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Friendship With Benefits
August 27, 2006

Reading  by Joan Chittister

“No one is indispensable” we say so flippantly, so unfeelingly…….but there is one thing that renders all of us, any of us, indispensable. As long as there is someone, somewhere whose life breathes in time with my own, I know down deep that I am indeed needed, that I have no right to die. I know that I am truly indispensable, irreplaceable, vital to a life beyond my own. To that person I am indispensable….Our friends depend on us…to have a friend is to acknowledge that some part of someone else’s life which we have held tenderly, trustingly in our own hands might well die with us…What if anything does friendship have to do with living life forever on the brink of becoming?...The short answer is Everything…the long answer comes in the slowly dawning awareness that once we are loved we have an obligation to live as best we can… 

Gigi was an extraordinary woman in her eighties that I got to know when I was the intern minister at our congregation in Hastings, New York. She was a Holocaust survivor, who had just been told that her cancer had returned and that although there were pain medications, there was no cure. She worked hard to fight through her treatments, yet when it became clear that they weren’t working, she bravely terminated them. “I want to live”, she would tell me, “if I can live well. Otherwise, I am prepared to die.” 

Her interest in people was difficult to resist; even though I was supposed to be her minister, she kept track of me: wondering about my time at the society, my upcoming ordination, my children, my travel. She would say, “We are friends, yes?” Up until the very end, she insisted on serving me tea and Entemann’s crumble cake at each visit. I would have to remind both of us that we were supposed to be talking about her. One of my favorite memories is right before I left for a business trip to Cuba, in the parking lot, this eighty year old woman said to me, “have a cuba libre for me and I understand that Cuban men are very handsome and good to flirt with!” 

She asked that I co-officiate with David Bryce at her funeral. After the family had spoken, we asked the people gathered if they would like to offer remarks. One woman stood. I’ll never forget what she said. “Gigi,” she said, “was my best friend.” She paused and looked around.  “Now, I know some of you don’t even know who I am…and some of you were closer to her than I was…but really, she was my best friend. I have never ever met someone who knew how to be a friend better than she did.” (SPACE) People around the room nodded, they knew that she was right.  Gigi had been their best friend too. In the book of Isaiah, God says of the eunuchs, the sexual minority of their time, “I will give you an everlasting name.” I thought to myself “best friend” is an everlasting name to strive for.   

Friendship is very important to me. One day, I was taking one of our tried for regular walks with my friend Ledell, who I have known since high school. I had had to fill out a form that day which asked about my hobbies. I told her that besides for trying to get to the gym and the Sunday New York Times cross word puzzle, I didn’t really have any hobbies. She said to me, “Yes, you do, Debra. Your friends are your hobbies.” And it some ways it’s true…after my children and my husband, after my work, I probably spend more time and effort cultivating my friendships than anything else in my life. I have a sign in my office that says “the greatest flowers in the garden of my life are my friends.”   

I have all sorts of friendships. I have friends I speak to or email almost every day; I have friends I see once a year but when we get together it feels like we pick up where we left off. I have friends from high school, from college, from my professional days in sexology, friends who live within a few blocks and friends who live across the country.        

Now, I’m not talking about acquaintances or playmates or contacts or colleagues…I’m talking about people who are truly “friends” – the people we share ourselves and our lives with – the people in Fredrich Buechner’s words, we choose to “make part of our lives just because we feel like it.” I flinch when someone say’s “we were only friends” meaning “we are merely friends.”  To me, that denigrates how important real friends are in our lives. Proverbs in the Hebrew Bible differentiates true friends this way: “some friends play at friendship but a true friend sticks closer than our nearest kin.” I think of my friends as the “chosen family of my heart”. We are friends not because of circumstance or the accidents of birth, but because we choose each other to be part of our lives. 

Men and women often have different types of friends. Men are more likely to have friends they do activities with, or friends at work, or friends of convenience. Some of the women here may have had this experience. You have a couple friend, and your husband and the other husband go out to play golf, tennis, fish, some activity. Your friend has confided in you that they are having trouble in their marriage. Your husband comes home and you ask, “So what did you and Dan talk about?” Your husband says, “Not much…we just golfed, fished, played tennis, etc..” You persist, “But did he tell you their having problems”…He looks at you amazed, “They’re having problems? Nope, didn’t come up.” Men much more likely to say that their wives are their best friends, and report that there are fewer than two people they view as confidents. I have met only a few women who consider their husbands their best friends, and in studies, women report three times more close friends than men do.

One of the things we don’t talk about much here is that many of us have made our closest friends here in this community. How many of you have at least one close friend who you met here at the Unitarian Church in Westport? Many of you are members of official small group ministries, but I also know that there are many unofficial small groups in our church, many chosen families of the heart. We have been cutting down our Christmas tree with one family here for almost twenty years now; we have our annual holiday dinners with two others. We have helped nurture each other’s children and we have stood together at our lowest times. I know that many of you have those kinds of friendships with people here too. I wonder why we don’t do more to acknowledge how important this congregation is as a place to make and nurture friends…perhaps it is because in a community that pledges to help one another, we don’t want anyone to think we are being exclusive and we surely don’t want anyone to be left out…but I do think it’s a benefit of being part of this community. To those of you who are newer here, I hope it is exciting to think that among us may turn out to be some of your closest friends.

I also know that many of us stop making new friends at church after we’ve been here a few years. We may feel that we already have enough friends here or that we don’t have enough time. Making friends in adulthood is hard given all the demands on us. In fact in one study, people who are retired had 50% more friends than people with teenage children. Being a friend is even harder. 

I think we have a lot to learn from adolescents and young adults about friendship. You may have heard teenagers talking about the term “friends with benefits”. Friends with benefits are trusted friends who share casual sexual behaviors without a stated romantic attachment. A Christian conservative minister with who I was talking about adolescent sexuality said to me, not totally kidding, “Why didn’t they have that when I was growing up?” Now, I’m not suggesting that the adults here look for that type of friendship, -- but there is an intensity to the friendship of adolescence and young adulthood that would be lovely to recapture. When was the last time you sat up until the middle of the night talking with a group of friends? Remember your high school best friend who you saw each day but still came home and talked to on the phone three more times? Teenagers talk about their “bff’s”…it stands for best friends forever. It is a commitment to each other, to a shared future.  I hope you have some bff’s in your life today.

A friend of mine’s daughter had a commitment ceremony with her best friend. They weren’t lovers or partners; it was a celebration of their ten year best friendship and a commitment to be best friends in the future. Molly and her friend, in the presence of their family and friends, made a public commitment to be part of each other’s lives till “death do us part.” What a lovely idea to make explicit what we too often just assume.

Friendship does have benefits. There are research studies that show that the more friends you have, the less likely you are to die at a young age. People with cancer and people with HIV who have strong friendships often live longer. People with strong friendship networks report that they are happier than people who only have one or two friends. 

One of the reasons that friendships are so important to me is that I didn’t have many when I was a child. I was the girl in first and second grade that had “cooties”, the girl who no one would play with during recess or eat lunch with; indeed, in second grade, there was an official “hate Debbi Haffner club.” I was the only Jewish girl in a class of twelve Catholic girls all studying for their first communion. They told me if I memorized it they would become my friends. I did – they didn’t. Things got a little better after we moved in the third grade, but I remember seventh grade as an excruciating year of trying so hard to get the popular kids to like me but to no avail.

I don’t think I really learned about friendship until college. Up until that point, I had guy friends and two best girlfriends who I double dated with. At 16, I would have told you that girls were not to be trusted; the prevailing norm in my high school was you made plans with your girlfriends if you didn’t have a date but it was fine to break them if a boy asked you out. 

In college, I attended my first consciousness raising group, and it changed my life. CR groups, as we called them, were groups of women who got together to talk about their lives and what it meant to be women. How many of you participated in them?  We talked about our mothers, our bodies, our first periods, our relationships with men, and on and on. Goodness, did we talk.  They were heady, intimate, exhilarating, and exhausting. And they taught me to like and to trust women. 

I met Kathryn in the fall of my junior year. There was an immediate intense connection; I felt like I had known her my whole life, I felt like she had known me my whole life. The lst book of Samuel describes Jonathan and David’s first meeting this way, “the soul of Jonathan was bound to the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul.” Isabel Norton wrote, “In my friend, I find a second self.” In Kathryn I had; we went on to co-found the women’s center, the first woman intramural sports team, the gynecological self help movement on campus…today she is a UCC minister in Maine, and she offered the benediction here at my ordination. I’ve been fortunate to have had that instantaneous connection with a few other friends in my life; I hope you have as well. Aristotle said, “What is a friend? A single soul dwelling in two bodies.”

But, soul mates are just one kind of important friend. I once heard someone give a talk about friendship who said we each need at least five different types of friends in our lives. Yes, we need our soul mates, our spiritual brothers and sisters, but we also need a chicken soup friend, who we can count on to nurture us when we are low. We need an intellectual friend with whom we can share ideas, books, movies, political debates and so on. We need a fun friend who enjoys the same activities we do, and we need a stretcher, someone who encourages us to be more than we think we can be in the world and in our lives. My five closest friends from out of town attended my ordination – what I realized that night was that each of them represented one of those categories, that without deliberately planning it, I had ended up with one of each of them. 

But, there are two things wrong with thinking categorically about our friendships. One, is that people change and our friendships must change with them. Your fun friend’s mother gets Alzheimer. Your chicken soup friend gets consumed with a family crisis of his own. Your intellectual friend is the one who sits with you waiting for results at the doctor’s office. Long term friendships transcend categories.

But, the other thing that’s wrong with the 5 types of friends’ theory is that it defines friendship as being about what it does for YOU. Unitarian Ralph Waldo Emerson in an otherwise very dense essay on friendship said a proverb that you surely have heard, “the only way to have a friend is to be one.” Friendship is not a passive venture. We have to show up, we have to be trusted, we have to be willing to share ourselves, we have to speak to our friends from the best part of ourselves. 

Emerson also wrote, “Let us approach our friend with an audacious trust in the truth of his heart.” Trust is the core of friendship for me. It’s what separates my friends from people I just do things with…it’s what turns a colleague into a friend. And trust takes time: I don’t think we really know someone is a friend until something happens where we learn if we can trust them with our heart – a fight that you come through, a crisis that you or they are there for, a time they choose you. Mark Twain said, “A friend will side with you when you are wrong. Nearly anyone will side with you when you are right.”

And sometimes we get burned. I have had my heart broken by friendships as often as I have had it broken by romantic partners. Like most of you, I have had some close friendships just fade away for no easily understood reason, and I’ve had a few people who have decided they didn’t want to be my friend anymore. Just as hard is being disappointed by people who I thought were good friends who for whatever reason couldn’t be there when I needed them to; a friend someone once said is “someone who can sing the words in your heart back to you when you have forgotten the words.” But, sometimes they can’t. During a family crisis several years ago, there were some more casual people in my life who surprised me by calling regularly, checking in, sending encouraging notes, who became much closer friends as a result. They knew to show up when I needed them most. There were other people who I expected to be there, and for whatever reason were not and my trust in our friendship changed. Some had issues in their own lives at the same time and couldn’t be there; others chose not to be or didn’t know how to.  

People often report that some friends fall away during their divorce or their serious illness or a problem with their children. People tell me, “I didn’t know what to say to her or him…after she was diagnosed with cancer, after his wife left him…after their child got involved in drugs…” What I have learned is you don’t often need to say anything but “I’m sorry. What can I do?” or even better just show up and be there. Showing Up may be my own cardinal first rule of friendship.  As we waited one night for the results of tests in an emergency room for one of our children, five of my friends sat in the emergency room waiting room. A nurse said to me, “You have a lot of sisters.” It was probably the only time I smiled that night.

Some times we are the ones who have to initiate letting go of a friendship. Sister Joan writes in her wonderful book, “life is short and energies are limited. Friendship requires time and care.  To waste these resources on relationships that bring no depth, no vision, is to waste a valuable part of life.” Some times, we begin a friendship and find out that the person isn’t who we thought – sometimes we may outgrow the friendship – sometimes circumstances intervene and make further communication difficult…Sister Joan writes that “the love of a friend always comes with a lantern in hand” and some times we realize that a person or a friendship really doesn’t. I know it is very hard for me to let go once I have begun to invest in someone, but sometimes letting go is what we need to do – or at least be willing to allow a friendship to recede into the background.

How many of you have made a new close friend in the past three years? It gets so much more difficult to do as we get older. I understand what Emerson meant when he said, “a new person to me is a great event.” A new friendship is in Sister Joan’s words a “pledge and a possibility.”  But it is also a risk…a risk to trust, a risk to open one’s heart, a risk of being hurt -- again. A therapist once suggested to me that the reason I have so many close friends is to assure myself that I will be all right if someone moves away from my inner circle, that there will be other people there to take their place. One of my closest friends says it’s so I don’t overwhelm anyone too much.

Yes, I’ve been told that I am a very demanding friend. I give a lot to my friends – time, attention, support, and care. We look to our friends for appreciation, warmth, and affection -- presence, empathy, wisdom, nurturance, truth telling, unconditional acceptance, trust, and loyalty. It’s a huge list. I hope that I bring those qualities to my close friends at least most of the time; I know that at times I have let myself and other people down. Loving each other, really letting someone know us, is a radical and scary act.

The Bible doesn’t say much about friendship and most of the ministers I asked said that they have never preached about it.  But there are clues. In the Bible, God and Abraham are said to be friends.  Exodus tells us God spoke to Moses “face to face…as a man speaks to his friends.” I like the image of God as friend so much better than the image of God as judge or avenger. A God who can be our friend is a God I can understand.

In the gospel of John, Jesus calls the apostles his friends. He says, “I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything…”  Scripture teaches us that friendship is mutual, that it is vulnerable, that as Sister Joan writes in the quote we used on the cover of the order of service, “friendship is never without the gain of a little more self.” Such friendships are holy.

The Midrash, the Rabbis’ stories that accompany the Torah, includes this story to explain how God told people where to build the First Temple. Two friends live on opposite sides of a field and both grow wheat. One has a family, the other does not.  One day the one without a family says, “My friend has a family to feed, yet have harvest equal amounts of wheat. If I offer some to him, he will refuse.” So in the middle of the night, he gets up and secretly puts wheat in his friend’s storehouse. The next day the one with a family says, “I feel so badly for my friend. He must be so lonely. Perhaps if he has more wheat he won’t have to work so hard and could go out and meet more people.” So he takes wheat in the middle of the night and deposits some in his friend’s storehouse. This goes on for several weeks. One night as each is sneaking to the other’s storehouse they meet in the middle of the field. Each realizes what the other has done.  They tearfully embrace. On that spot, the rabbis write, the Temple was built.”          

True friendship is a sacred space.

The term “just friends” is usually used like “only friends” to explain that a friendship is something less than a more important relationship…but it changes if we understand that “just” comes from “justice”, right relations. “Just friends” love and nurture each other. “Just friends” listen to each other, sit with each other, and offer each other unconditional regard. “Just friends” show up. “Just friends” tell you the truth when no one else will, but always with kindness and compassion. May you be blessed with just friends. May you find a new friend. May you call or email your just friends today and let them know how much they mean to you. May “best friend” be your everlasting name. 

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