We learn the root of charity through our close relationships

HE’D GONE TO THE EMERGENCY room, feeling horrible, not in the “I’m very sick” way, but in the “I could be dying” way. The doctors didn’t know what was wrong with him but did enough to send him home, feeling a little better but afraid that he was very sick, as he turned out to be. He only told me later.

I told him he needed to tell his friends when he was in such danger. He was as stoic as most of the men I know tend to be. We all feel we should muscle through such things on our own and not bother anyone else.

His circle of close friends all wanted to know. We wanted — I know better, but this still sounds a little sappy to my ears — to care for him. Whatever he needed, we wanted to do: prayers first, but also rides, food, companionship, running errands, cleaning the house, listening to him lament the awful New York Jets.

Stoicism of the sort that keeps you from sharing your burdens is a curse that you must exorcise. It keeps you and your friends from that sharing of burdens that’s essential to friendship, and it robs your friends of chances to be true, caring, sacrificial friends.

They need that chance, and you’re the one to give it to them, simply because you’re the one in need. At some point, they will be the same for you.

We need the training friendship provides. We learn to love those we don’t know by loving those we know well. Saint John Henry Newman explained this in a beautiful sermon titled simply, “Love of Relations and Friends.”

God works this way, he writes. We learn by doing. We learn to do big things by doing the little versions of the big things. “We are to begin with loving our friends about us, and gradually to enlarge the circle of our affections, till it reaches all Christians, and then all men.”

We need practice, which we can only get from our friends. “By trying to love our relations and friends, by submitting to their wishes, though contrary to our own, by bearing with their infirmities, by overcoming their occasional waywardness by kindness, by dwelling on their excellences, and trying to copy them, thus it is that we form in our hearts that root of charity, which, though small at first, may, like the mustard seed, at last even overshadow the earth.”

My friend admitted that he should have alerted his close friends. He wanted our prayers and sympathy, and he might have needed our help as well. His experience was lonelier than it needed to be. He saw that our care for him meant something binding on him. If nothing else, he’d want us to be, and we’d want to be, a little better prepared for his death. Which was not, let me be clear, all that unlikely.

Friendship — serious friendship — is a relation in which you give up purely personal decisions. You have invested yourself in people and welcomed their investing themselves in you, so that their losses are yours and yours theirs, and your joys also.

How this works out in any particular friendship is a matter of negotiation and growth. Some friends are this kind of friend, and some aren’t. But once you enter into a real friendship, you’re no longer purely a free agent with respect to your friends. You’re not a person among persons, but a person with persons. You’re a friend among friends.

David Mills has edited Touchs tone and First Things magazine and now writes columns for several Catholic publications.