The contents of this post is a reply to Irene's letter:
Making Time for Friendship

Dear Irene,

It's great to hear from you after that brief silence. It's good that you make it a point to hang out with your friends when there's an inclination to be fixated on some disconcerting life issues. That's what I do as well; not as a way of avoiding the issues, but as a way of allowing my mind and emotions to rest for a while before I attend to the "world within" again. We all have our days, I guess. But like I told you on the SMS the other day, I believe grace prevails.

Part of friendship is in allowing ourselves to receive comfort from our friends at times when we ourselves have nothing to give. This can be such a difficult thing to do sometimes; it makes us feel like "useless" friends. But perhaps that's precisely what we need to learn: that there's no need to be a "useful" friend in the first place. Friendship isn't about what we do; it's about who we are.

Friendship is indeed a mutual exchange. We very often enter into friendships thinking about what we can or desire to do for the other person. (Of course there are those who enter friendships simply for what they can get out of the friendship, but I'm not talking about such people.) This may be done out of the noblest of intentions, but it certainly defies God's divine design for friendship.

When we are able to see friendship as a mutual exchange between two (or more) people, we soon realise that it's not just us who're going to affect others with our life stories. Their life stories too are going to affect us. Our paradigms of life are going to be challenged and impacted by virtue of having such spiritual friends in our lives. That's the whole idea of friendship: needing as much as we are being needed, being changed as much as we are changing others, receiving in as much as we are giving, and being vulnerable towards our friends in the same way that vulnerability is required of them in their befriending us. It requires less humility for me to think of myself as God's sacramental presence to my friends, but more humility for me to understand my friends as being God's sacramental presence to me.

I find myself identifying with your sentiments about "small talk". It really used to be that I never had a thing for "small talk". It was to me an absolute waste of time and was for people who didn't have anything better to talk about - and I supposed I had much better and bigger things to talk about. I remember how I used to hijack conversations with others just to try to bring the subject of my conversations to a "higher level"... my my, the explosive ego.

But that has changed now (hopefully). I no longer try to steer conversations. I realise now that most people need time to linger at one level of conversation before they proceed to another level of emotional and intellectual exchange. And I also try to appreciate that some people never proceed beyond that; but that doesn't mean that they lack a capacity to enjoy friendship. Perhaps just not in the way I understand it to be. Or perhaps some people need to feel safe; and we need to respect such safety boundaries that they've constructed for their own security. It is after all, for many, a fearful world.

I think "depth" in friendship can be measured in different ways. And part of our being vulnerable rests on our allowing for people to demonstrate their idea of depth in friendship, and to allow them to reveal themselves as they are. When this attitude is embraced, we will find that each spiritual friendship is a unique adventure in itself. So you go ahead painting fingernails side-by-side (your new female bonding ritual), and I'll keep watching movies with my friends (my ancient male bonding ritual).

Hey, take care.

To friendship!
Sherman