Seeing Your Friend Before God

The forgotten eternal dimension of friendship

There is a type of connection that is seldom reflected upon in the modern age, and which comes from understanding the nature of another person as he exists before God.

I have been blessed with a variety of friends, colleagues, and acquaintances. Some of them are more similar to me than others dispositionally as well as in terms of interests or shared loves and values. With some of them, I can “share the Faith.” I have been thinking about what this means of late, likely as a result of recent highly public political sagas in the Church.

Being able to share the Faith with another is not akin to sharing a hobby or even a core value with another person, even though those are goods in their own right. It is so much more. A shared hobby might mean that we have a similar personality type (for example, friends who enjoy gardening are likely to have more similar dispositions to one another than those who enjoy axe throwing competitions), but what hobbies cannot convey is something much deeper: “I recognize the dignity of your beginning, the eternal nature of your destination, and the gravity of who you are to God.” Let’s unpack that.

If you share the Faith with another, you both understand each other’s immortality. As C.S. Lewis said, “You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations - these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit - immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.”

The person sitting across from you is more than what you can see visually. The person with whom you converse will live on in an afterlife without end, a destination influenced by the choices he makes in the present. Moreover, it is not merely the case that he has plans for his own life, but that God too has a purpose for him.

In the context of a friendship, this means that we are called to properly see the other not for who he is to us (primarily), but for who he is before God and entirely outside of our relationship. It means valuing the other in a truly non-secular way.

In this manner, sharing the Faith with another is not reducible to “we both go to church” (or even the same parish), even though outwardly, that might be all that is apparent to an observer. It means that in an immeasurable way, we are working to aid in the other’s salvation, and our friend is trying to aid in ours. It means that even something as simple as giving advice is done within the framework of realizing that you may be helping (or harming) someone else’s pilgrimage to Heaven. It is at once wholesome and terrifying, because there is a gravity to everything that we do and say—to how we live.

I do not mean to suggest that people cannot have close or meaningful associations with those who do not share the Faith, but I do assert that they will lack the particular depth that is possible in friendships among faithful people.

By sharing the Faith, you also share the very image of the hero. You are bonded over an understanding of what holiness looks like, so you know what your interlocutor aspires to. You know what he considers to be virtuous, heroic, and good. These things are not otherwise evident, nor are they constancies in a relativistic society like our own. That doesn’t mean that the person of faith will be perfect, but at least you will both have the same vision of failure.

In fact, by a shared vision of (Transcendent) success, you can guide, care, and love. While one person’s worldly success will look different to another’s, our spiritual success will be in alignment. We can pray together, grieve together with an understanding of those we have lost, experience pain in light of the redemptive nature of suffering, and better support one another through the difficulties inherent in this life. Having the Faith permeates every area of our lives, such that who we are, how we act, and how we love are shaped by it. All the better that we might share it.