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

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Spiritual Friendship

is with Christ himself, he begins “to taste how sweet he is” and “to feel how good he is” (Pss 34:8; 100:5). 19 134. So, ascending from that holy love with which he embraces his friend to that love with which he embraces Christ, he will reap the fruit of spiritual friendship with a face filled with joy, and he will look forward to the fullness of all things in the time to come. When that fear is removed which we now feel and by which we are filled with care for each other, and when all adversity, which we now must bear for each other, is driven away, and especially when the sting of death is destroyed along with death itself ( 1 Cor 15:54–55 ), by the pangs of which we now must be worn out, so that we must grieve for each other—when all these are past, and security has arrived, we will rejoice in the eternity of that Highest Good, when this friendship to which we here admit only a few is poured out over all, and is poured out by all in turn upon God, and when God is “all in all” (1 Cor 15:28).

19 Aelred paraphrases Pss 34:8 and 100:5 here.