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| What Are Friends For? One is the loneliest number … January is a lonely month. Christmas and the hollow days can be tough for some people, and even a happy light does little to dispel the gloom that settles while the world is decorated in tinsel and ornaments. But January’s the dead of winter. You’re lonelier than a preacher at the 8 a.m. service on Epiphany Sunday. It’s the first of the year and you’re sitting there like a diary with blank pages. Someone says, “You lonely? Get a dog.” This is how Valentine’s Day got invented: Someone in January said, “Hey, where’s the love?” It doesn’t get lonelier than the winter months, especially given the fact that according to recent studies we have a third fewer friends and confidantes today than we did 20 years ago, and we didn’t have many then. According to Duke University professor, Lynn Smith-Lovin, we weren’t lovin more than three friends then, and today only two. It seems to me that if we really wanted more than two friends, we’d go out and get them. But we don’t. Why not? We must not really — I mean, really — need friends. If we did, we’d work at it. I was reading the other day about this service that will hire someone to pretend to be your friend if you’re planning to go clubbing or bar-hopping — to look, ironically, for a friend. Fifty bucks an hour will get you a professional wingman, or wing-woman, who will do a brash Vince Vaughn impersonation, bragging about you and puffing you up to everyone else — talking about your great job, great personality, great car, great house. This person will sing your praises — no, I mean, really sing — your praises, help you collect phone numbers, pull you into conversations with beautiful women or cool people, score you some serious connections, and basically make you look so honking good it’s ridiculous. What are friends for? Who needs them? There’s the Alibi Network that exists to provide cover for cheating spouses. Can’t find a friend who will lie for you? The Alibi Network’s got it covered. We don’t need friends for companionship because we’ve got Oprah, Dr. Phil and the CSI and Law and Order franchises, not to speak of ESPN. We don’t need friends for artful and stimulating conversation, because we’ve lost our conversational skills and don’t know how to converse unless it’s a conversation that consists solely of the exchange of information. If it involves a discussion of ideas, particularly with those of an opposing view — we’re in trouble. I was impressed by N.T. Wright’s discussion of his collaboration with Jesus Seminar scholar, Marcus Borg, with whom he has profound theological differences. His comment (see the Wright interview in this issue; our interview with Borg ran in the July-August 2006 issue) was that in a culture that is increasingly polarized, he and Borg want to model how to have theological conversations. So what are friends for? To mooch free food and products off of. To help you score Laker tickets; that’s what friends are for, baby. Or, friends might be protectors, defenders or advocates, as in “Friends of the Public Library,” or “Friends of Tibet,” or “Friends of Open Space.” Friends of Ted Haggard. Mel Gibson. Michael Richards. As Dionne sings, “For good times and bad times/ I’ll be on your side forever more/ That’s what friends are for.” Sometimes, “What are friends for?” is like a Sicilian response to some gesture of largesse. The judge gets an all-expenses-paid trip to Hawaii. “How come? What gives?” [Shrug of the shoulders] “Eh, fugetaboudit. What are friends for?” [Pause. Adjust the tie.] “But about this little matter …” Aristotle talks about friendship (philia) in his Nicomachean Ethics (VIII.3) and says that they come in three varieties: friendships based on utility, pleasure or goodness. We have some friends because they serve some purpose. We have some friends because they’re amusing to be around. But the best and most enduring friendship is one that’s based on goodness because the friends “wish good to each other for each other’s own sake.” Jan Yager in her book, Friendshifts: The Power of Friendship and How It Shapes Our Lives (1999), argues that today we have fewer friends and the friends we have come and go in shifts as we move through different periods in our lives. The friends we had 10 years ago have moved to Vermont or California, or are on a different career or family path and we’ve moved on. We have few friends today, and the few friends are new friends, if indeed we have any friends at all. It wasn’t always this way. Back in the day, you had friends whether you wanted them or not. We lived in a porch ‘n’ parlor culture then, lived in smaller towns, congenial neighborhoods, and if you wanted a slab of meat you went to the butcher, shoes — you went to the shoe store, repair shoes — to the cobbler, and you got your milk, cream and eggs from the milkman. We were a nation of shopkeepers. Everyone knew everyone else’s business. Today we drive, not walk, in a Hummer, to the mall five miles away, or to the grocery store five blocks away. This is an important discussion for Christians because “friend” is a theological concept that — if the metaphor is disappearing in the culture — may soon have little content for 21st-century people, like, say, “shepherd.” What’s a shepherd? We have to be taught what a shepherd is, in order to understand “shepherd.” And we’re going to have to teach, and model, what a friend is, in order to help others understand what a “friend” is, what a friend is for. Abraham was called a “friend” of God. Jesus said to his disciples, “Now I have called you my friends.” We’re getting to the place where we read that and don’t have a clue as to what that means. “Friend? Huh?” We don’t have friends, we don’t need friends, we don’t want friends. We don’t know what friends are for. That probably overstates the case. But I think it comes close to describing a lot of people — people who come to church once a Sunday or once a month. I thought I’d at least mention it. As one friend to another.
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