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

Introduction

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heroes of the faith have not just become friends for life, they have become “eternal friends”—we will be friends for eternity (1.22−24, 68; 3.134). I could write about my delight in these friends for many pages—truly their friendship has been one of God’s greatest gifts to me. But my experience with friends in ministry was not all positive. I also experienced painful betrayals of trust, the kind David writes about in Psalm 55:12−14. If an enemy were insulting me, I could endure it;

if a foe were rising against me, I could hide. But it is you, a man like myself, my companion, my close friend, with whom I once enjoyed sweet fellowship at the house of God, as we walked about among the worshipers. (NIV)

All this to say, two decades of ministry led me to a preliminary answer to the question Ambrose’s book had raised many years earlier. “Yes! Friendship is vitally important for spiritual leaders if we want to not just survive, but thrive, and to serve faithfully and fruitfully for a lifetime.” The growing assurance I had about this answer is what led me in 2017 to sign up for a three-day retreat advertised with the title “Spiritual Friendship.” I did not know much about the spiritual classic that would serve as the basis for the retreat, but I had heard of it before. Some years prior, my friend, Rev. Bob Engel had loaned me a book called The Love of God and Spiritual Friendship . 3 This book had selections from two friends who had lived in the twelfth century, Bernard of Clairvaux and Aelred of Rievaulx, and it was edited by a professor

3 Bernard of Clairvaux and Aelred of Rievaulx, The Love of God and Spiritual Friendship , ed. James M. Houston, Classics of Faith and Devotion (Portland, OR: Multnomah, 1983; reprint Vancouver, BC: Regent College, 2018).