“A Friend Loves at All Times,” Proverbs 17:17a

For the last 5 years God has only seen fit to give me the youngest of young friends – women in their 20’s and one in her late 30’s.

I used to complain to God, “Really, God? I’m old. I’m in my 50’s. They’re half my age!”

(I love writing I’m old. I love saying I’m old. I love getting old. More about that later.)

These are ladies who are just starting out in their careers: a business owner, a fund-raiser, a writer and soon-to-be religious sister.

These young friends are Aristotelian in that they want, wish, and will my good even if and especially when my book and my career take me from them.

Aristotle says that wishes are real and that friends will help you ascertain how and if you can obtain those wishes.

I wish to be a paid writer.

These young friends are honest about whether I can.

6 years ago with great reluctance I began a book, a non-fiction account of 9 Indiana kids who somehow made it out of a tumultuous childhood and flourished as adults.

Called Pears for Breakfast: Raised by Wolves in Northern Indiana, I had returned to Indiana to write this magnum opus of a book.

Years before, in Cleveland, writing a different kind of a book, a textbook called We, The People: U.S. Government I had grown so lonely in the task, sitting by myself in the Case Western Law Library poring over congressional hearings andreading Montesquie, Locke, the Federalist Papers all my myself – without conversation, collegiality, camaradarie.

I missed my teaching colleagues. I missed my students. I missed swim practices.

Lingering along the book shelves at a break, I came across Aquinas’ Summa Contra Gentiles and then his Summa Theologia where he asks, “Does man need friendship?” and then affirms that he does.

In Aquinas, I found a friend and his affirmation of my deep-souled need for fellowship was a great comfort to me.

I finished that government textbook and pursued a Masters in political philosophy at The Catholic University of America, desiring a deeper understanding of the philosophical, constitutive nature of friendship.

Roman, Greek, Christian and modern philosophers had devoted significant scholarship to the definition of and life-giving nature of friendship to man and to society.

Aristotle says in Chapter 8 of the Nicomachean Ethics foundation is the basis of a just society, https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/aristotle-the-nicomachean-ethics

“Perfect friendship is the friendship of men who are good, and alike in virtue; for these wish well alike to each other qua good, and they are good themselves.”

Now those who wish well to their friends for their sake are most truly friends; for they do this by reason of own nature and not incidentally; therefore their friendship lasts as long as they are good-and goodness is an enduring thing.”

“And each is good without qualification and to his friend, for the good are both good without qualification and useful to each other.”

“But it is natural that such friendships should be infrequent; for such men are rare. Further, such friendship requires time and familiarity; as the proverb says, men cannot know each other till they have ‘eaten salt together’; nor can they admit each other to friendship or be friends till each has been found lovable and been trusted by each.”

Rome’s Cicero in De Amicitia says, “I can only advise you to prefer friendship to all things else within human attainment, insomuch as nothing beside is so well fitted to nature, — so well adapted to our needs whether in prosperous or in adverse circumstances. But I consider this as a first principle, — that friendship can exist only between good men.” (Source: https://oll-resources.s3.amazonaws.com/titles/544/0267_Bk.pdf)

The Good Book in John 15:13 says, “Greater love hath no man than to lay down his life for his friends.” See https://bible.usccb.org/bible/john/15

The Christian’s Jesus Christ, a Jew, lays down his life for the whole world, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.” John 3:16-17

The crux of Christianity is friendship – sacrificing for others out of love.

Why did God give me, in this short time of writer’s loneliness, young women friends?

They are good in their nature. They’re not proud. They don’t take themselves too seriously.

Also, in their youth of just starting out in their respective careers, they’re risk takers who’ve grown accustomed to hardship.

I’ve, too, have become a risk taker in my second career as a writer.

So, when my lights go out for an unpaid bill; I’m sofa surfing and eating coffee because I’m broke; riding the bike because the car is in the garage because the engine seized when I forgot to put oil in the engine*; I’m walking, not biking, because the bike got stolen, my young friends see and hear the humor in the constant doing without of being poor.

These young friends laugh about the humiliations, trials, and hardships with the energy of someone who knows that tomorrow is a better and brighter day and this, too, shall pass.

My editor? Texas poet Leah about whom I have written? See https://carolthecatholic.wordpress.com/2018/01/26/what-jacques-maritain-says-about-texas-poet-leah-comings-literature/

She’s young, too, and a devout Catholic Jesus freak and Dorothy Day Catholic Worker House alumnus. A Notre Dame graduate with a Texas-size steel will, raised by a scientist mother and a military father, as my editor, she brooks no fools nor excuses.

I can come up with perfectly good excuses for not completing a writer deadline: world-wide pandemic, hurricanes, $0.00 in the bank, strange landlords and neighbors who-haven’t-found-their-purpose-yet and thus act in ugly and awful ways.

She replies to my maelstrom of problems with tough and direct questions: “Where’s the book? The edits? The freelance pieces? How did the interviews go?”

These young lady friends are kindred spirits, to quote Anne of Green Gables. https://www.anneofgreengables.com/

“A friend loves at all times, and a brother is born for adversity.” Proverbs 17:17

Amen.

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*That story on which I was working was so ugly, so terrible that in writing it, I forgot to put oil in the engine. And I’m a Hoosier hayseed who grew up among brothers who watched the Indy 500, changed their own oil in the driveway, and went to car shows. That shows you how terribly the people about whom I was writing have been acting.