Home » Dorms » Women's Hall

The Fruitfulness of Friendship

Catching Up

Yesterday, I caught up with an old friend, someone I've known since I was in college, but haven't had much contact with since then. We sat at the local gelato shop, reminiscing and filling each other in on all that's transpired since we saw each other last.

It was so wonderful to see her — to devote two hours to doing nothing other than feeding our friendship. (Well, we were also devoted to feeding our bodies that yummy gelato!)

Sometimes, we make the mistake of undervaluing female friendships. We can get so fixated on getting a date, or finding a boyfriend, or getting married that we neglect our girl friends. (Occasionally we do worse than neglect them. In college, I single-handedly killed a friendship by going after a guy my friend had her eye on. What a stupid, short-sighted move! I traded what could have been a life-long friendship with a wonderful woman for three lousy dates with a guy whose last name I no longer remember.)

College is a terrific time for friendship. You may never again live in such close constant physical proximity to a group of women, and you may never again live in a community that is so seamless — where the people you work and study with are also the people you live and socialize with. Indeed, college is a great time for not only forming friendships, but for making good friendship habits. When you're older, it will be tempting to focus on work and family and forget about friends — the friendship habits you're learning now will stand you in good stead later.

Friendships during those college summers, though, can be a little tricky. Maybe you've just finished your freshman year, and you're home for a few months. You're suddenly separated from your New Best Friend, the woman you met on the first day of orientation, the gal you spent every waking hour with for the last two semesters: You're at home in Ohio, and she's off doing an internship in California. You miss her like mad!

And then there are your old friends — the high school friends. The fact is, you haven't really kept up with them, and you find that it takes a while for things to feel normal and natural between you. But you also find that the old adage is true: Make new friends, but keep the old; one is silver, and the other gold ….

Flight, Fight or Friendship

Philosophers and theologians have always devoted considerable attention to the topic of friendship (though until the seventeenth century, many of these philosophers defined friendship as something only men could engage in). Aristotle wrote that to experience the good life and happiness, we must share in the happiness of other people. If we want a life in which we flourish, says Aristotle, we must have friends — relationships not based on crass utility, but on common interest, affection, and, finally, commitment.

The rabbis of the Talmud saw friendship as a key part of faithful living. When reflecting on such figures as Honi Hamaagel, who wanted to die because he did not have a single friend, the rabbis declared "Either friendship or death." Christian thinkers, too, have stressed that friendship is part of Christian discipleship and Christian love. St. Ambrose, fourth century Bishop of Milan, encouraged Christians to devote themselves to their friends, saying that virtuous friendships are to be preferred over wealth or power.¹

In more recent years, scientists and social scientists have begun to study friendship — and, unlike those ancient philosophers, they are paying a lot of attention to friendship between women. Researchers at UCLA found that when women get stressed out, our brains produce a set of chemicals that push us to make and cement friendships with other women. This new research from UCLA suggests that, for women at least, the response to stress is not "fight or flight" but "flight, fight or friendship," and that women tend to go for option number three.²

UCLA's research results may explain why, if you're worried about an upcoming exam, you don't immediately head to your carrel to study alone; instead, you sit down with your girlfriend and a cup of chai latte.

A different study, this one from Harvard Medical School, found that women with more friends tended to age better — they were less likely to develop serious illnesses, and more likely to have a graceful decline.³

Sociologists and scholars of pedagogy have also studied women's friendships. Ana M. Martinez Aleman, an educational theorist who teaches at Boston College, noticed that her female students talked freely about all sorts of things — literature, philosophy, politics — in the hallways, but clammed up when they got into the classroom. To find out why, she conducted a study of 44 female sophomores, juniors and seniors, and found that for college women, friendships offer a respite from the stresses and strains of life, and a safe place for trying out new ideas.

Aleman found that it is actually in conversations with friends, and not in classroom dialogues, that college women feel most free to explore new ideas, to challenge and question, and to think through information so that they can finally claim it as their own.⁴ (You can tell that to your parents when they say they wish you'd spend less time socializing and more time studying!)

Persistence Pays Off

The Bible has a lot to say about friendship too — the Book of Proverbs contains such gems as "You use steel to sharpen steel, and one friend sharpens another" (27:17, The Message), and in the Gospel of John, Jesus tells His disciples that one must be willing to lay down one's life for one's friend. The story of Naomi and Ruth offers a model of devoted female friendship that inspires me daily.

One of the most perplexing, and yet illuminating, biblical passages about friendship is the parable found in Luke 11:5-10. Often, we rush straight to the last verse, and presume that this passage is only about the power of prayer, or the ways that Jesus will respond to our cries for help. And of course, it is that. But the passage is also about friendship.

Imagine yourself in this scenario: You've gotten into your jammies, brushed your teeth and gone to bed for the night. You're looking forward to a few minutes with your novel, and then it's off to the land of Nod … when a knock comes at the door. It's your friend Sheila.

"Could I come in and borrow some food?" Sheila asks. "My friend Martha has turned up out of the blue; she's been driving for 14 hours … and my cupboards are bare."

You call back that you've already gone to bed: Sheila will have to provision herself somewhere else. And yet, she is persistent, so finally you get up and give her a lasagna that's in your freezer — not, the text tells us, because you're a devoted friend, but because Shelia is persistent. So, "Ask, and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks, finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened" (vv. 9-10, NIV).

Commitment to Caring

What an interesting picture of friendship! On the one hand, this parable lays bare the limits of friendship — friendship wasn't enough to get you out of bed. (And to be honest, I've certainly ignored the phone, if not a knock at the door, when I've been in bed myself.) On the other hand, friendship is nonetheless the source of the story's movement.

It was friendship that drove Sheila to your house in the first place — another friend has turned up needing help, and she turned to her friend (you) to help her out. It is Sheila's friendship for Martha, and her trust in her friendship with you, that allows her to be so persistent.

What I like best about this parable is its honesty about the demands of friendship. Friendship is costly. In each of our friendships, we will be called outside of ourselves — called to get up in the middle of the night and lend aid, literally or metaphorically. Maybe we won't be called on to provide lasagna, but we will be called on, time and again, when our friends experience the dark night of the soul, when they need a listening ear, when they need to be propped up. Friendship feeds, nourishes and sustains us, but it also requires that we reach beyond ourselves.

Indeed, the longer I am a friend, the more I realize that friendships are not to be entered into lightly, because they will, eventually, require us to get up in the middle of the night; they will require us to reach beyond ourselves and put another's interests above our own, and that is not a commitment I want to make cavalierly.

When I look back at my own past friendships, I notice one consistent sin: I regularly imply a commitment to new friends, a commitment I'm not really ready to make. I meet a gal I really, really like, and I exude enthusiasm, and hang out with her a bunch, and then, when the friendship no longer feels exciting or new … I don't exactly drop her, but I do backpedal a bit. So, for me, learning to be a better friend means, in part, learning to be a slower friend, not rushing into a relationship, and establishing expectations that I ultimately cannot meet.

Finally, this parable teaches us that Jesus found, in ordinary human friendships, a helpful analogy for our relationship with God. Of course, the analogy is not perfect — God's friendship toward us is not limited, as any human friendship inevitably is. But the point stands: We can learn something about being in a relationship with God by being a friend, and we can learn a lot about being a friend by participating in friendship with God.

C O F F E E  S H O P

---

Do you think we need to be more intentional about maintaining our friendships?

Join the discussion!

Friendship is not simply part of what makes life enjoyable or fun; it is not simply a place to relax, and try out new ideas. Friendship is also a school where we learn, by extending ourselves to someone else, about God's embrace of us.