Faculty Commons Virtual Team,
Faculty Commons, a Cru ministry
[April, 2013]—
Friendship is the greatest of worldly goods. Certainly to me it is the chief happiness of life. If I had to give a piece of advice to a young man about a place to live, I think I should say, ‘sacrifice almost everything to live where you can be near your friends.’ I know I am very fortunate in that respect. — C.S. Lewis
Recently, Faculty Common’s staff member Randy Newman recommended the reading of the novel, Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner. Randy said, “No other novel drives me to be a better friend or a better husband than this novel.”
In it, two couples struggle with the challenges of the academy–the search for professional and publishing success, the hope for and loss of tenure, the longing for academic security. Into these challenges comes the story of a friendship between two couples–a friendship so reminiscent of Jesus’ words. “Greater love has no one than this that someone lays down his life for his friends.”
One of my favorite lines in the book occurs when one of the wives, feeling suddenly sick, is put to bed during a noisy gathering of university colleagues, now friends. Her husband says to everyone:
“Oh, please don’t leave. Sally loves the sounds that friends make.”
Why is it that typical academic environments appear so little like Parker Palmer’s definition of education: the pursuit of truth in the company of friends?
Is it the competitive environment, the struggle to be the smartest in the room? Or is our identity so rooted in promotion or position that we can’t rejoice in the success of others? Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, “The aim of friendship is exclusively determined by what God’s will is for the other person.” Do you agree that we make too little of friendship?
In that Oxford community of scholars, known as the Inklings, it was different–all seemed to value a company of friends. For J.R.R. Tolkien and his fellow Oxford don, C.S. Lewis, friendships were not just elements in a story–they were as Aristotle said, “the excellence which is most indispensable in life.”
They came together because of common values and interests. They found that sharing one’s own joys is one of life’s greatest pleasures. Lewis describes how friendships are born, how they arise from commitments larger than self, even larger than the other:
“Friendship is born the moment when one man says to another, ‘What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . . Friends are not primarily absorbed in each other. It is when we are doing things together that friendship springs up-–painting, sailing ships, praying, philosophizing, fighting shoulder to shoulder…You will not find the warrior, the poet, the philosopher or the Christian by staring in his eyes as if he were your mistress: better fight beside him, read with him, argue with him, pray with him.”
Of all people, we as Christ-followers should make more of friends. Who are your friends?
(c) 2013 Faculty Commons