Spiritual Friendship: Learning to Be Friends with God and One Another

108

Spiritual Friendship

friendship as they are more practiced in overcoming vices through virtue—I mean those who can be held by the bond of friendship more securely since they are accustomed to resist the temptations of vice more bravely. 33. WALTER: Please don’t be angry with me for saying this, but that friend of yours of whom Gratian spoke a short while ago: We do not doubt that you received him into friendship, but I wish to know whether he ever seems prone to anger to you. 9 34. AELRED: He does indeed, but not at all in our friendship. 35. GRATIAN: What do you mean, that he is not prone to anger in friendship? 36. AELRED: You do not doubt that there is a bond of close friendship between us? GRATIAN: Not at all. AELRED: When have you ever heard that anger, strife, disagreements, rivalries, or arguments arose between us? GRATIAN: Never; but we thought that this was because of your patience, not his. 37. AELRED: You are wrong. For there is no way one friend’s patience will rein in anger which the other’s affection does not itself rein in; on the contrary, by a show of patience one often goads the irascible man into fury—for the sole purpose of gaining for oneself some bit of solace if the other shows himself to be his equal in angry disputes. Now, with regard to that man of whom

9 See Spiritual Friendship , 3.16−21.