In Spiritual Friendship, the English monk Aelred of Rievaulx draws on the long tradition of philosophical reflection on friendship going back to the ancient philosophers. Aristotle said, ‘A life without a friend is not worth living. A friend is another oneself.’ So this was a subject of great intellectual inquiry: What is friendship? What is the role of friendship in life? Today, we’re very interested in relationships of all kinds, but we tend to approach relationships more often in a pathological way, or we approach them often through the way they have failed, and often because they do fail.
But Aelred is speaking about friendship as both a goal of life and also the way to that goal. And he puts it into a Christian symmetry by speaking about Christ as the friend in the same way that Sufi mystics have this refrain in many of their poems of ‘the friend’. The friend is the Spirit of God within you, but it’s also a part of yourself. As you make the journey, you are becoming more friendly with yourself. This is something I think we learn through meditation.
