Reflecting on the value of friendship

For eons, religious leaders, including Jesus, Muhammad and the Buddha, have taught that friendship is at the center of a flourishing life.

Jesus, as usual, said it plainly in John 15:13: “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” He both said it and did it.

Gautama the Buddha once said this: “Good friends, companions and associates are the whole of the spiritual life.”

And the many quotes from the Prophet Muhammad, gathered by followers and scholars, include this: “A man follows the religion of his friend; so, each one should consider whom he makes his friend.” And the Qur’an itself (43:67) offers this: “Good friends bring you closer to Allah.”

As the grandchildren whom my wife and I share begin to move into adulthood, I’ve been thinking about their need for steady friends. In turn, that has led me to give thanks for the many friends with whom I share my life — a life they make infinitely richer.

In fact, I was rather stunned when I began to list the various groups of friends who have been so important in my life, starting with my three sisters, who — after the death of one of them in March — are now two.

Although we are (were) scattered literally coast to coast (California to Kansas City to Chicagoland to Cape Cod), we have maintained regular touch in many ways and have encouraged each other as we have moved from childhood to senior discount status.

Beyond my sisters, there’s the group of men from my church with whom I began to meet weekly in the early 1980s for friendship, Bible study and prayer.

More than 40 years later we’re still at it, though we’ve lost and gained a few members over time. We meet each Wednesday morning and know we can tell each other almost anything and everything.

Then there’s the weekly golf group I’ve been a part of for several decades. Like other groups of friends, it’s lost and gained a few folks. We try to play nine holes on Friday mornings, and only a few of us (not including me) are very good. But we don’t play for birdies and eagles. We play for companionship, for camaraderie, for a way to take a generative break from life’s seriousness.

There’s also the small group of folks with whom I gather in a classroom at my church each Sunday morning to talk about what we learned from last week’s sermon. We appreciate the freedom to share our worst and best attempts at theology. I deplore missing that class.

(If my life sounds boring, it’s not. Rather, it’s “borning,” which is to say that these various groups give me new life each time I’m with them.)

Some friends I don’t see as often as I’d like.

My former colleagues at The Kansas City Star are among them, though I loved a recent reunion with some of them.

Same with the many friends I have in the National Society of Newspaper Columnists and in an alumni group of kids I once went to school with when I was a boy in India. That group, in fact, gathered in Madison, Wisconsin, early in June, and it was great to be together.

Former neighbors? Yes, I stay in touch with some of them because I like and admire them. Sometimes I drive down my old street hoping one of them will be outside and we can catch up.

Same with college friends and former high school classmates (I saw some in early June in Woodstock, Illinois).

To say nothing of friends from nonprofit boards on which I’ve served. Plus, all the people who were my wife’s friends before we were married, many of whom have become friends of mine.

There’s a joke about friendship and Jesus that goes like this: “Nobody talks about Jesus’s greatest miracle — having 12 close friends in his 30s.” (Well, 11, anyway.)

That’s funny only because humor inevitably comes out of pain.

And the pain of loneliness is so pervasive in our country that in 2023 the U.S. surgeon general issued a distressing report about the acute loneliness plaguing Americans. That report was called “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation,” and I suspect things are no better in this regard today.

The need for friendship is one reason faith communities offer opportunities for members and visitors to meet socially outside of worship — like World Cup watch parties. Those efforts sometimes flounder but it’s important that they be made because friendship and connection are so central to who we are and to the core teachings of various religions.

Do friendships fail? Oh, my, yes. That’s what happened to Jesus and Judas Iscariot. In fact, here’s a story containing a long list of celebrities who once were friends, but who no longer connect. Sigh.

The book of Proverbs (27:10) says this: “Do not forsake your friend or the friend of your parent.” It’s good counsel but we are human, so sometimes we’re unable to sustain a meaningful, generative friendship.

We should mourn broken friendships and repair them if possible. But mostly we should invest our time and love in the friendships that sustain us, so we won’t have reparations work to do.

I continue to be astonished at all my friends, even including the nearly 5,000 people who are called my “friends” on Facebook, though I don’t know a lot of them well. But I’m especially grateful for my very best friend, my wife.

I try to be morally serious about friends, which means recognizing that I can never know them fully, nor they me. Instead, I must accept what they give of themselves as a gift and not beg for more than they want to give.

The religious leaders I quoted above are right.

Friendship is central to a meaningful life, and without it we shrivel.

As David Dault writes in his new book, “The Accessorized Bible,” when Jesus called followers to lay down their lives for a friend, he “is not glorifying death.” Rather, he writes, “this is an invitation into life itself: a life of abundance — with others. . .”

And that’s my own experience with friendship. Tia Levings put it this way in her new book, “I Belong to Me: A Survivor’s Guide to Recovery and Hope After Religious Trauma”: “Peace means I know who my friends are.” Exactly.

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P.S.: In my last column, I mentioned that a white woman from Seattle moved to Parkville, Missouri, to spend more time with her grandchildren and that she was instrumental in writing a successful grant application that helped a Black church, Washington Chapel C.M.E., restore its old structure. Her name, which wasn’t in the column, is Barbara Luetke.

Bill Tammeus, an award-winning columnist formerly with The Kansas City Star, writes the “Faith Matters” blog for The Star’s website. His latest book is “Love, Loss and Endurance: A 9/11 Story of Resilience and Hope in an Age of Anxiety.” Email him at wtammeus@gmail.com