During the period we are experiencing, dominated by the health emergency, we have been forced to sacrifice our most intimate relationships to safeguard everyone’s health.
In this way, we also took time away from our friends, despite their importance; overwhelmed by fear, we withdrew into ourselves; some found refuge on social media. Thus, we reinforced the image of human beings as individualistic, overlooking how important friendship is for each of us’s personal growth.
Friendship, in fact, consists in opening our hearts to those beside us and trusting them; it presupposes respect and is the most sincere feeling of love that can exist, the only one that expects nothing in return.
Jesus, too, had true friends by his side during his life. We can recall Lazarus, Martha, Mary, and the apostles. In his Gospel (11:1-44), John tells us how Jesus wept and was moved by the death of Lazarus, and about the miracle of his friend’s resurrection; he also reports Jesus’ beautiful speech to his apostles when he says: «I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything I have heard from my Father» (15:15).
Saint Augustine devotes some beautiful pages of the Confessions to the importance of friendship and how difficult it is to find a true friend and distinguish him from others. He soon discovers that there are two types of friendship: one selfish, which excludes God and seeks only personal fulfillment, and another whose ultimate object is God. In this kind of relationship, we shed our self-centeredness and love our friends in God.
In some passages from the Letters of Saint Francis de Sales, we rediscover that friendship means belonging to one another and that friendship is a gift from God. The Lord gives us a friend so that we may care for him, support him, allow ourselves to be helped, and establish a heart-to-heart dialogue with him.
Aware of the importance of friendship, let us not allow our society to drown in individualism; instead, let us help change it by facing life’s challenges with our hand clasped in that of a friend!
