Between Friends

© 2010, Rev. Bill Hamilton-Holway

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What a week: rainstorms and flooding, the earthquake aftermath in Haiti, the Proposition 8 trial in San Francisco, the strange political eruptions in Massachusetts and Washington, D.C. and the Supreme Court eradicating years of campaign finance reform…It’s a lot. So much goes on in our world, in our lives. We see images of devastation around the world. We’re aware of much suffering. This all makes for a lot of tension, frustration, hurt, and fear. Hopes rise and fall in us.

Friday, a circle of eleven people, seven from this church, formed on the 400 block of Wilson Avenue in Richmond. Church member Kim Duir led us in laying a wreath and offering our presence at the site where during the week 22-year old Derek Morris was shot to death on a neighborhood street. At the spot where friends had left mementos and messages was Derek’s mother, bereaved and wailing.

Think of all the people wailing—in Haiti, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, on our streets. Derek’s mother was sobbing. We weren’t sure what to do, what to say. Our tears came with hers. We said what we could. May she somehow find comfort. May she find strength. May all the senseless violence end. We said we were sorry. We were so sorry. In that moment, we eleven people became a circle of friends.

Most people, I think, want to learn a way to be with others, to learn to trust ourselves to know what to do, what to say. We want to learn how to make healthy relationships that make a difference in our lives and in the lives of others.

We learn these things by risking friendship.

What do you know about friendship?
What have others taught you?
What have you learned through your own actions?

Friendship can be challenging.
It can break your heart.
It can heal the brokenness.

Have you ever thought of friendship as a theological term?

We can view it as the doorway into understanding the interconnection of all things. One of the seven principles Unitarian Universalists affirm is the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part. Everything is in relation. Friendship, how we live it, how we heal its torn pieces, how we step forward into its new possibilities, helps us to understand the divine within, between, and among us.

By “divine,” I mean our ability to flow in our living, to not get stuck, to act from the creative place deep within us that always, always, overcomes alienation and draws us to new connection and understanding.

Friendship is a doorway to divinity.

Almost two years ago, Barbara and I sat around a table with a circle of friends in Tulsa. My father recently had died and three of my friends had invited my mother and the two of us over for dinner. Kirk and Janine hosted the candlelight dinner in memory of my Dad. Kirk and I met in kindergarten and we both met Janine in seventh grade. In the candlelight, we took turns, around the circle, naming memories of Dad. My friends’ stories of my dad comforted me, strengthened me. Their gratitude for him, their being with me with my tears and with all I was feeling, was what I needed.

Last Thursday night we arrived to the weekly, catered dinner here in the Atrium, to learn that church member Ben Keeler’s father had just died. In our Circle of Community before the meal we offered Ben our support as he prepared to leave the next morning to go to Knoxville, Tennessee to be with his mother. Ben said he had chosen to come to church that evening because he wanted to be with friends. I watched person after person go up and give Ben a hug and simple words of caring and support.

Friends being with me when my father died, this community being with one another, like with Ben when his father died, keep me learning. We learn from one another. We learn how to be with a hurting world, how to be with 22 year old Derek’s mother, broken-hearted on the street in the rain.

All our circumstances are different. I know a woman who felt she never had a true friendship until well into her adult years. She says she had empathy for others but it was without compassion. She saw humans made a mess of things and she was full of judgment. As she grew and recognized her own limitations, her own failings, she knew all people mess up. Then compassion grew within her and she began making deep friendships. Now she seems to me to be able to make moments of deep connection with just about everybody.

Friendship requires a willingness to risk vulnerability, to share deeply, to listen appreciatively. Learning how to trust, especially when you have been hurt in a relationship, can be hard to do.

Church community, at its best, supports this learning

I think it is not by chance that my longest standing friendship is with a man who I met when our parents brought us to church as young boys. I don’t remember not knowing him.

Tom was also at the memorial dinner for my father. He was like a brother to me growing up, and we’ve continued our close friendship through our adult lives. He now lives in Costa Rica.

Tom and I, with the support of our church school community and youth group, shared deep conversation about the values we cherish. We talked of God as Love, life and death, and ultimate concern. We competed in ping pong and pool, and loved throwing a Frisbee. I once told him that though I liked winning when we competed that I never felt diminished when I lost. We each wanted the other to succeed.

We both considered going into the Unitarian Universalist ministry. I did. Tom made a bunch of money and retired early.

Through the wonder of email, I asked Tom for his reflections on friendship.

He realizes some relationships are cloaked to appear as friendships, but are not; and friendliness is not the same as friendship. When he says it’s possible to have too many friends, like maybe 300 Facebook friends, he means in part that the quality of our friendships is much more important than the quantity of our friendships.

He reminded me that no friendship is always the same. Our needs change, as do those of our friends. Friendship is always in motion, evolving, and the depth of friendship is a function of mutual trust as we go through our changes.

When I look back on more than a half century of our friendship, I feel gratitude for the church community where we met and that nurtured our relationship.

Tom ended his email to me with this thought: My love to you, my life-long friend. I am a better person in this world because of knowing you, sharing with you, and loving you... maybe that is what friendship is.

That’s what we ant to say to one another here. I am a better person because of knowing you, sharing with you, loving you and being loved. You see my strengths and my failings and we keep finding our way together.

I believe just seeing each other week after week, greeting one another, singing together, makes us better people.

When Rev. Cathleen Cox, one of our Community Ministers, met with our Board of Trustees last Thursday, she offered a very simple and powerful suggestion for how to deepen our work together. In reviewing a meeting, we sometimes look back at what decisions were made, and if we got through our agenda in the time allowed. Sometimes we talk about the feeling tone of the meeting, where there was humor, where there was tension. Cat called us to go deeper.

She said, ask yourself, “In this meeting what was my experience of respect?” “How respectful have I been?” And, “How have I been respected?” Be in touch with what feelings you have in this regard. This is a foundational concept, she suggested. Nothing is more important.

These are great questions for a working group in a religious community.

And they are important ones to ask within our friendships.

“How respectful have I been?” How respected do I feel?”

Our religious work is not the tasks we engage, but the connections we make.

The religious impulse is toward relationship, to create and maintain friendship.

In many ways this church helps us to do so.

Through our Covenant of Right Relations we call one another to appreciative listening, trust building, and honesty.

Our Chalice Circles are laboratories or training experiences where we practice these skills of friendship.

Our Committee on Ministry adopted a logo two years ago. It’s an eye, an ear and a heart. It gives visual expression to their vision: Seeing, hearing, and loving our members into engaged ministry. By ministry we mean all of us here.

We mean each of us trusting ourselves, what we know, what gifts we have to give that the world needs.

This is our calling: to help one another be compassionate human beings, engaged in serving others.

This church calls us into healthy relationships, where we connect soul to soul, where we risk vulnerability to open ourselves, to listen each other into speech, where I risk trusting myself, and you, that we may become compassionate, courageous and strong. This means not avoiding conflict and disagreement, but trying to find the words to speak to name our truth and our feelings and open our ears and hearts to one another. For, this is what our world needs.

There are so many experiences in our lives that nurture our greed, our alienation, and our fear. Religious community can be a bright spot in a bleak time.

This congregation is not a haven, not an escape, though I know the feeling of relief, of a deep breath as I enter this place. It is rather a safe place to practice growing into the person I most want to be.

Friendship is the antidote we all need. The better able we are to be in deep friendship with one another, the better able we are to carry the burdens of living in our complex, sometimes confusing, and frustrating world.

Through friendships we are reminded of the goodness within us, even when we don’t always act from it.

Through friendships we are called back to our best selves, that we may help to transform this world into a more healthy, healing, heartfelt place.

So, make new friends.

And keep the old.

 

Between Friends from UU Church of Berkeley on Vimeo.

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