Becoming Friends: What Medieval Monks Can Do For Us

"Every friendship should make our world bigger, and Christian friendships should link us to the kingdom of God.  Ultimately, the purpose of friendship in the church is not  primarily our mutual edification but to make us the kind of community that can faithfully enact God's narrative of love, healing, and redemption in the world." 

In this chapter Wadell surveys Aelred of Rievaulx and the life of spiritual friendship.  Aelred, as Wadell portrays to us by spending an entire chapter on him, is a mentor for deep intimate friendships in a culture surrounded by fear that intimacy is too much of a risk in friendship. 

Brian McGuire comments on Aelred "No other monk tells us so much about himself.  No other medieval writer invests so much of himself in discussing friendship and friendships....In the spiritual community of the cloister he sees the possibility for friendship to reach new heights.  What was so obvious for Aelred was not at all apparent for his contemporaries."  His contemporaries maintained, writes McGuire, friendship was a "mode of intellectual contact through letter...they usually felt a certain hesitancy and reserve about their need for each other."  McGuire writes Aelred "insisted on telling his readers about the actual friendships he had had, how experienced them...Aelred's loves were immediate and open, with no hesitation, guilt or fear that friendship might become a problem, an exclusion, or even a temptation away from the discipline of monastic life."    McGuire observes Aelred  "got to the point where he could cultivate a friendship without considering sex as a central factor or potential threat."  McGuire also notes Aelred's practice of friendship were not universally accepted among his contemporaries.

Liz Carmichael comments on Aelred's time: "Cliques and jealousies could arise...Although the ethos of the community could be understood as a common friendship, it became rare to encourage personal friendships, grounded in and aimed towards Christian maturity." 

1.  Friendship is basic to our nature, a fundamental need at the heart of what it means to be human. 

"The first story about human beings in the Bible is a story of our need for companionship...by interpreting the creation story of Adam and Eve as a story of friendship, Aelred argues there is no escaping our need for friendship" writes Wadell. 

Listen to Aelred a 12th century monk--a few centuries ahem, before feminism appeared: "How beautiful it is that the second human being was taken from the side of the first, so that nature might teach that human beings are equal and, as it were, collateral, and that there is in human affairs neither a superior nor an inferior, a characteristic of true friendship."

Aelred even though he was living amongst men, felt the creation story gives us a grounding for fitness of friendship between men and women. 

2. We need good friendships because life is often hard, more than any of us can handle alone.

Wadell observes "Our friends are the people who are not reluctant to share in our sufferings and not afraid to be with us when we mourn.  They see us through times of failure and are not ashamed to stand by us when others judge and abandon us." 

3. Each of us need someone with whom we can be completely open, someone with whom we can relax our heart. 

Listen to one of Aelred's classic quotes on this relaxing presence in a friendship:

"But what happiness, what security, what joy to have someone to whom you dare to speak on terms of equality as to another self; one to whom you need have no fear to confess your failings; one to whom you can unblushingly make known what progress you have made in the spiritual life; one to whom you can entrust all the secrets of your heart and before whom you can place all your plans!" 

Some people from a therapeutic standpoint, pay hundreds of dollars each week to have someone listen to them.  For Aelred, this was a core practice in friendship.  Wadell says "We need someone we trust and feel comfortable enough with to share the secrets, dreams, and hopes of our hearts including matters of the soul."  Wadell states the the purpose of this sharing is not merely therapeutic or to make us feel good about ourselves, but "to help one another be good."

Aelred writes "it is no small solace in this life to have someone whom you can unite to yourself with intimate affection and by an embrace of most holy love, in whom your spirit can rest, to whom your soul may pour itself out, to whose pleasant conversation you can flee as to a consoling song amid sorrows, into whose most kind embrace of friendship you can enter, secure among so many scandals of this age...as if by an application of medicine, you can rid yourself of the weariness of tumultuous cares; who weeps with you in troubles, rejoices with you in prosperity, searches with you in times of uncertainty...indeed you so unite and attach yourself to him, and mingle soul with soul, that one is made from many." 

Here we get another encouragement of Christian unity ""What, therefore, is more pleasant than so unite to oneself the spirit of another and of two to form one."  Aelred, continues "And thus, friend cleaving to friend in the spirit of Christ, is made with Christ but one heart and one soul, and so mounting aloft through degrees of love to friendship with Christ, he is made one spirit with him in one kiss." 

Wadell writes "Friends do not give up on one another."  He states friends "do not abandon us when we are struggling with the shortcomings, weaknesses, and imperfections in our lives....There are times in any seasoned friendship when one of the friends has to be patient with the other's failures, sometimes egregious failures, and help them recover in integrity."

Wadell observes "In so many of our churches we gather as strangers, worship as strangers, and leave as strangers...True friendships develop us morally and spiritually because in them we learn how to care for someone other than ourselves.  They teach us to see beyond our immediate needs and gratification by identifying with the good of another.  True friendships free us from the enervating prison of self-centerededness, while worldly friendships deceive us into believing we are most free when we look after ourselves first." 

Aelred was another one who saw deep friendship as Christians sharing union not just with God but with each other.  Aelred was not the first to use such language to describe friendship.  . 

You may recall Augustine's lament of a friend who had died:

"I felt that his soul and mine had formed one soul in two bodies."

In another friendship, Augustine wrote, "Anyone who knew us both would say that we were two separate people only as to our bodies, not our minds, for we are in complete agreement and on terms of perfect intimacy although we differ in merit in which he surpasses me."   Carolinne White writes "Augustine's view of friends forming one soul is enriched by his belief, evident in his mature thought, that a unity of souls necessarily involves a profound intimacy with  Christ and  with one's fellow  men."

Comments

[Beth]

It takes the most profound courage to be such a friend as is described. Indeed it
takes the very courage of our redeemer. And
knowing as He did the price to be paid.

[sue]

One of the pitfalls of living in Canada is that there is a lag time between the release of a new book there and the time it gets released here. I'm waiting patiently (not!) for Wadell's book to arrive through Amazon.

[Jennifer]

Dan,

2 Things...

1. Is that Wadell's list or Aelred's?

2. Does Waddle talk at all about how Aelred dealt with the people who didn’t believe particular friendships should be allowed? I'm thinking of how he answered the "audience challenge", even though this was cross-sex friendship.

Oh...and 3. Great Post :-)

[Jennifer]

Sue,

Yes...but you get free health care in Canada, so if you hurt yourself while waiting, it's covered :-)

[Dan]

Jennifer,

That list is Wadell's summary of Aelred's beliefs. Aelred wrote two books to counter the objection of intimate personal friendships and of his quotes above were from those books.