A MONK IN THE WORLD
Author: Wayne Teasdale

The Nature of Friendship
Looking at my own life as a contemplative in the world, living at the crossroads of fundamental societal change, I want to explore here the vital nature and value of friendship as it functions in my experience. As a hermit monk in the Catholic tradition, I am naturally also a celibate. Neither marriage nor the joys of sexuality are options for me, given my commitment to the monastic ideal. This path is not a popular one, and I don’t expect the worldly wise to understand it, but it affords its own joys and possibilities. For one thing, it has made it possible for me to appreciate how precious a gift friendship actually is.

Friendship meets a human need to be nourished and comforted by the companionship, laughter, and the wisdom of others. We benefit greatly when we are among people with whom we enjoy sharing time. Many less technologically developed societies around the world — as well as American college students! — have developed hanging out with friends into a high art form, and this capacity is a talent natural to the human family. We have an innate tendency to be social, to seek fellowship with those with whom we feel kinship and affection.

The nourishing, comforting, social qualities of friendship, qualities that define this extraordinary human relationship, are universal requirements of a healthy bond of affection in whatever corner of the planet we happen to find ourselves. In our frenetic existence, however, with its emphasis on individuality and absence of meaningful community, we are often left devoid of the deeper richness and texture friendship gives us. We are like refugees adrift in our mass culture, with its anonymity and lack of opportunities. We need friendships as much as we need community, and we require both, because they complete us in an essential way, contributing to our intellectual, moral, psychological, and spiritual maturity. Others complete us because we all share the same mysterious Self, or Spirit. In our families, communities, religious groups, clubs, associations, and friendships, we are ritualizing our need for wholeness, integration with the larger Self, our ultimate and permanent identity.

Friendship is thus a universal value present in every culture, at every time, in all the situations of human experience — in the most deplorable as well as the most sublime. The ubiquity of friendship eloquently verifies the subtler nature of our identity in our individual and collective participation in the one selfhood. We all feel the need to be immersed in its fruitful connection with our common self in the Spirit. And so, since it expresses and meets a universal need, it is also an important goal and must be one of the highest priorities in the lives of most individuals and cultures.

I have many friends. And I continually find our greatest joy comes when we share time with no other purpose than being together. Such joy characterizes all of my times with my Indian friends Russill and Asha Paul, and with my many friends with whom I practiced aikido for three and half years. In each of my friendships, laughter and joy predominate, which are among the greatest gifts we give one another. Russill, Asha, and I usually give a few retreats a year as a team. Normally the theme is a holistic experience of the Sacred, an essentially experiential approach to the Divine. It has become a tradition for us on the last night of these five-day retreats to perform skits. One of these skits the three of us have developed is, if I may say so, a hilarious portrayal of an Air India flight, where it is said all sentient beings are welcome, including cows, sheep, dogs, and cats. Although the skit has a basic structure, we also improvise, and our retreatants usually can’t stop laughing, especially when they see Asha in the role of a flight attendant, Russill as a dhoti-clad Brahmin, wearing only a white cloth around his waist, and me as a stuffy Englishman.

Often it is similarity of interests that draws individuals together, and the common interest, whether a working goal, cause, or spiritual commitment, acts as the catalyst awakening relationships to this uniquely focused affection. A person who becomes our friend, which happens when we really begin to see one another, ceases to be the anonymous presence our society’s indifference often dictates for most relationships and becomes someone we love and appreciate, in a bond growing more profound with the inevitable ripening of the years.

A common philosophy of life, similar politics, or social orientation, a work or cause shared — all these inspire people to form friendships. But deeper still, we seek friendship with those few who put us at ease and with whom we can really be ourselves. Most of all, we desire friends who create a safe space for us to be ourselves. Friends exhibit this depth of acceptance; they know who we really are and love us for it. This quality of acceptance, of cherishing, is one of the most treasured capacities of life.
Capacity for silliness is another serious measure of friendship. If we can be genuinely free enough to let our hair down together, to be carefree and vulnerable, then we know we have an authentic friendship. When I would visit my Franciscan friends, who were hermit monks in Massachusetts, we would spend nearly our entire visits laughing over church politics, larger society, or our own foibles. Our silliness was in service of poking fun at ourselves. Humor in friendship has no other end than the transcendence it introduces; it relaxes and comforts us. It is often the glue of affection; it attracts us to people, revealing to us their preciousness. Humor gives us access to one another’s humanity, particularly in situations where seriousness prevails. It often breaks the proverbial ice, our usual uptight tension. It has a way of lightening things, of granting much needed perspective.

During my late teens, I experienced a profound fear of death, which stemmed from a confrontation with my own mortality and that of my Uncle John, with whom I lived. My uncle had adopted me when my mother married my step-father, who didn’t want me in the picture. I was suffering an inner dark night about death brought on by a crisis of faith. Uncle John knew I was going through some spiritual crisis related to death, and he tried to dissipate my fear by provoking me to laugh about it. Like a Tibetan elder training a young lama about the ubiquity of impermanence, he used repetition to make his point.

On dozens of occasions I would return home to a dark house except for a little lamp near the sofa. Uncle John would be laid out on the couch like a corpse, with his tongue sticking out. It was a pretty convincing sight, and the first and second time he did this he managed to frighten me almost to death! When I cautiously approached him and was about to take his pulse, he opened his eyes wide, grinned, and blurted out, “Scared you, didn’t I?” Terrified me is more like it. After recovering from my momentary fright and irritation, I broke into a long fit of laughter with him. Over time, this little ritual, mocking death and the fears it arouses, cured me of my melancholy philosophical mood. With the help of my later mystical experiences, it propelled me into my enduring spiritual optimism. Poking fun at death had freed me from fear and eventually led me to a larger understanding of life.

It is undoubtedly a common commitment to faith, a similar view of the nature of existence, the purpose of life, and the destiny of persons that brings us together and solidifies countless relationships. I make this observation on the basis of what I’ve witnessed and on what is certainly true in my own case. It is definitely true of many of my friends; they are people with whom I have a lot in common, especially in a spiritual sense. Uncle John and I had our Catholicism as a foundation. The pursuit of knowledge and wisdom and the search for the Divine, or the spiritual journey, are powerful points of focus in friendship. Aristotle observed that lasting friendship must be predicated on a similarity of nature and not on attraction or utility. By the latter he is referring to those unstable friendships based on using one another.3 Utility reduces the other to an object to manipulate and exploit for some hidden purpose. A friendship based on utility is founded on sand and simply not worthy of our attention.

Excerpted from “A MONK IN THE WORLD” by Wayne Teasdale, New World Library, .95, Trade Paperback, Order Toll-free: 1-800-972-6657 Ext. 52 or www.newworld.library.com






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Wayne Teasdale is a lay monk who combines the traditions of Christianity and Hinduism in the way of Christian Sannyasa. An activist and teacher in building common ground between religions, Teasdale serves on the board of trustees of the Parliament of the World’s Religions. He is a member of the Monastic Inter-religious Dialogue and helped draft their Universal Declaration on Nonviolence. He is an adjunct professor at DePaul University, Columbia College, and the Catholic Theological Union, and coordinator of the Bede Griffiths International Trust. He is co-editor of The Community of Religions, with George Cairns, and the author of The Mystic Heart and dozens of articles on mysticism and religion. He holds an M.A. in philosophy from St. Joseph College and a Ph.D. in theology from Fordham University. He lives at the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago.

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