WHAT IS GRACED FRIENDSHIP?
Graced friendship is a relationship given to us by God to bring us into communion. It is a friendship that reveals God as a communion. The first graced friendship that is essential for healing is our friendship with God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.
ABBA FATHER
In friendship with God the Father we see that no one on earth is our ultimate origin, which is why we “call no man on earth father” (Matthew 23:9). Even though we have an earthly father or father-figures there is only one REAL Father, the first and last father, the only one truly worthy of the name, before whom all others are merely icons of the real deal. God the Father is the principle, initiator, and beginning of our whole person. Blessed Pope John Paul speaks about Christ’s conversation with us in the theology of our bodies that brings us back to the beginning. The Father is our beginning. He is the source of your manhood & masculinity or womanhood & femininity. In friendship with the Father we come to discover ourselves as “Created before the world began” or existent within the mind of God the Father before he created us, before there was a chance for sin, and most importantly in a personal way, before there was sin in my own life. A tender, interior, real friendship with our heavenly Father has the power to bring real freedom and confidence. Men find that they can stand tall as a son of God, who shows them their “glorious liberty of the sons of God” (Romans 8:12-17).
Women find the father-daughter fulfillment as being enthroned and enshrined in the Heart of the Father like “a dove nestled in the cleft of the rock” (Song of Songs 2:14). I don’t know how many times I find the necessity of re-introducing the relationship with Abba Father in the lives of the faithful. It seems there are so many people whose primary hindrance to holiness and happiness is that they don’t have a real friendship with God as Abba. How many people there are who just can’t find that extra confidence boost to go beyond themselves, stuck in a rut, spinning their wheels, just waiting for the moment when they will finally begin to live the Gospel the way their heart longs for.JESUS REDEEMER
Jesus is our friend. Moving beyond the cliché, we have to see that a friendship with Christ means redemption from sin. Depression, anxiety, fear, worry, hopelessness, and doubt often plague the emotional lives of many, but do they ever link these things to allowing sin to remain in their lives? A sin is a grave moral act that is against the ten commandments that a person consciously and willingly commits or some good that they ought not omit. A sin is bad, you know it, and you do it. Sin is not an attitude or feeling and can be something that a person really likes and is attached to, could even feel really good about it, even though they know deep down that it is evil. Their minds justify it, and growing accustomed to it being in their life or lacking the courage or desire to be free, they don’t get rid of it.
HOW USELESS it is to talk about healthy graced friendships if a person is still in mortal sin! They could have already gone to confession many times, but they never confessed a particular evil that they freely and knowingly did many years ago. That sin is still lodged in their heart and life, and, still like a foreign infectious object, is the actual reason for many sleepless nights or depressing days. HOW FUTILE would it be to talk about relationships if you didn’t first get rid of sin. If a person commits one mortal sin they merit the eternal punishment of hell and separation from God (Catechism of the Catholic Church 1033-1036). This is the dogmatic teaching of the Council of Trent and therefore the authentic teaching of Jesus Christ. This is a teaching that he personally reveals to you in an intimate friendship with him. If the punishment after death is hell, you better believe that there is a very real separation from God in the soul that manifests itself in the emotions and thoughts of a person already in this life.
St Teresa of Avila said about those in mortal sin, “I cannot believe that He would grant them contemplation” and in another place “one of the biggest hindrances to holiness is unconfessed mortal sin.” We must confess our sins, according to canon law, “in kind and number all mortal sins committed after baptism” to get rid of them like weeding a garden. If we to just confess the sins without doing this it would be like taking the tops of the weeds off, which would in fact merely prune them, allowing their roots to grow deeper in unseen soil of our souls. In confession, Jesus is our friend who frees us sin.
Confession is the Sacrament given to us by God to be honest with ourselves and accepting of the evil that we have actually done. It is the way that we no longer feel victim of our childhood experience, when we take full responsibility for our lives and actions. I am convinced that it is the true way for God to totally free us of things which plague us, and that many kinds of emotional imbalances, depression, anxieties and fears, still are permitted to rule our souls because of unconfessed sin.
The love of Jesus, who was crucified for us and knows us even in our sins, loves us exactly where we are at right now, and it is this love, perhaps only this love, that gives us the courage to be brutally honest with him in the Sacrament of Mercy. Also we must know that a real friendship with Jesus Christ is SACRAMENTAL. This means it is incarnated into a specific ritual that he himself instituted and in which he himself wills for me to participate. I need to be able to hear his words spoken to me in a sacramental-personal way,
Baptism- “unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God” (John 3:5)
Reconciliation- “My child, your sins are forgiven” (Mark 2:5)
Eucharist- “This is my body, which will be given up for you” (Luke 22:19)
It is important for me to understand that is through sacramental friendship that it is incarnate, made real and intimate in a way that will potently change my life and bring me deeper into Christ. Christ also makes this friendship deeply ecclesial, a relationship in and of the Church. In this way I can truly hear the voice speaking in to me as the living Word of God, that is only transmitted in its fullness in the tripod of Sacred Scripture, Sacred Tradition, and the Magisterium of the Church. The chief place where this Word is spoken to me and I receive it is the Liturgy, especially when it is celebrated well, with dignity and solemnity.
THE HOLY SPIRIT, THE SOUL OF OUR SOULS
The Holy Spirit is the Love of the Father and the Son. He is the “soul of our soul,” he is the gentle and powerful lover of our inmost hearts. To know him in personal friendship is first to realize that he is not just a symbol like a dove, a fire, a drop of oil, but a real PERSON, a friend. This friend is PURE LOVE. This is his divine personality. To know him is to know you are loved from the inside-out. This love takes the form of an interior power, a fullness, the joy of eternal love, the happiness of blessedness, the power of God alive in us.
The Holy Spirit reveals his friendship with us as the one who dwells and fills our bodies as a holy temple, our hearts as a sacred altar, our minds as a sealed tabernacle. He is particularly important in the work of the redemption of our bodies. In our baptism the Holy Spirit, and therefore the entire Blessed Trinity dwells in our inmost heart. Although our faculties are immediately purified of original sin, the effects still remain, and the Spirit works mightily in our interior to bring this about. From the inside and working outward the Holy Spirit slowly transforms our beings through grace, through prompting us to desire redemption more, through our response to suffering, ultimately through an ever more pure and full gift of our inmost self to God and to his friends. It is very much like a microwave oven, which heats up the core and then slowly moves outward.
“Deep calls to deep in roar of mighty waters” (Psalm 42:17), that is God the Holy Spirit searches the depths of man and “searches the depths of God” (1 Corinthians 2:10) and joins the misery of man to the mercy of God in Christ. You could say that the Holy Spirit finds the riches of the depths of Redemption, of the merits of Christ crucified, of his sacred wounds and sews them into the very wounds of man. For it was man’s wounds that wounded the redeemer and his willingness to be wounded by love for our sake that releases the mighty waters of the Holy Spirit, so that the inmost depths of man are eternally transformed into the depths of God. The greatest thing therefore that unites us to God are our wounds, not our gifts or virtues. They good that is in us is not the cause of our union with God but the fruit of it. The good that is in God cannot resist the parts of us that need him the most like water falls to the lowest point. This happens because of God’s mercy, not because of us, however our desire, our groaning, our inmost yearning for God is our cooperation in redemption. This is a work of the Holy Spirit and often happens very deeply within us without even our knowledge that it is happening, like heart transplant surgery or a bone marrow transplant. As Blessed Pope John Paul II said in his encyclical Dominum et Vivificantem (On the Holy Spirit in the Life of the Church)
"For we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words."282 Therefore, the Holy Spirit not only enables us to pray, but guides us "from within" in prayer: he is present in our prayer and gives it a divine dimension.283 Thus "he who searches the hearts of men knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God."
The Holy Spirit himself is the relationship of the Father and the Son. He therefore is the one who is our relationship with each person in communion with them. He is the Spirit of friendship, of communion, of belonging, of family love. We ought to desire that the spirit of our relationships, which may often even in good and holy friendships still have elements of need, gratification, egoism, greed, vanity, impurity, and pride, be replaced with the Holy Spirit who is the relationship Spirit. What moves and motivates your friendships with others? What is the reason and purpose? The Holy Spirit purifies our relationships. It is truly only in Him that we have graced friendships with others.
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