Recently, I have been reflecting on friendship in the context of common and complementary vocations.
Friendship, for Catholics, is most often understood in the context of living the good life—of pursuing the universal call to holiness through communion with one another. Our friends help us to “put on love,” as St. Paul says to the Colossians, through mutual edification, admonition, prayer, and both active and passive invitations to a life of charity.
There are many great texts to which one can turn to get a good picture of what this looks like in practice. Book VIII of Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics and St. Augustine’s Confessions are classics, with their images and descriptions of the various kinds of friendship, but St. Aelred’s Spiritual Friendship is easily my favorite.
Spiritual friendship, St. Aelred writes, “begins with Christ, is advanced through Christ, and is perfected in Christ.” These Christian friendships are meant to help us order our lives toward God by means of relationship. Anyone who has experienced such a friendship will readily attest to the impact it has had on their walk with Christ—that through it, they have grown in holiness and so drawn closer to God in friendship.
Now, let’s turn to vocation. All of us share in the universal vocation to holiness. St. Peter exhorts us, “as he who called you is holy, be holy yourselves in all your conduct” (1 Pet. 1:15).
We are all called to holiness, and we are each called to live out that calling in a particular way through our particular vocation: to either the religious life, ordained ministry, or married life. While the discernment of a particular vocation is quite personal, we seldom treat it as an individualistic affair. One’s discernment of marriage quite obviously involves the discernment of another person, and the Church is clear that priestly formation happens in the context of community. The same is true of religious life.
More than this, though, we naturally tend to speak with our friends about how things are going in our particular vocations and the discernment thereof.
This is especially true for our friends who share a common discernment or vocational state. St. Aelred explains, “spiritual friendship is begotten of the righteous by likeness of life, habits, and interests.” For those of us who are in priestly formation or discerning a religious vocation, the value of Christ having sent his disciples out “two by two,” strongly resonates. In our communal prayer, ministerial assignments, classes, and other everyday endeavors, the co-experience of life that is found in this sort of fraternity is a helpful way of navigating matters of discernment and formation. As we share our joy, bear one another’s burdens, and send forth prayer for one another, these friendships naturally lend themselves to becoming spiritual in nature and to deepening friendship with Christ.
Likewise, for those who are dating or married, there is a natural fruitfulness that springs from being friends with other couples—or for individuals, with other individuals—pursuing holiness through marriage. The world has lost its reverence for marriage, and so there seems to be a great sense of support in knowing the road to holiness as realized in married life is not untrodden by others. Fellowship with other Catholic couples, who share a common end and path, is thus invaluable in one’s vocational endeavors.
Whatever the vocation to which one is called, it is clear that friendship is ordered toward one’s ultimate vocation, which is holiness, and one’s particular vocation is the means through which one pursues that vocation. And so friendships ought to be a place in which vocations can be fostered, discerned, and supported. Common vocational states are naturally conducive to this end.
So what about the aspect of complementarity I mentioned earlier?
Well, there seems to be a real value in friendships shared with those who are different from us. If the twelve disciples were all tax collectors, or all zealots, or all fishermen, the band would have fallen flat. Similarly, if the band of Christ’s followers did not include those myrrh-bearing women, who, despite the disciples’ return to fishing after the death of our Lord, chose to abide with our Lord as an exercise of the feminine genius, the disciples may have indefinitely returned to their normal lives. It is clear that the Lord created Adam and Eve with complementarity in mind: that their differences would somehow serve to build one another up in charity. Complementarity is the great foil to monotony in the world of friendship.
We can even turn to Christ for an example of this, as he went off to spend time with his friends Mary, Martha, and Lazarus. There must have been something very refreshing about the leisurely afternoons he must have spent in conversation with those dear friends. Neither Mary, Martha, nor Lazarus were priests, teachers, or carpenters, and yet he was able to share a deep and meaningful friendship with them all the same. Perhaps these friendships were especially important for our Lord in light of the human desire for leisure—the desire to take time away from one’s usual settings and delight in spending one’s time differently with different people.
These friendships prevent our world from becoming a humdrum echo chamber of experience, and more than that, they edify us uniquely.
I imagine that for the priest, there is something truly edifying and sanctifying in witnessing a married couple live out their vocation well—it offers him an earthly image of the vocation to which he has committed his life. And likewise, for the married couple, I imagine seeing a priest who is deeply devoted to his Lord and sacrifices his life for his bride. Our particular vocations are wrapped up in the mystery of the Cross, and our image of the Cross is incomplete without a deep understanding of its various dimensions.
Our friendships with those who differ from us in approach, but not in aim, lift us out of our present perspectives and shed new light on the path that lies ahead of us.
"Whoever fears the Lord directs his friendship aright,
for as he is, so is his neighbor also."
Sirach 6:17
“The Art of Conversation” by René Magritte
Ryan P. Both 