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

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Spiritual Friendship

61. AELRED: Four qualities ought to be tested in a friend: faithfulness, intent, judgment, and patience. You should test your friend’s faithfulness so that you may entrust yourself and all that you have to him. Test his intent, to ensure that he is looking for nothing from the friendship except God and that natural good that comes from your mutual friendship. Test his judgment, so that your friend not be ignorant of the obligations and demands of friendship, the matters in which friends must weep or rejoice together; and let him be aware both under what circumstances we believe friends must sometimes be corrected, and the proper means, time, and place for such

correction. Finally, test your friend’s patience, to make sure that he is not grieved by correction, and does not despise or hate the one who corrects him, but is willing to endure any adversity for the sake of his friend.

“Four qualities ought to be tested in a friend: faithfulness, intent, judgment, and patience.”

Testing a Friend’s Faithfulness/Loyalty (3.62−67) 62. In friendship there is nothing more outstanding than faithfulness, which seems to be both the nurse and the guardian of friendship. xviii In all of life’s turns, in adversity and prosperity, in joy and sadness, in delightful and bitter circumstances, it reveals itself to be comparable to friendship, holding in the same regard both the humble and the exalted, the poor and the rich, the strong and the weak, the well and the infirm. Thus the faithful man sees nothing in his friend that is alien to his own spirit; he honors virtue in its own proper place, but considers all other qualities external to his friend and does not test them much if he finds them present, nor seek them much if they are absent.