We all want friendships, particularly close friendships – people in our lives we not only enjoy doing things with, but who we also can trust to see our flaws yet see them as part of the whole picture of who we are, who we can count on in hard times, and who see the good in us that we sometimes don't see in ourselves. If we don't have the kinds of friends we want, we feel lonely and left out. And those who do have friends find community and safety.
We know that good friendships are important to the Lord too. And interestingly, He tells us about how to develop good friendships, in part by spending a considerable amount of time telling us about dangerous friendships, which He calls 'friendships of love'. At first glance friendships of love seem to be exactly what we would want in a friendship. After all, we'd say that we love our close friends. But the Lord means something different by this term and to understand it we need to get a bit technical.
Friendship of love is to be distinguished from external friendship, which is with the outer persona alone and exists for the sake of various pleasures of the body and the senses and for various kinds of contact. This external friendship can be contracted with anyone... This is simply called friendship, the other, friendship of love, because friendship is a natural connection while love is a spiritual connection (True Christian Religion 446).
The last phrase is the crux: Friendship is natural, but love is spiritual. The challenge comes when we have a friendship with someone – a connection that is based on external similarities – but infuse that external connection with the power of an internal bond of love. The disproportion of the bond with the quality of the relationship causes trouble.
I should add here that we do love many of our friends and that friendship is then no longer natural, but spiritual. The Lord calls that sort of love 'mutual love'. In this kind of friendship, the quality of the friendship and the quality of the love are proportionate. And this is beautiful.
The danger lies in getting overly close with people whose values we do not share. External friendship revolves around shared activities; love revolves around values. When we develop a closeness in a friendship that should be reserved for people we share deeper values with, we can get into trouble. What happens in this overly close bond leads us to keep an undiscerning connection with the person even when they are doing things that are wrong, or saying things that are untrue ie. when their actions conflict with our own values. We fall into this trap when we say, 'my family/friend, right or wrong.'
People who do this can not only be led into dangerous situations in this life, but in the next life this bond can cause considerable hardship. If the person they are friends with happens to be evil, for a time they can be dragged down into hell with that person before they slowly learn to see the person's true character (True Christian Religion 447, 448). The Lord says that this happens particularly between family members and between people who have spent a lot of time trying to get close to someone else (True Christian Religion 448.2).
The Lord wants us to have many friendships, even those when we disagree on fairly significant issues. But He also wants us to be safe and wise in our friendships. The easiest way to do this is to pay attention to what others value, as well as to what we do together with them. To the extent that we share values, we let the friendship develop into something deeper and to the extent we don't, we keep the friendship at a more superficial level (True Christian Religion 449). Or to put it another way, when we seek to love what is good and true in the people around us we will, without thinking about it, develop friendships that are as strong as the values we share with them.
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