There is a friend that sticketh closer than a brother. This fact may tell us as much about brothers as it does about friends. But we all do need a friend who is close to us, knows us, enjoys us, and is there with us when we need her, in ways that we do not expect or want brothers to be. And most of us consider ourselves blessed if God provides one or two in a lifetime.

But what about a friend that “sticketh,” not only close, but for a long time, maybe until death doth us part?

Should we look for enduring friendship in a life where most relationships are only for the time being? Does friendship have commitment woven into it, an enduring commitment, the kind of commitment that calls us to stick with a friend without a time limit?

Alvin Toffler told us in his book Future Shock that in the future, which is now yesterday, friendships would be ad hoc, here, now, and over with when the company sends one of the friends to another plant or when the grass looks greener at another club or another church or another neighborhood.

The best friendships, C. S. Lewis reminded us, are born when two people discover that they like the same things, work for the same things, play at the same things…things outside of themselves…so that when they get together they both focus, not on each other, nor on their friendship, but on whatever it is, out there beyond themselves, that they care about and do together.

But even best friends carry on in a mobile society; they move around a lot, and get too far apart to play together at their hobbies or work together at their jobs. So they find new people to do these things with in the new place—ad hoc friendships, friendship for this time, this place, this club, this project. It strikes me that Lewis’s ideal of friendship becomes, in an upwardly or downwardly mobile culture, a victim of mobility, just as Toffler predicted.

It is sad that it should be so. But it may be that the mobility that makes for throw-away friendship only underscores the melancholy fact that friendships are marked by the creator for the time being only. Friendship may be tentative because it flutters with the shifting currents of personal change.

Friendship is reciprocal, rooted in mutual need, mutual affection, mutual admiration. Who would even want a friend who stuck with us only because he felt compassion for us, or only wanted to be our benefactor? My friend does not have a duty to bail me out of jail, cover a gambling debt, or pay my hospital bills. He would probably do it if he could, but coming to my rescue is not what our friendship is about. Benevolence is a Christian duty, but it can spoil a good friendship if you do too much of it, certainly if you expect too much of it.

Friends are friends, not only as they do things together that they like to do; they are friends because they like each other, and are friends only as long as they like each other. They may have agape afterward, but not friendship. There is certainly some melancholy in this. I feel just a bit cheated when I read such harsh observations as Samuel Johnson’s, that “the friendship…practiced by common mortals must take its rise from mutual pleasure, and must end when the power ceases of delighting each other.”¹ But it is true. Friends do stop pleasing each other, and when the pleasure is gone, the friends tend to become former friends.

Well, there is nothing peculiar about that; it happens all the time in a world where people change, not always for the better as far as friends are concerned. And when friends change, friendship cools. Aristotle, who valued friendliness as a noble virtue, saw the inevitability of it. “One who broke off such a friendship would not be felt to be acting oddly, because the man that he made his friend was not like that anymore; so now that he has changed…he gives him up” (Nicomachaen Ethics, IX, 3).

So, one concedes reluctantly, friendships are not bound by commitment to endure all change, abide through all changes of circumstance, or interests, or sympathies, or feelings. If a friendship happens to last a lifetime, count it an extraordinary blessing; it did not happen because friendship obligates you to make it last.

Even the way most friendships begin hints at friendship’s impermanence. Friendships do not begin with a solemn vow spoken before God and these witnesses. There is no liturgy of baptism into a friendship, or a promise to stick with our friend until death us do part.

The way Jonathan and David took an oath to friendship forever is a poetic exception. “Jonathan made a covenant with David,” we read, “because he loved him….” And they both banked on that sweet swearing when the time turned sour and friendship was tested in blood. Jonathan made David swear again by his love for him (1 Sam. 20:19), and David appealed, not to their mutual liking, but to his friend’s loyalty. But such self-conscious swearing fits the biblical narrative and is imitated more easily by romantic children than by practical adults.

Most of us stray into friendships, almost by accident. We meet, both of us ready, needy even, maybe hungry for a friend, and we poke around delicately, discreetly, not too eagerly, as the openings come. We look each over, see signs that we might hit it off, discover that we talk the same language, agree on what is important in life, like to do the same sorts of things when we are not at work, and we discover that we get deep satisfaction from doing them with each other. And so, we fumble into friendship.

The birth of friendship is an awkward process, unceremonial and uncontrived—and, at the beginning, uncommitted. Casual friends become best friends, not by a commitment to best friendship but by a grafting and a growing together as each learns to truth the other, understand each other, depend on each other, presume on each other, and simply expect each other to be there for them. We become best friends as we learn to feel safe in the friendship, “safe in the knowledge that we can give the other something she or he needs, something that will create a binding tie between us, somewhere inside, we may also know the friend…has qualities we need, qualities we envy because we cannot yet give them to ourselves.”²

But when we don’t feel safe in it anymore, can’t count on it, don’t envy the friend’s qualities anymore, we gradually remove the life support systems and let the friendship die…with dignity if we are lucky, but die nonetheless.

When it dies our friends and neighbors do not feel that either of us has violated a sacred commitment. There is no churchly censure on failed friendships. No guardian of the Judaeo-Christian tradition bewails the decline and fall of friendship in our culture. Friendships die and nobody lifts a moral eyebrow as when a commitment is broken and fidelity is lapsed.

Mutuality holds friends together; if two people do not feel a mutual attraction, they will not become friends, and if mutual attraction ceases, friendship will cease. But why can’t friends make commitments to stay together anyway? Why can’t they commit themselves to stay friends no matter what? Well, the reason is that when people stick with people they do not want to be stuck with, they are not friends. Colleagues, maybe. Married couples, maybe. But not friends.

Yet we do want more. Just because friends can be so close, closer than family, we want friendships to have commitment sewn into them. Kelly Girl friendships, ad hoc, as the occasion arises, are not enough. We don’t want all our friendships to be like a relationship with a savvy stockbroker or a caring therapist, good people who give us care as long as we pay the fare. We want a friend like Dean Acheson, Truman’s beleaguered former Secretary of State, who went to visit his friend Alger Hiss in prison, convicted traitor though he was, bad politics though it was; we want a committed friend who sticks even if sticking gets him into trouble.

Friendship does carry a need for commitment. If it does not require a commitment to permanence, it does need a commitment to loyalty or devotion.

One ought to be true to a friend. He ought to stick close to a friend when she is in trouble or sadness. She ought to listen when a friend tells of her troubles. He ought to defend his friend when he is falsely accused. She ought to give a friend preference over others, do favors to a friend that she cannot do for many others. Friendships create an inner circle where people prefer one another over outsiders.

At the very least, one ought not to turn against a friend. It seems so much worse that Judas betrayed his friend than if a stranger had turned him in. It seems awesomely more wrong for Brutus to turn against Caesar than for Cassius to do the same thing. To betray a friend is a particularly grievous wrong because friendship needs loyalty, even if it does not require benefaction.

Friendship gives a friend a reason to trust a friend. Here is a cliche: If you want a friend, you must be a friend. And it must mean: If you want to be a friend, you must commit yourself to her, over others, to be with her even when being with her is a severe disadvantage to you.

And so we have a real commitment of intention even if we do not have a commitment of extension: a commitment to a quality of relationship for now even if it is not a commitment to be friends forever.

Still, having conceded so much, something in us wants more. We want a friend who sticks with us after we have moved away and we do not play tennis together anymore, or bitch about fortune and the terrors of love, or plot ways to renew the church or change the world; we want a friendship that lasts even though most of the mutually enriching ingredients of friendship are gone. We want a friend who sticketh, not only as close, but nearly as long as a brother. For when we lose a close friend, we feel a kind of death. Kierkegaard said that to lose a friend is like what happens when the second part of a hyphenated word is erased and only a dangling half-word is left, with a hyphen dangling at the end waiting for the other half to come back.

We pine for a world where long term fidelity and friendship are compatible. And we believe that this life is worse off, that the human community forfeits its humanity when friendship is all ad hoc, relished today, relinquished tomorrow. The city is sad when a lonely person’s best friend is his therapist, or his bartender.

Maybe our longing for lasting friendship is a hint that heaven must be real—that there must be a time and a place where nobody is a mere neighbor or brother-in-law whom you have to love because you are a Christian, but where everyone is a friend you want to love. Heaven is where friendship is both deep and enduring, and so generously, so promiscuously shared, that philia, not agape, and not eros, but philia, friendship, will be what fills the human soul.

What I suggest is that friendship, when we are all transformed, may be the essence of heaven’s goodness, and that our longing for it may be a strong evidence of heaven’s reality. For the time being, we accept the melancholy of transient friendships and are thankful for the gift of loyal friends as long as they last.

1. Samuel Johnson, Essays from the “Rambler,” “Adventurer,” and “Idler,” ed. W. J. Bate (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), p. 283, cited by Gilbert C. Meilaender in Friendship (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), p. 57.

2. Lillian Rubin, Just Friends (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), p. 181.

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