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

Chapter 8: Giving and Receiving between Spiritual Friends (Book 3.97–134)

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For this is what well-ordered friendship is, that reason rule the heart, and that we should look not so much to what will make our friends agreeable as to what is most useful for all. Examples fromTwo of Aelred’s Spiritual Friends (3.119−127) 119. I am thinking now of my two friends who, although taken from this present world, nevertheless to me “live still and will always live.” 15 The first of these I joined to myself when I was first converted, because of a certain similarity between our characters and because we followed the same pursuits; the other I chose almost from the time of his boyhood, and after testing him in many different ways I took him into the highest friendship when my advancing age was already turning my hair gray. At a time when I had no burden of pastoral care and was not filled with concern for temporal affairs, I chose the first friend as a partner and companion in the spiritual sweetness and delights of the cloister, into which I was then being initiated. I asked nothing and offered nothing except what Christian love demanded as a sign of that affection. Now in the case of the younger man, once I had taken him on as one of my responsibilities, I had him as a coworker in my labors. Looking back on these friendships, as memory leads me to do, I see that the first depended more on affection and the second on reason, although the first was certainly not lacking in reason, nor was the second bereft of affection. 120. In short, since my first friend was taken from me at the very beginning of our friendship, I was able to choose him as I described, but not to test him.

15 Ibid., 27.102.