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

Chapter 5: Choosing Spiritual Friends (Book 3.1–38)

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Aelred has learned about friendship from his historical mentor Ambrose (d. 397), who lived some seven hundred years earlier. Aelred

quotes Ambrose’s description of a friend as “the sharer of your soul,” someone to whom “you entrust yourself to as to another self” and “from whom you fear nothing” (3.30). Elsewhere Aelred quotes Gregory the Great’s definition of a friend as the “guardian of my soul.” What practical advice from this chapter would help you become the kind of friend that Ambrose and Gregory describe?

Aelred’s thinking about spiritual friendship has been shaped by reading the spiritual classic Wisdom of Sirach. Aelred uses Sirach

to warn about five habits that can destroy a friendship: (1) slander (3.23), (2) reviling (3.24), (3) arrogance (3.24), (4) betraying secrets (3.24–25), and (5) backstabbing (3.25). 10 Which of these habits is most likely to be a barrier keeping you from forming spiritual friendships?

10 To read more from Sirach about friendship, see Bob Lay, ed., Books Jesus Read: Learning from the Apocrypha , Sacred Roots Spiritual Classics 5 (Wichita, KS: The Urban Ministry Institute Press, 2022), 172−78.