted to expose the lies and reveal the naked truth.
However, that impulse was in direct conflict with what I wanted the most: I wanted my congregation’s love and friendship more than a drowning victim wanted to breathe, but I never made it easy for them to do. It took me getting fired at the age of 50 to realize that you can get a congregation’s respect without getting their love and that virtually no church will love any minister who is not, first and foremost, a moderate who holds no strong opinions about anything of importance.
You add to the controversy that comes with trying to be a prophetic preacher, the secrets you learn when you are a parish pastor. I almost never had a church member who managed to stay in a friendship with me when I had been called into their most embarrassing life moments…. Sometimes I had to go break up domestic disputes.
I wrestled a pistol out of my best friend’s hand when I walked into a drunken family fight. She had shot at her out of control husband, and missed him, thankfully, but the bullet had gone through the wall into the nursery and had literally pierced the blanket in the crib covering their sleeping baby. We had been so close, but as happened hundreds of times after that, when you bail someone out of jail, or have someone arrested, when you know about the affairs, the crimes, the addictions, well, most people don’t have what it takes to face their shadows and still be friends with the people who have seen them in their worst moments.
Real friendship can only take place among good people . . . not perfect people, but good-ish people . . . people who have the character to be known for both their good attributes and their brokenness, and to still love the people who have seen both sides of who they are.
These are the ghosts that visited me when the streets of Phuket were three feet deep in flood waters, and I had a few days of isolation to remember where all of the scars on my heart had come from. And I still feel grief about every friendship that ended that might have been saved if we had been smart enough, disciplined enough, good enough to rise above the pain of conflict or humiliation.
I have already talked to long to give the friendship of Jesus and Judas the time and energy it deserves so I am going to distill it down to a nutshell: Judas was not a real person. Judas is a literary invention, what we call an interlocular. Judas isn’t one person, but Mark invented him as a literary representative of a lot of people, it is no accident that “Judas” sounds like “Judah.” Mark distilled all of the betrayal, all of the falsehood, all of the pain and broken relationships that led up to the crucifixion of Jesus and put it into one character in a brilliantly described passion narrative. If it makes you mad to hear me say that Judas wasn’t a real person so matter-of-factly, write to me ask me to prove it and maybe I will do that in April around Easter.
We don’t have a lot of historical evidence to go on but my best account of the actual death of Jesus of Nazareth is that we was crucified by the Roman government along with other Jewish trouble makers, under a charge of insurrection following a riot he started in the Temple’s outer court.
This probably happened during the Jewish harvest festival, Sukkot, in the fall. But, so far as we know, the first gospel writer, Mark, takes tremendous liberties with history to give us a passion narrative that, in spite of his bad grammar, gives us one of the most brilliant narratives in all of literature.
Mark is, on one level, trying to answer one of the first and biggest problems with the Christian story: if Jesus was God’s chosen one, how did he get killed? And the answer couldn’t be simply that the powerful Roman government plucked him out of a band of rioters and executed him. Mark tells the story of the death of Jesus as an archetypal narrative of betrayal . . . symbolically, at least, a betrayal by everyone; his family, his closest disciples, and all of his Judean people, but Mark pulls it down into a few characters . . . a governor, a high priest, his friend Peter, but mostly, it was interlocular, the symbolic character of Judas.
Judas was portrayed as the most trusted friend. Judas carried the money bag, he was the one trusted with their resources. He is said to have always been seated next to Jesus. In fact, he was the kind of friend who could walk up to Jesus in a crowd and just greet him with a kiss. It was that person, that beloved friend, who could bring about the death of God’s very own son.
William Shakespeare is obviously borrowing from Mark’s passion narrative in the way that he describes the death of Julius Caesar. We know from history that Caesar was stabbed by a group of Roman senators who were, in part, organized by Marcus Brutus, but Shakespeare makes it very personal.
He describes Caesar being surrounded by his assassins and one by one they stab him, and Caesar turns to see with each blow who is holding the dagger. Finally, he is stabbed by Brutus, and Shakespeare says that Caesar looked at his friend and said, “Et tu, Brute? Then die Caesar.” Suggesting that the mighty Roman dictator could not survive the betrayal of his close friend.
Medically speaking, someone is likely to die from being stabbed more than 20 times, but that is an irrelevant biological observation because when you have been betrayed by a friend, when your heart is broken by the loss of a close friendship, it feels like you have been stabbed in the heart.
Cicero was critical of the sophists of his day who warned people to avoid making close friends. They seemed to suggest that you should be “friendly” with people who can benefit you in some way, but avoid actually loving someone because they will inevitably hurt you.
Love is dangerous that way and Cicero didn’t disagree, but in spite of the risk, you should still allow yourself to love a good person, if only we could figure out who really is good . . . or at least, good-ish. I’m a fairly clever boy with more than a little training in psychology, and I have been wrong a hundred times more often than I have been right. Admittedly, the unique nature of my work, and undoubtably, the way that I have done it, makes it hard to be a good friend to me, but still, love is worth the risk.
If you don’t want to be a sophist in the way that Cicero describes them, you can’t just use people and discard them when they are no longer useful or when the friendship asks a bit too much of you, but I bet that both Freud and Nostradamus had less than a 500 batting average when it came to picking the people who were actually good enough to be a trustworthy friend.
I’ve taken thirty minutes of your time to get to this point. Friendships can be and most often are, dangerous or at least disappointing, the worst one’s can kill you and at best, most of them will disappoint you, and yet they are still worth the risk and possibly even necessary to life and they are necessary to the success of families, companies, churches, armies, and nations but no one can consistently tell in advance who has the character to hold up their end of the bargain.
Still, there is this one important thing that you can do. You can be good enough to be worthy of friendship yourself. You can choose to never stab a friend in the back, to never betray them with a kiss. You can choose to never abandon a friend in their darkest hour. And I would like to add even this . . . do not assume that friendships are in endless supply. Do not lose a friend through neglect, absence, forgetfulness, or by taking them for granted.
My very own “ides of March” actually took place in July of 2007 when I was fired from my church position in a coup that was, largely organized by false friends. I withdrew, hard. For a time, I cut myself off from everyone. I remember even saying to my daughter that I hoped that I would never be dumb enough to ever trust another person.
Slowly, I recovered enough to try again but, admittedly, not without a lot of caution and no small amount of sophistry. I gave almost all of my energy to starting our progressive church and rarely had a minute for anyone who wasn’t a part of that project. I starved a lot of friendships through neglect while being so focused on our church. Only in the past year, as I have begun to step back from full-time ministry, have I made space to just be a friend to some people who couldn’t care less what I do in my professional life.
I have even been able to resume some vital relationships with people I was once close to but who I simply didn’t bother to be in contact with for 15 years. It started by just playing a game of racquetball and in a very few weeks we were both kicking ourselves for having let so many years pass without contact. We have become again what we were to one another years ago, one another’s closest confidants and most trusted friends.
There have been so many times in those 15 years when I felt so isolated, so all alone in the world, when I didn’t need to. Not all the ghosts of my past haunt me. Some of them, given a little time and effort, have turned out to be saints.
People now, in this messed up time in history, have fewer friends, less contact with family, and we have more addiction, depression and suicide. I don’t have all of the answers for a world that seems to be falling apart but I have one answer that I know makes a big difference . . . be a friend, treasure your friends, invest time and energy in your friendships.
Give up your anger, set your resentments aside, stop fantasizing about revenge, and focus on being a good person who is worthy of trust and friendship, and you can be a part of the healing of the world.
Some of you will have to start by just trying to be good-ish, but, please, do your best.
