"Blessing for Friendship"

 

Blessing for Friendship (John O’Donahue)

May you be blessed with good friends

And learn to be a good friend to yourself,

Journeying to that place in your soul where

There is love, warmth, and feeling.

May this change you

 

I have felt let down in so many of relationships and friendships.  People whom I thought would be good friends ended up being cold and ungenerous.  Others whom I felt close and safe with could still hurt.  Some never seemed to hear what I shared or cared. In other cases, a searing jealousy would ripen inside of me as I hungered for what they had, and I felt I lacked.  Distances grew between myself and friends that I felt incapable of bridging. 

Even so, I still longed for intimacy and constancy, like the friendships I imagined others had, that I saw in movies and read about in novels.  It seemed like this should be possible, a best friend who was always there for me as I would be for them.  A friendship where we could overcome difficulties and misunderstanding, where awkwardness, jealousy, irritations did not corrupt.

But as I dig deeper down into the reality of myself, of life, of love, I am learning that this kind of friendship that I longed for is only a fantasy.  I understand now how we will always fall short in our friendships if the goal of friendship is to be saved, liked, cared for by another or if we feel the need to be that all for another.  This is not humanly possible.  We hardly know how to care and love ourselves.  To expect another to be able to do what we cannot do for ourselves is folly.  While friendships can start out seeming to meet our needs for love, belonging, and understanding, overtime if we are to develop a truer intimacy, we will need to share our darker sides with another, to rub up against what in not so kind, considerate, and understanding.

Mature friendships help us to carry the weight of our own darkness by pushing it back onto us. The space that then emerges between us can give us some discernment about whether our expectations of the friendship are realistic, compassionate or self-centered and conditional. Paradoxically, by experiencing the space between us, we can find a new approach to friendship that is more open, loving, and compassionate because it becomes less about filling our own needs and more about experiencing the other as they are. Friendship can become more playful like when we were children and not so much concerned about what got out of a friend but how much fun we could have together in all our strange awkward stumbling around together.