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

Chapter 6 Testing Spiritual Friends (Book 3.39–75)

Chapter Summary Are you comfortable testing your friends? If you were going to test them, what would you test them on? This sixth chapter provides Aelred’s answers to these and many more questions. In the last chapter, Aelred introduced four steps to finding spiritual friends, and he discussed the first step: choosing a spiritual friend. Now, in Chapter 6, the conversation continues with Walter asking what to do if you discover that the friend you have chosen has a serious character flaw; Aelred replies by providing a number of practical suggestions (3.39−51). Aelred then provides a helpful summary of the conversation so far (3.52−58), before moving to the second step in finding a spiritual friend: testing your friend’s character (3.59−61). Aelred identifies four characteristics to test in a potential spiritual friend: (1) faithfulness (3.62−67), (2) intentions (3.68−71), (3) good judgement (3.72), and (4) patience

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