Celebrations are important acts of community building and friendship sustaining. This weekend we celebrated the 50th birthday of a great friend we've known and journeyed with since 1978. A shared meal in a cool, place-to-go-to type restaurant in Aberdeen, a band that knows how to sing blues and soul, a brief but moving acknowledgement of the importance of friendship and family as the given context for our spiritual and human maturing, a huge birthday cake and a lot of long time friends in one place. While our newly turned 50 year old host spoke of people who had been an inspiration and support, the rest of us had our own thoughts of admiration, affection and gratitude for the capacity of people like himself, to live unselfishly, being there in the background or foreground as part of the peculiar and essential landscape of our lives.
We came away from Aberdeen aware of the need for a modern equivalent of 'blest be the tie that binds, our hearts in Christian love'. The sentiments of the old hymn are fine, they're just too sentimental for contemporary experience to feel comfortable with – I think. For some time now I've been impatient with the use of community at every turn as the term to be used for people gathering together, working together, living together, worshipping together. It's not the experience of togetherness I'm uncomfortable with – I suppose I'm looking for something that qualifies the kind of community, the nature of relationship, the basis of commitment. For myself, I am working with other words like friendship, hospitality, welcome, laughter, companionship, even partnership providing it's minus all commercial connotations.
Amongst the important tasks we undertake for our own good, paradoxically for the good of others also, is the careful maintenance and repair of friendships. An interesting piece of research, study and practice for a sabbatical – examine the fabric of our lives, and the friendships woven through it, and do the necessary restoration. There is considerable skill, and craft in such relational care, and friendship building. 'I no longer call you servants, but friends…..'. Few of Jesus apparently incidental comments are more revealing of what it meant for Jesus to embody and live out a full and true humanity – and to call the likes of the disciples, and us, his friends. In any audit, review or appraisal of my life and work – I'd want quality of friendship to come before most other things – including the friendship of God in Christ which For Christians is the energy source of that faithfulness, affection and trust which are integral to all other friendships.
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