On Friendship

Ode to Declarations

It was my friend Michelle who was the first to make one. I had paid her a visit but then realized I’d stayed too long and made a hasty exit. “Bye,” she called after me. “Love you!”

It was a truncated version of the Three Little Words that strike delight to one’s inmost heart.

Why is this so rare? We worry, perhaps, that a declaration is a promise that we can’t keep. Or we’re afraid that our friend will take it wrong and infer a romantic attachment.

That’s tricky, but you’re just going to have to risk it. Friendship is a love relationship, and any love worth having is worth declaring. Tacit understanding is for the birds.

There is an art to all this — it takes practice. I personally like to experiment. I go around, eavesdropping and gathering good material, and filing it away to use later, to tack onto the ends of phone calls or goodbyes after coffee.

There’s a progression of skill. Starter declarations are basic affirmations or statements of admiration: “That was brave” or “Your comments were great.”

Mid-level declarations get more particular and personal: “Your call meant a lot to me” or “I like your face.”

“I love you” is black diamond territory. It can be intensely, uncomfortably serious, or impishly ephemeral, leaving you to wonder if you really heard what you think you heard.

If it must be indirect, so be it, like when my husband was traveling with his friend Michael, who is even taller than he is and was asked by the flight attendant if he wanted to change seats for more leg room. “No way!” Michael responded. “I want to sit next to my best friend.”

But direct declarations are the ones that change your life. At a New Year’s party, I turned the corner and found my friend Nathan bouncing his newborn against his chest. “Wendy,” he said as he made a playful genuflection, a cross between a formal bow and a namaste salute, “I want to tell you how unexpected and delightful our friendship has been to me. It has been one of the best parts of my year.” Listening, I felt joy’s slow burn.

Nathan is acquainted with grief, and this makes him especially brazen. He has no patience for leaving important things unsaid. Our souls, he knows, are unmoored till the “gossamer thread we fling catch somewhere.” Declarations anchor us in love’s web. So, enlist, gloat, and preen exultingly — look ‘em in the eye and tell your friend how you feel.

Then report back. I can always use some new lines.

Ode to Greetings

One Thanksgiving, I answered the door to find my friends Joel and Julia beaming on my porch. I held my arms out to hug Julia, then turned to Joel, whom I had never hugged before. I took a gamble. “Can I give you a hug?” I asked. He leaned down, and we embraced.

“Thank you for participating in the consent culture,” he said. I smiled, pleased that my gamble had paid off without too much loss of face.

Really, we have made our greetings more difficult than they need to be. Hug or handshake? Or a post-pandemic bump of fists, or worse, elbows?

Handshakes are comparatively straightforward, but they also call to mind your dad’s speeches about your handshake making or breaking any job prospect that came your way. And how every man who you shook hands with in your 20s felt the need to offer evaluative comments on your grip – so firm and strong for such little fingers!

Hugs bring up another issue: How much bosom are we willing to involve?

If only we could faire la bise like Chileans or the French, making kissing sounds while brushing cheeks. It is warm and personal but also clearly bounded. You don’t actually put your lips on their cheek, and you don’t linger. The intimacy is mitigated by the brevity and the promiscuity – you do it with everyone.

Some people promote the “side hug” as a chaste alternative to a full-frontal hug. But this is specious because most hugs lack the requisite surface-area contact to even qualify as full-frontal.

Watch one sometime. Two friends lean in and lightly touch shoulders with a momentary press-and-release to their friend’s upper back. There is minimal chest and even less if you go for the bro-y handshake-to-one-shouldered-clasp-conversion, which I personally find is the perfect expression of self-conscious, playful affection. It gives me a taste of what it might be like to meet a long-lost frat brother unexpectedly on the back nine.

Side hugs are feeble squeezes of sidling regard. I would much prefer a handshake, but only if its offered with same fond ebullience with which John Jarndyce welcomes his guest in Bleak House: “Rick, I have a hand at liberty. A word in earnest is as good as a speech. I am heartily glad to see you.”

Dickens doesn’t say so in the text, but Jarndyce probably immediately pulled Rick in for that one-shouldered-clasp-conversion I was talking about. He seemed like a gambler to me.

Ode to Little Friendships

You can be best friends, for a few minutes at least, with almost anyone.

This happened for me recently at Win-Mart. Not the 6^th Ave Win-Mart where the North Enders sidle in, thinking they want to try frugal but really want to be teleported back to Met Market for heirloom beets and pay with credit card.

No, my best friend worked at the South 72^nd Street Win-Mart, where a guy with a cardboard “Anything helps” sign helps you remember where to turn. It has a blinking blue camera on a tall pole and a security guard leaning against the entrance with hooded eyes.

The beauty of little friendships is that you don’t need much to get started. Ours started with mushrooms. The clerk pulled my produce bag full of them across the scanner. “Cremini,” she muttered to herself as she drew her finger down the barcode list.

“I think those are portobello,” I ventured. You don’t want to come across too strong in your new little friendship.

“Okay,” she said. “I need my glasses.” She rifled through the papers on the tiny ledge next to the register. She patted down her pockets, then stepped back to her jacket on a hook and patted that down. Finally, she found them.

“This is my life now,” she said with mock exasperation, “Searching for my glasses.” She put them on.

“That’s annoying,” I smiled at her.

“I know,” she said, “I just had an eye appointment yesterday.” She pulled a bunch more items across the scanner.

“Have you been to the 6^th Ave Win-Mart?” I asked.

“Yeah,” she said, “I was supposed to move over there, but I like this store. There’s always something going on over here, all kinds of people come in. It gives me something to do; I like to stay busy.”

“This is my favorite store, too,” I said. We were establishing common ground.

“Plus I get to pray for people that I wouldn’t normally pray for,” she added.

“That’s a cool ministry,” I said. I blinked back sudden tears.

I was silent for a minute then waved toward to my daughter, who was putting our groceries into bags, and commented, “Isn’t my girl a good bagger?”

“Yes,” she said, “yes, she is, and she’s beautiful too; she your only one?

“I have another girl and a boy,” I said. I reached for the receipt.

“You have a blessed day,” she said.

Friendship exists through mutual goodwill, established by humane self-revelation and empathetic acceptance. It can be big or little, long- or short-lived.

You might think that you don’t want to be friends with the Win-Mart checkout lady. But you don’t have enough information to determine that. You don’t know. She might be an angel that you entertain unawares, sent from God with a message for your heart, like mine was.

Ode to Neediness

“Give others the gift of your need,” a missionary once told me. He was talking about fundraising and so much more.

Humans are contingent beings. We have constant needs that must be supplied by Something Else, or rather, Someone Else. Neediness defines our common humanity.

Babies are the neediest mammalian young in the world at birth and the neediest for longest. The whole point of human infancy is to create love through met needs. Neediness is the mark of our supreme dignity and value.

Somehow, though, “needy” has become a pejorative term. We don’t like to be needy of others or for others to be needy of us. Even my best friend, Annie, with whom I am often quite needy, argues with me.

“You’re not needy, Wendy,” she says. “You’re a badass who gets beat up and needs help getting up off the floor.”

Exactly: needs.

Expressing neediness, or “being vulnerable” as it is more popularly known, is not a sign of weakness, but an accurate appraisal of reality. Even in the best of health and at the height of our powers, we all are susceptible to illness, injury, grief, and death at any time.

I like being needy. Neediness and love go hand in hand, and I like love.

Maybe it’s just that we don’t have good models for telling our friends that we need them. But it doesn’t have to be complicated, just honest about ways that we make mistakes or experience loss.

“I need some encouragement” might just be the best way to share neediness. It is just the right level of neediness — you’re trying to be responsible and stand for goodness and light, but it is painful, and you just need someone whose opinion you trust and who has a soft spot for you to tell you that you are doing a good job.

Learning to be needy with your friends is kind of like learning to spit. To get there, you have to be willing to practice and possibly to get spittle on your shirt and stringing down your chin and to wipe it off with the back of your hand. It can be gross and look silly, but runners who ignore their need to spit are not serious.

Friends who ignore their need to be needy are not serious. It is stingy. Through it, we can invite our friends to be human and needy with us, and that is the best gift of all.

Ode to Jealousy

I have a bone to pick with C. S. “Four Loves” Lewis, who wants to tell us that personal attraction is for romantic love only and not for friendship. “Lovers gaze at each other” he says piously, but friends gaze beside, and thus, friendship is the “least jealous of all the loves.”

C. S. Lewis is practically a patron saint at my alma mater — they even have the Wardrobe in their reliquary — so I’m probably being disloyal when I say that Lewis’s chapter on friendship is pretty patronizing and makes me want to take him down a few notches, starting with that eros–phileo-gaze distinction.

People who gaze beside each other certainly share the same space and are interested in the same things, but they’re not friends. Hobbyists, yes; friends, no.

Friends do plenty of gazing at each other. What’s more, they like what they see and wish to see more. Friends find the motive for friendship in each other.

This is where the jealousy thing gets tricky. We usually reserve jealousy for situations when someone who is “ours” might be stolen. Friends — co-equal, free — do not own each other.

Friends do belong to each other in a real way, though, in the way they generously respond to each other through time. That accustomed pattern of attention becomes a thing unto itself. It’s worth being jealous over.

My friend Michelle returned from a retreat once and told me, “You would have loved it! I can’t wait to tell you.” Her words were sweet, but there was a snick of jealousy too. She had gone on spiritual retreat without me and with a bunch of strangers instead — I didn’t like that.

It’s possible that my jealousy was inappropriate. But it was also very useful, prophetic even, because it told me who I’m meant to be to my friend. I don’t give a rip if Michelle hangs out with cooler people than me, going on vacation with her best friends from high school until the cows come home. I’m not jealous about that. (Except I am better at Boggle than any of them and can give her a proper run for her money.)

No, I was jealous of that chance to watch and listen with her, to witness the Holy Spirit unfolding a specific purpose for her life and character.

Jealousy is not a destination. It is important to visit occasionally, though, because it gives you the lay of the land, the raison d’etre of your friendship and why it’s worth cherishing.

Sam Gamgee from Tolkien is the best friend portrayed in fiction and definitely the most jealous. Sam’s jealousy is inseparable from his unique purpose in Frodo’s mission. I wonder if Tolkien quarreled with Lewis over this while kicking back at Inkling meetings at the ol’ Eagle and Child. Maybe took him down a few notches. I would have liked to be there.

Ode to Goodbyes

Jane Eyre, fiction’s premier wounded healer and friend, knows all sorts of things. “How do people perform that ceremony of parting, Jane?” Mr. Rochester asks, “Teach me; I’m not quite up to it.”

“They say, ‘Farewell,’ or any other form they prefer,” Jane instructs.

Sure, fare-ye-well to most of our friends is fine. “Que te vaya bien,” Latin Americans say. May it go well with you.

Off you go.

But for our best friends, the friends of our lives, the ones who have made us laugh in the face of despair, the ones who have spoken prophetic truth to our yearning hearts, is this really enough? “It seems stingy, to my notions, and dry, and unfriendly,” Mr. Rochester protests. “I should like something else.”

What he’s talking about of course is how to get through a parting without keeling over from the burden of knowing that it might be permanent. “Let us learn to hold loosely our dearest friends,” the British preacher Charles Spurgeon said. “Let us love them, but let us always learn to love them as dying things.”

You can’t take leave of your friends saying some version of, “You might die before I see you again, and I might not get another chance to tell you what you mean to me.” That’s morbid.

But it’s also true.

“It is enough, sir,” Jane assures, “as much good-will may be conveyed in one hearty word as in many.”

It’s cute, but not necessarily helpful, to mention that etymologically, “good-bye” is short for “God be with ye,” and commits your friend to the care of the God of the universe, Father of lights, source of good and perfect gifts. “Good-bye” has ultimacy.

The problem is that friends do not often get a chance to say their final goodbyes. Death takes us unawares, or we are not invited to the deathbed. This is a classic friendship problem. King David’s grief over Jonathan’s death was solitary, unsanctioned. Eberhard Bethge complained about not getting to see Bonhoeffer’s letters, let alone permission to visit to say his last goodbye: “Friendship — no matter how all-embracing it may be,” he mourned, “has no necessitas.”

We don’t like it, but our one hearty word must be enough, even when it might be a parting for years or for life. My favorite tack is to run full-tilt through the conversation and at a more or less decent juncture, abruptly say, “Okay, bye.” The abruptness is an acknowledgement, a promise even, that our companionship continues even though we part for the time being. Our communion endures forever because our friend, the Lord Jesus, is King.

But if the press of affection and mortality is especially strong, adding, “Love you” is perfectly okay too.

Ode to What a Friend We Have in Jesus

‘Smarmy’ is the word that comes to mind when I hear this hymn. It’s a mite too saccharine and tidy a description of what kind of friend we have in Jesus.

Because my friend Jesus is hard to pin down. He always has been. He is tough with his best friends, who love him and who stick with him through thick and thin. He has a soft spot for people who aren’t lovable at all. He speaks in riddles, and in my experience, he doesn’t bear griefs and sorrows in a very helpful way. “What is that to you?” he tells Peter. “You follow me.”

The gospel writers left out whether Jesus hugged. He does kiss and is kissed in the manner of Jewish men, but also alarmingly by women, foreigners, and enemies. He greets people in intimate ways, spitting and rubbing mud on a man’s eyes, calling Peter out onto the water — did they hold hands? I bet they did. He lets his friends embrace him but warns them also, “don’t try to hold onto me.” Not a side hugger, my Jesus — he doesn’t do things by halves.

Jesus does not beat around the bush when it comes to telling people he loves them. They declare it right back. I love how John constantly says that he is the “disciple that Jesus loves” — so arrogant! John makes Jesus’ declarations a matter for boasting.

Jesus jealously pursues but also lets his friends go. He guards and nurtures their affections; he rebukes them when they do not “get” him or fulfill their appointed kingdom role. “Martha, Martha,” he says, surely a bolt of lightning to her heart.

Jesus invites his disciples’ neediness, condones it, and answers it, but not always in the way that they want. That’s the problem with being friends with a prophet; he responds with God’s purposes in mind, not yours. Jesus is needy back, though. “Watch and pray,” he pleads — I’m suffering; I need some encouragement. He shares his little lonelinesses openly, precursors to the Great Loneliness of the cross.

Jesus is a master of little friendships. They often develop into big change-your-life loyalties. He chats with the woman at the well. He casually remarks on Nathanael’s stay under the fig tree. He calls out to a tree-climbing tax collector and invites himself over for dinner – Zacchaeus’s new best friend. He reveals important, vulnerable things to mere acquaintances, and lends them his careful, compassionate attention, almost like he knows them already.

And what can be said about Jesus’ goodbyes? One goodbye is a tender, fierce, four-chapters-long speech — a toast to end all toasts. Others are abrupt vanishings and strange forebodings, words hanging in mid-air.

Okay, bye.

I love you.