Session Nineteen 2009

Session 19 – Friendship, October, 2009

Adapted from Cristine Robinson and Alicia Hawkins

Chalice: I get glimpses of myself in other people’s eyes. I try to be careful whom I use as a mirror: my husband; my children; my mother; the friends of my right hand.

Reading: A friend is one with whom you share your soul – your innermost being. That means that the best lovers are also friends, that young children often have their parents as friends, and in the best of all worlds, grown children and parents share a friendship. It also means that friendships can be sudden and short-lived as we come and go through each other’s lives, and that even people who live together for years may not be especially close friends. This definition of friendship excludes many important, pleasant, and useful relationships that we tend to call friendships, but which don’t involve much deep sharing. We can eat lunch and talk politics and recipes with the same folks for years and never really know them. We may trust our neighbor with our spare key, but not with the depths of ourselves. We friends, we take the risk of knowing and being known. We continue to get closer to them even through we know that there will be loss in our future. And in spite of the temptation to make them “just like us,” we give them space to be who they uniquely are.

From Heart to Heart

Quotes from the Common Bowl: see attached

1. How do you define “friend?” Is there always deep sharing or can “friend” be more casual that that?

2. Can you sustain friendship with someone whose values are different from your own? How is this challenging or rewarding?

3. What is your experience of friend as “mirror”, someone who reflects yourself back to you?

Closing ritual: May the light around us guide our footsteps, and hold us fast to the best and most righteous that we seek. May the darkness around us nurture our dreams, and give us rest so that we may give ourselves to the work of our world. Let us seek to remember the wholeness of our lives, the weaving of light and shadow in this great and astonishing dance in which we move.

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QUOTES FOR SESSION 19 – FRIENDSHIP, OCT. 2009

False friends are like our shadow, keeping close to us while we walk in the sunshine, but leaving us the instant we cross into the shade.

Christian Nevell Bovee

The best things in life are never rationed. Friendship, loyalty, love, do not require coupons.

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art…it has no survival value; rather, it is one of those things that give value to survival.

Friendship of a kind that cannot easily be reversed tomorrow must have its roots in common interests and shared beliefs.

Hold a true friend with both hands.

A friend who is far away is sometimes much nearer than one who is at hand. Is not the mountain far more awe-inspiring and more clearly visible to one passing through the valley than to those who inhabit the mountain?

No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow

Relationships – of all kinds – are like sand held in your hand. Held loosely, with an open hand the sand remains where it is. The minute you close your hand and squeeze tightly to hold on, the sand trickles through your fingers. You may hold onto some of it, but mostly it will be spilled. A relationship is like that. Held loosely, with respect and freedom for the other person, it is likely to remain intact. But hold too tightly, too possessively, and the relationship slips away and is lost.

Treasure each other in the recognition that we do not know how long we shall have each other.

We control fifty percent of a relationship. We influence one hundred percent of it.

Two shorten the road.