In the Christian tradition we have a rich but often neglected theology of friendship. Philia, one of the four concepts of love in Greek, is a profound love for the other for their own sake, and not for our own advantage.
“I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends” (John 15:15, NRSV)
Philia implies a deep communion with another person, while always maintaining the freedom to choose the other’s good rather than it being an obligation. Thomas Aquinas even said that the ultimate purpose of human life is nothing less than “friendship with God,” a relationship of mutuality and union which God invites us into through Jesus.
I find this notion of friendship a powerful alternative to our often superficial ideas of what it means to be a friend. Too often it seems like we define friendship as those who we simply “hang out with,” exclusively sharing our own ideological assumptions and group identity. Yet a deeper sense of friendship is meant to be an intimate sharing with the other of our very selves in freedom, and an invitation to let the other in at the most fundamental level of our being. The demand thus becomes not simply to love the other but to be ready to be challenged and changed by them. Through the Holy Spirit our friends can call us to a fuller and more genuine discipleship.
“Will you be my friend?”
So friendship might be more a matter of quality of relationships rather than quantity. But what about for people with disabilities? I am convinced that one of the greatest sufferings for people with developmental disabilities is their general lack of relationships of mutuality and trust, their poverty of genuine friendships. Too often we have the notion that those with cognitive impairments need only our care, which then excuses us from a more radical sharing of our lives.
One of my earliest memories of Jean Vanier was watching an interview with him on a Canadian television program. At one point he was speaking of those people who came to L’Arche and occasionally exhibited violent behavior. I will never forget how he explained the motivation for this kind of violence. He said that these people were asking fundamental questions in this behavior: “Do you love me?” “Will you be my friend?”
It was one of those moments when your heart stops for a moment and you realize that somehow God has spoken to you through another person. For the first time I understood that people with developmental disabilities asked the same questions and shared the same hopes that I did.
But I still did not believe that I could be really friends with a person with a disability. Sure I could help them and serve them and maybe even love them. But it took being in L’Arche to teach me how Gord and Brian and Angus had a gift of drawing me into transformative relationships of mutuality. It was they who befriended me as much (if not more) than I befriended them.
“Will you be my friend?”
Jesus invites each us to a relationship of intimate participation in the very life of the Trinity, a life that cannot help but overflow into the whole creation. Can we dare to acknowledge that welcome as the guiding force of the universe, one that calls us all to practice that invitation to make friends with even the most radical “other”? Perhaps then we might see what true friendship really means, and be profoundly transformed in the process.
“Will you be my friend?”
Jason Greig was a Student Associate with Anabaptist Disabilities Network when he wrote this article.
