The Most Terrible Poverty

I'll never forget one of my best friends in high school, since he was instrumental in my conversion. I'm inclined to put friends in quotes because it was a completely one-sided friendship. I was available to hang out whenever he wanted someone to do something with. With our other buddies we had great times walking the rail road tracks for miles, and sneaking to each others houses through the giant drainage pipe that ran under the 202 bypass. We were a posse. 

I don't know if he ever realized it, but this friend of mine was one the most self-centered people I had ever met in my life. He was gregarious and fun, quick to share a laugh, talented, and popular. Yet despite our years of friendship, when I was in the hospital he never came to visit me. I couldn't share anything of meaning with him while feeling he truly cared about me. I was good for a good time. I could never put my finger on it; it was only in retrospect that I came to realize that he didn't really care much about me or my well-being.

I mentioned that he was instrumental in my conversion because I never really felt valued by him as a person, despite the years and years we spent together. He helped me to feel and experience what the model of friendship in the world was--utilitarian, shallow, self-focused. So when I did experience the model of love, self-sacrifice, concern, communion, and genuine friendship in the person of Jesus Christ and those people I met who embodied his life as disciples, I had something to contrast it with. There was no comparison. I'm indebted to my friend for allowing me to experience the shallow dissatisfaction and loneliness such a friendship provided, because it moved me to search for something more that what it provided.

Saint Augustine believed that in this world there are two things that are essential: life, and friendship. To Augustine, friendship is as important as food, and a means of being authentically human. He drew on Cicero's definition of friendship: “agreement with kindliness and affection about things humans and divine,” but added, “in Christ Jesus our Lord who is our real peace.”

Today, I have good close guy friends from my time in Philly who I hang out with regularly and who would probably take a bullet for me. None of them, however, are Christian, and so there is always something I am leaving aside when we hang out. I love them like brothers, but I can't share all that I am with them; despite that, making new male friends in your late thirties is no easy prospect, so the thought of leaving them behind is not something I'm inclined to do.

I often find myself in a conundrum--longing for the close male friendships, the communing of souls, Augustine extols in his classical treatise; friendships not based on "doing things" or shallow interests, but on willing the genuine good of the other as disciples striving together for holiness

And yet, this kind of closeness seems to be the territory of women. It's not the male archetype, and so there is a subtle shame in desiring and needing these kinds of intimate friendships. As a married man, I can't seek out new friendship with members of the opposite sex. And as a man, finding another man who I can confide in beyond the trite and externals is not easy. My dad used to say when my brothers and I were younger, "making friends is easy! You just go up to a kid and say, "Hi I'm Robbie, want to be friends?" It generally worked as kids. Manhood as a husband and father in suburbia is a different story, especially if you are like me and really thrive on close, intimate relationships. The lowest common denominator in this closed equation is loneliness.

"The biggest threat facing middle-aged men," wrote a journalist in a Boston Globe editorial last March, "isn't smoking or obesity. It's loneliness." It's a public health crisis in that loneliness contributes to cardiovascular disease, stroke, and Alzheimer's. But it cuts deeper, too. St Mother Teresa of Calcutta said, "the most terrible poverty is loneliness and feeling of being unloved."

I have such good memories from college of sitting out in the quad at 1 in the morning with my brother in faith, Peter. We would share our struggles and our desire to serve the Lord til the sun came up. It was a special time, but a time that wouldn't last forever. Like most of my friendships as I approach my forties, they've taken a backseat to work, family, and activities. Most of my guy friends aren't real big on writing or staying in touch regularly, and I can't say I am all that good about it either. It's just not something guys do. But when times get hard, and I think, "who can I turn to? Who can I commune with, confide in, confess to...I come up short.

Christian Men need an archetypal way of connecting that moves beyond the shallowness of sports and acquaintanceship. They need to know they can rely on other men for their struggles, trust that they can be accountable and hold others to account, and that other men will look out for their well being while pushing them to cultivate those virtues which allows them to stand on their own two feet. A deep loneliness and isolation permeates middle-aged men, especially those (like myself) who struggle to connect in a meaningful way beyond the BS that often keep us at arms length from really knowing one another. I don't know what the remedy to that isolation is, but there is a lot going against us: technology, isolation, convention and social norms, substituting 'doing things' for being there for one another in times of need, the fear of rejection or being seen as weird or effeminate, and being vulnerable.

But I don't think it has to be that way. At the heart of true friendship is wishing the other well. Jesus himself said "there is no greater love than for a man to lay his life down for his friends" (Jn 15:13). That kind of sacrifice, such "brotherly love" is a truly masculine trait. Jesus' vulnerability, too, in wanting his friends to stay awake with him in his hour of need in the garden before his crucifixion was a deeply human trait, neither masculine or feminine, but human.

Christ the Son of God said to those men in his inner circle, "I do not call you slaves, but friends." (Jn 15:15). To make a friend you sometimes have to be a friend, so maybe that is what God is calling me to do and be. Instead of desiring friends, maybe I should try being a friend to someone without, someone suffering under the painful yoke of loneliness, without thinking as much of my own need. Maybe that is a an unconventional remedy, though it is not without risk. "A man of many companions may come to ruin, but there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother." (Prov 18:24) Moving out of ourselves has a way of assuaging at least in part that deep sense of loneliness we all experience as part of being human, our attempts to fill that "God shaped hole" in the imperfection of human friendships. And yet what better and sweeter way to experience the love of God than in those friendships founded on the love of Christ? It is "iron sharpening iron," more valuable than gold.