When I arrived at Yale Divinity School the famous author and Catholic priest Henri Nouwen had retired from teaching and moved north to a different ministry context. However one of the staff members at the Divinity School still managed Father Nouwen’s finances. She shared on the down low that one of Nouwen’s major expense items was flowers. He loved to send people flowers, large, beautiful bouquets for a variety of reasons: birthdays, thank yous, anniversaries, and memorials. Though I never met Nouwen I always treasured the idea that this man who had taken a vow of poverty used what money he had to lavishly convey affection to his friends. For him friendship was not a superfluous add on to life or a social nicety, it was essential to his spiritual walk. He once wrote:

“Friendship has always belonged to the core of my spiritual journey.”

This weekend I will spend my birthday with a friend I met 39 years ago. Some of those years passed and we didn’t even speak. Maybe only a Christmas card was exchanged. But when we get together, not a minute has passed and we return to that deep sense of knowing, of respect, of carefree laughter that one shares with the rare friend who loves you unconditionally and yet still calls you to be more of your best self. Later this summer I will gather with some other graduate school classmates for another birthday celebration. One of them I last saw 17 years ago and the other perhaps 20. But the emails and texts that are flying contain the same raw banter and intimate familiarity that was born when we were all students. I can already feel the joy of simply being with them.

Last week a member of one of our AA groups told me that sometimes the “pivot moment” in someone’s healing is not in the AA meeting but after, in a one-on-one conversation in the Prayer Garden in Centennial Park. God works through friendship. My definition of success in the church is when lives intersect, and grace is present. It can happen at coffee fellowship in the Parlor or over hot dogs on the grill, or in the parking lot as well as it can in the Sanctuary. Through friendship, God’s mysterious and overflowing love becomes real. At the core of our being, we know that we are treasured, forgiven and free. Our souls come to life in new ways in the midst of friends.

Jesus said “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”