The Wall

I sit in front of the narrow way
it stretches
restricted
And all I see in front of me is a wall
Soul-less, soul-sucking, inviting despair
Composed of bricks of inadequacies and false adequacies
Fears and former dreams.
It is high, but not so high
A leap, a bound
I'd clear it and be on my way --
not so bad once the wall was passed
('til I reached the next) --
had I the strength.
Had I.
And that leap-able but unsurpassable height sits mocking me,
Reminding me I could be a saint if I could choose it.
And that one "if" echoes with the promise of an eternal nothing:
comfortable, safe, alone.
Heaven's a decision I'm not strong enough to make.
"You built me," the barrier mocks.
"I became more insurpassable with each moment you could not surpass yourself."
A necessary silence or a necessary smile that lay lingering in the air
unfulfilled.
Carpe Diem, seize the day;
What fool would defer, defer, then be no more?
The despairing choice of multitudes suddenly becomes clear.
My barrier built in a life of relative ease.
I cannot jump it,
not for my sake.
The prize mocks by its proximity:
"You could, if..."
The narrow way is simpler when it's vast
confusing
labyrinthine.
More hopeful when The Decision's deferred
To somewhere, somehow, down the line.
To if I turn the corners right.
Surely a single jump is not the only route?
Pushing, climbing, dismantling brick by brick.
But then I look to the side, and see Him.
Him on the cross with his arms stretched wide
In the widest embrace man has ever known
Wide enough to bridge the gap between creator and created
The eternal and the temporally bound
Wide enough for me and my wall besides,
And the width of his arms is the width of the narrow way.
I see how blind I've been
blind, blind, deliberately blind.
I broaden my gaze to match his, and I see the way
Not over, through, bounding, scraping
But around.
Slowly, sheepish, I peer, I look up.
I look around my wall and there He is
Has been
Eternally has been,
Hanging there as if to say "I have all eternity to wait for you."
His wounds more eloquent than any man can intertwine.
Inscribed in each of them are two simple, fatal words:
"I thirst."
Fatal because I could have chosen loneliness for myself, but not for Him.
Fatal for my faults, my fears, my former dreams,
Fatal for the wall which dissipates like so much smoke
Because it does not, cannot matter when He is there.
It does not, cannot span the chasm of his thirst,
I cannot cover it over, it yawns:
gaping, mawing, bleeding since the dawn of time.
Nowhere to run from wounds so vast I am engulfed.
"Come down. Come down because I will not come
Yet cannot leave you there."
Churlish, childish, I command:
Afraid because he found the point on which I cannot yield.
He does not answer, only hangs, hangs and loves,
And by His hanging writes my sentence,
the just penalty for every "No" I wish to fling against the promise of eternal joy:
"I hang, have hung, will hang, am eternally hung
For you
And I will not come down."
Precisely because I cannot, am naught and fulfill naught:
I must.
If He could be satisfied I'd look to stronger types.
Defer until He came down
To leave me for a better love.
But as He is helpless, hopeless,
Hopelessly in love,
I cannot leave Him there.
He nags me, loves me, baits me with His wounds
And sings,
Sings my name sweetly from the cross.
Each wound a note in an eternally written symphony.
I could be won with no earthly roses, but He bleeds me a garden,
An offer I cannot refuse:
"Come, come and bring your wall.
I'll make it mine,
If you but come.
Come, and follow me."

The Visitation

The Second Joyful Mystery: The Visitation

The Fruit of the Mystery: Ministry by allowing Elizabeth her joy

A year ago I wrote a post on the Magnificat. One of the parting points of the piece, and the "thesis" of the post, was the following:

Elizabeth's greeting is Mary centric. It is all about her greeting, her voice, her womb, and her response to God. Mary does not condemn this, but she redirects it. She changes all of the you to He. It is not about what she has done for God, it is about what God has done for her, and for everyone else.

"...the Almighty has done great things for me, and holy is his Name."

[...] while proclamation is more active, magnification is a passive thing. When a magnifying glass is placed in front of something else, it cannot help but to magnify it.

In my last post, on the Annunciation, I focused on what exactly the Almighty did for Mary: namely, leveling the playing field for her from the start so she had the freedom to choose Him. This is a leveling He does vocationally for each of us; although (because less is asked) less is given to us than to Mary.

Mary, the perfected recreation of who we were meant to be, blazed a trail for us to follow when she walked her path. If we are to take the Joyful Mysteries as an encapsulation for us of what our own vocational journey should look like, after this moment of super-abundant grace comes the next scene, the Visitation, where others recognize something extraordinary in us. When your life has just been changed and re-shaped by an unmerited gift, personal praise of this nature can be hard to stomach.

But Mary doesn't just redirect the praise. She allows Elizabeth her joy. This, more than any physical acts of service she did while she was there, was her primary act of service to her cousin.

Mary was not given her vocation for herself, but for the world. After the acceptance of the gift, she goes out. Out to the hill country of Judea, out on a long and arduous journey, out to minister. Our vocation, if it is from God, should not merely deepen our interior life; it broadens our heart outwards to include others, to allow us to embrace the world.

Sometimes when we embrace the world it responds coldly; it does not understand. Other times when we embrace the world it understands completely. It rejoices because we have given it hope. Elizabeth said to Mary:

Blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.

Elizabeth was in a unique position to understand Mary since she herself was the beneficiary of a miraculous act.  Yet Mary also came to help Elizabeth better understand her own vocation. Mary's arrival happens in a critical period in Elizabeth's life: after she was the recipient of a miracle but before her husband's lips were unsealed to explain to her the larger significance. Up until the Visitation, Elizabeth saw the gift of her unexpected pregnancy as something given to her by the Lord "to take away my reproach among men." (Luke 1:25) Given that she saw John the Baptist as a personal gift to herself, it would not be surprising for Elizabeth to initially see Mary's pregnancy in the same way. After all, in those times, fertility was tightly linked in social and religious perception to divine favor. Yet she said "Blessed are you among women" as a direct out-flow of the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. She saw Mary and her cooperation with the Divine Will as good in and of themselves because, by the very act of her yes, even before accomplishing anything wonderful in the world, Mary opened Elizabeth's eyes to the realm of what was possible with God's grace.

The best way that Mary can help Elizabeth correct her perception of her pregnancy and understand that her vocation is a gift not to herself but to the world is to let Elizabeth be the first beneficiary of the manifold gifts that Mary's own vocation will give to the world -- to be the first of the children of Israel to feel hope at the coming of Christ  ("Why is this granted me..."). Hope that He would make all things new and accomplish something beautiful in us.

That is the kind of witness to beauty that we with our vocations are called to give. This witness does not allow us to hide in humility, but sometimes it is far more humble to simply shine.

The Annunciation

The First Joyful Mystery: The Annunciation

Fruit of the Mystery: "Yes" to the unknown

Fra Angelico, The Annunciation, San Marco Monastery, Florence

I've already explained here why Fra Angelico is my favorite artist, so I won't dwell on that; I'll merely say that this is my favorite depiction of the Annunciation. The specifics of its theology will probably come up over the course of the post; for now it speaks for itself.

As stated here this series of meditations on the rosary is set in the context of a vocational journey. And so let us begin.

God comes into our lives and announces to us that great plan that he has for us. At times he does this directly, and at times through intermediaries -- just as the angel Gabriel was an intermediary to Mary. At times the vocational call is something we have known for all of our lives; at times it is a total surprise -- something we have never imagined. The Virgin Mary's call certainly falls in the latter category. Though  the length of time between when one hears the call and when it comes to fruition can vary greatly, one thing is constant: it is always something for which God has been preparing us for all of our lives -- just as he prepared the Virgin Mary by her Immaculate Conception.

It is crucial to make a distinction here. Although God has been preparing us for this moment for all of our lives, this is not Calvinistic predestination. We still have the freedom to reject it -- although this would be a rejection and a fracture of our own being (this idea is expressed very well in And You Are Christ's by Fr. Thomas Dubay). Mary, just like us, would have been capable of rejecting the invitation to be Christ's mother had she wanted to do so; in the Immaculate Conception God merely gave her the enormous grace necessary to be able to understand and accept His call.

There are several reasons why this is so interesting to me. The first is that something about the combination of the Immaculate Conception and Annunciation has always (ironically) struck me as a bit too Calvinistic to sit right -- especially when you have hymn verses like "predestined for Christ by eternal decree."1 Mary, however, is not predestined in the traditional Calvinistic fate-robot sense of the word. To see why, we have to look at the nature of concupiscence.

Concupiscence, as it turns out, is a tragically misunderstood word. Most dictionaries, in a form of demented synecdoche, equate a facet of it -- sexual desire -- with the whole thing; however concupiscence is much more than simply a synonym for libido. According to CCC 405:

[O]riginal sin [...] is a deprivation of original holiness and justice, but human nature has not been totally corrupted: it is wounded in the natural powers proper to it, subject to ignorance, suffering and the dominion of death, and inclined to sin - an inclination to evil that is called "concupiscence". Baptism, by imparting the life of Christ's grace, erases original sin and turns a man back towards God, but the consequences for nature, weakened and inclined to evil, persist in man and summon him to spiritual battle.

Our own concupiscence makes it hard for us to follow God's will in our lives. An absence of concupiscence doesn't mean we are obligated to do good, merely that the playing field is level instead of tilted. With concupiscence, the devil already has a foothold in our hearts before the battle even starts. We're already inclined to listen to him. For Mary to have been born with concupiscence would have been the ultimate lottery for him. If you have to fight a battle just to not snooze the alarm in the morning, just think of the war he must have waged against the woman "destined" to crush his head with her heel. No concupiscence doesn't mean no temptation -- just look at Eve -- it just means the slate is clean; there's no "acquired taste" for sin.

God gives us this grace as well -- although it is not necessary for him to totally remove our concupiscence.  Without this grace we would be utterly incapable of accepting the magnificent gift he offers us; it would seem to us like a punishment instead of a gift. It is critically important that we see Mary's fiat in this same light -- if she becomes roped into Divine Motherhood by her pre-conception acceptance of unsolicited gifts and the accompanying obligations, one of the most profoundly beautiful aspects of salvation history goes stale. Just like with the dual-authorship of the Bible, God has the divine condescension, the profound humility to let humans share the credit for the mystery of his grace working in our world.

This is why Mary is the New Eve, and why her "Yes" is so beautiful. She, like us, had the power to say "No." She, like us, was given the grace to have the freedom to say "Yes."

There are many times in our vocational journey when we are asked to say "Yes." Most of them are mundane and have no angels or moments of Divine Revelation, they are nothing more than painful perseverance on a path we have already begun to trod. But here, in the Annunciation, we meditate on the grace Mary received to make that first painful, beautiful fiat. There would be other, more meaningful surrenders later (with Simeon at the presentation, in the crowd as the mob yelled "Crucify him!", at the foot of the Cross), where she knew just how much was asked, and still surrendered all.

The Annunciation is a jump into an abyss. It is a "Yes" to an unknown: an act of love, an act of trust, an act of grace.
________
1 Thankfully for my spiritual life I generally tend more towards the "I'm too stupid to understand what's actually going on" than the "let's nail my objections to the Church door" approach; as an end result I developed a voracious appetite for reading apologetics materials in high-school.

Fra Angelico

As I was getting ready to begin my post on the Annunciation, I realized that it was about to become a post on Fra Angelico. Since that would do justice to neither the Annunciation nor Fra Angelico, the friar gets his own post.

 

Dominic et al at the Coronation

Fra Angelico's real name was Blessed John of Fiesole, which I just learned from Wikipedia. So if you want a good historical explanation about him, you should consult that and not me.

What really interests me about Fra Angelico is San Marco Monastery.

Cell 3 in San Marco

Fra Angelico (and his helpers) painted devotional images in the cells of the friars in San Marco. These are significant for a number of reasons.

They're simultaneously a set and a series. There's a progression in their subject matter depending on the stage of religious life the occupant was in (the novices traditionally occupied a certain block of cells). The novice cells were primarily filled with crucifixions, since that had to be understood before anything else. St. Dominic also gets older as the images progress into the cells occupied by older members of the congregation.

While all of that is interesting, my fascination comes from the following:

1. They were painted for the friars, not for the world.
Fra Angelico did not expect to gain fame during his lifetime for painting them. They were painted in cells: a part of the monastery closed to the public. Like Michelangelo sculpting the back of David even though he thought no one would see it, Fra Angelico painted for God.

Noli me tangere

2. He is master of the theologically correct gesture.
There are a lot of really atrocious pictures of Mary and the saints. Not because they're ugly -- in fact they're often quite beautiful. Rather, despite the fact that religious art is often intended to be didactic, they bestow gestures, expressions, and postures upon the Church Triumphant that span a vast array between annoyingly inaccurate to outright heretical. I've seen enough pictures of the Annunciation or Mary Magdalen to really appreciate it when someone really gets it right. It's said that a picture's worth a thousand words. Most of what we say and convey as humans isn't oral -- by showing this with his brush, Fra Angelico has written his Summa Theologia on plaster walls.

The Mocking

3. His simplicity amplifies the truly important.
In looking at the images of Fra Angelico, it is easy to see the purpose for which they were originally painted: to be objects to foster contemplation. This purpose explains why some of his pictures are seemingly "incomplete" -- such as the one at right. The disembodied heads and hands are in fact more fully bodied than if they were fully drawn because they represent us. We are the ones buffeting and spitting upon Christ. Unlike so many other Renaissance artists, Fra Angelico avoids the temptation for elaboration. Michelangelo added buff naked figures to the background of his Holy Family picture because he liked to paint them, and was good at it. Fra Angelico avoids the temptation to indulge in exhibitions of artistic mastery, and by doing something creates something free of superfluities, something truly conducive to leading the soul to contemplation.

4. Fra Angelico shows us a model of how to pray.

St. Dominic at the Crucifixion

A characteristic feature of Fra Angelico's paintings in San Marco is that St. Dominic or some other saint from the ranks of the Friars Preachers is often portrayed as present at a biblical scene in contemplation/adoration of the events. Dominic is sometimes portrayed as studying -- rightly seen as a form of prayer by the Dominicans -- such as in the above picture of The Mocking. The implication is not that Dominic bi-located, but rather, that, through contemplation, we are connected outside of time to the mystical body of Christ. Our contemplation can literally bring us to calvary, to the coronation. It is in the act of contemplation that the past of the faith becomes our present and can be brought forward to affect our lives. It is only once we have been to the foot of the cross that we can share it with others.

Rosary Meditation Series: The Mysteries of the Rosary as a Vocational Journey

I am currently abroad in an undisclosed foreign country, and I have a 40 minute walking commute to work every morning. Since I work at a Catholic University and they have mass in the morning in the chapel, the streets are still peaceful and empty at the early hour at which I traverse them. As I became familiar with the route, my steps gained a certain automaticity, enabling effective multi-tasking. Never one to see time go to waste (except on the Internet), I decided to pray the rosary during my commute, and it became a habit that stuck.

With the occasional exception here and there, my family has prayed the rosary together every night for as long as I can remember. This, in my perspective, has always been simultaneously good and bad. There are obviously abundant graces that come from praying together as a family, and I know that it taught me early on that prayer and the faith were both things that were to be valued and prioritized. Even when our days were busy, we still found time for the rosary. Familiarity with the prayers and traditions of the church is beautiful; however, my familiarity reached the point of automaticity. I gained the super-power of being able to reach the end of the decade of a rosary, having orally prayed all of it yet without the faintest recollection of having done so. The trap of automaticity is always there waiting for me when I pray the rosary; because of this it has long been hard for me to pray it devotionally. It has rarely been my prayer of choice -- unless on car trips or to kill time; however as I have matured into other aspects of my faith, my interest in the rosary has been slowly awakening. The art of Fra Angelico brought me to an appreciation of the Annunciation, and that then became a portal to dive deeper into the rest of the mysteries. I began to realize that the mysteries were not just arbitrary events in Christ's life; I realized they reflect our own lives, struggles, and journeys, and show us how to live our faith. Dominic preached the rosary and won the hearts of the Cathars. By understanding the mysteries of the rosary, we understand the mysteries of our faith. My morning commute has been the final straw in making me fall in love.

I want to frame this series in the context of the nature of the rosary as a hylomorphic prayer -- a prayer that possesses both body and soul and loses its nature if separated from either. Just as the automaticity of my steps allowed me to meditate on other things while they still led me to the University, automaticity of praying the rosary can open a door to deeper meditation -- though all the while our steps through the rosary still form a foundational undercurrent directing our thoughts toward the divine.

Our Lady giving the rosary to St. Dominic

I will hyperlink entries as they go up. They might not go up in order, since I'm still fleshing out the parallels on some of them.

The Joyful Mysteries

The Annunciation

The Visitation

The Nativity

The Presentation in the Temple

The Finding of the Child Jesus in the Temple

The Luminous Mysteries

The Baptism in the Jordan

The Wedding Feast at Cana

The Proclamation of the Kingdom

The Transfiguration

The Institution of the Eucharist

The Glorious Mysteries

The Resurrection

The Ascension

Pentecost

The Assumption

The Coronation

The Sorrowful Mysteries

The Agony in the Garden

The Scourging at the Pillar

The Crowning with Thorns

The Carrying of the Cross

The Crucifixion

"My soul magnifies the Lord"

As part of the ordinary for Evening Prayer in the Liturgy of the Hours (LoH), the "Magnificat" (aka "the Canticle of Mary") is said daily all over the world by millions1 of Catholic priests, religious, and laypeople. I myself have been saying the Liturgy of the Hours regularly-ish for a bit over a year, and have thus become well acquainted with the prayer -- which is actually lifted straight out of the bible (Luke 1:46-55).

The prayer is Mary's response to Elizabeth's greeting. After experiencing her baby leap within her at hearing the sound of Mary's voice, it says that Elizabeth became "filled with the Holy Spirit" and she praised Mary, saying:

“Most blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. And how does this happen to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me? For at the moment the sound of your greeting reached my ears, the infant in my womb leaped for joy. Blessed are you who believed that what was spoken to you by the Lord would be fulfilled.”2

Although Mary's words are the ones recited every day as a part of the LoH, Elizabeth's are the ones which will be familiar to most Catholics because they are the prime source for the Hail Mary. So if Elizabeth is praying the first-ever Hail Mary, the Magnificat can be rightly seen as Mary's response to that prayer. The key to interpreting her response lies right in the first line; however I didn't realize this right away because most translations -- in my opinion -- do not do justice to the poetry of Mary's expression. 3 

Here is how the standard translation in the LoH reads:

My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord, my spirit rejoices in God my Saviorfor he has looked with favor on his lowly servant. 

From this day all generations will call me blessed:the Almighty has done great things for me, and holy is his Name.

He has mercy on those who fear himin every generation.

He has shown the strength of his arm,he has scattered the proud in their conceit.

He has cast down the mighty from their thrones,and has lifted up the lowly.

He has filled the hungry with good things,and the rich he has sent away empty. 

He has come to the help of his servant Israelfor he has remembered his promise of mercy,the promise he made to our fathers,to Abraham and his children forever.

I always considered "My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord" to mean that Mary was simply rather passionate about lauding God. This changed when a priest called my attention to this alternate translation:

My soul magnifies the Lord...

We see words constantly but we rarely give any thought whatsoever to their etymology. We take their origin for granted.  Despite the number of times I had seen the title of the prayer, it had not occurred to me that Magnificat looks remarkably like magnifies. As "Magnificat" is a latin word it takes no great genius to see why they are so alike.

"My dear Saint Jerome!" you say, ever so indignant, "Whatever do you mean by putting such a strange word into the vulgate? Mary cannot magnify God! To magnify something is to make something greater, and if God is that than which nothing greater can be conceived, how could he possible be made any more magnificent? You, sir, despite your sainthood, are in mortal heresy!"

Or, alternatively,

"At last! Here we find proof that Mary is, in fact, greater than God, giving us due license to worship her as much as we please without Protestant criticism!"4

My dear, misguided fool, let us rewind a bit and make some important distinctions, and you will find this ancient Catholic, biblical prayer is unprecedentedly profound, and not at all heretical.

What does a magnifying glass do?

1.) A magnifying glass makes things appear larger.

Magnification does not, as you suggested, increase the size of something. It merely increases our perception of the magnitude of something. Just as the David magnifies Michelangelo, Mary's soul magnifies the Lord.

2.) A magnifying glass helps us to discover truths indiscernible with our fallen vision.

God is everything brought to its perfection, but sometimes perfection incarnate and stretched throughout eternity is difficult to emulate in our own lives. We see Christ, but, despite his full humanity, we sometimes our blinded by his divinity. "Of course he resisted temptation, of course he never sinned, he's God!" In Mary, God isolates the perfect human soul from divinity so that we can see it more clearly.

3.) A magnifying glass can focus light to start a fire.

God in his super-abundant love and mercy is showering light upon us all the time, but sometimes we're stubborn, clumsy little boogers.  We hide under leaves or trip into puddles and it becomes awfully difficult to set us on fire. We may know that he is God, and that he is big and large and magnificent, but our love is often diffused everywhere and difficult to focus anywhere, let alone on an infinite, invisible God. Mary shows us to love Christ as she loved him, and puts us in his hands.

So, in this light, in what light does this put her response to Elizabeth's greeting?

“Most blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. And how does this happen to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me? For at the moment the sound of your greeting reached my ears, the infant in my womb leaped for joy. Blessed are you who believed that what was spoken to you by the Lord would be fulfilled.”2

Elizabeth's greeting is Mary centric. It is all about her greeting, her voice, her womb, and her response to God. Mary does not condemn this, but she redirects it. She changes all of the you to He. It is not about what she has done for God, it is about what God has done for her, and for everyone else.

"...the Almighty has done great things for me, and holy is his Name."

What I like about the image of magnification rather than proclamation is that, while proclamation is more active, magnification is a passive thing. When a magnifying glass is placed in front of something else, it cannot help but to magnify it.

Oh, and did you catch the second line of the Magnificat?

"my spirit rejoices in God my Savior."

Mary magnifying God for us through her free cooperation with his Divine Will. Now that's what I call radical joy. If done properly, any life lived with radical joy will magnify the Lord.

____
1 Rough estimate. Actual numbers unknown.
2 Source: New American Bible, Revised Edition (NABRE)  Luke 1: 42-45.
3 Or, at the least, they make it less obvious to dullards like myself. I'm not sure if the translation I like is actually a more accurate one or if it's emphasis is just better for my favorite exegesis of the passage. Fun fact though: a new translation of the liturgy of the hours is currently in the works.
4 Disclaimer: Neither of the above statements represents sound Catholic teaching.

P^3: Pray Past Pleasure [Part 1: True Friendship]

Aristotle classifies three distinct categories of friendship. Friendships of use, friendships of pleasure, and  true friendships.

Friendships of use are when we are friends with people because they will help us study for tests, will give us rides places, or are a way into the crowd of which we would like to be a part. They occur when your sole reason for being with a person is for something they can provide you.

Friendships of pleasure occur when we are friends with someone purely because we enjoy their company. They make us laugh, we may share common hobbies, and they help us pass the time. These will be the majority of our friendships, and there is nothing inherently wrong with this category. Not all of our friendships can be true friendships.

In fact, Aristotle makes the category of "true friendship" exceedingly narrow. To qualify as a true friendship, your commitment to the relationship must be beyond the motivations of the first two categories. There is a Spanish song I absolutely love called Alegate de Mi, and in many ways I think it is a very astute embodiment of true friendship.

I'm going to do a side by side of the original Spanish and then my rough translation. I can't bear to just do one because if I just post Spanish, English speakers won't get anything out of it, and if I just post the English all that will be there is my butchered version. If you're reading the English please know that the Spanish version I fell in love with is so much more beautiful and poetic than my rough approximation, but hopefully the English is sufficient for its purposes.

Alejate de mi y hazlo pronto antes de que te mienta. Tu cielo se hace gris , yo ya camino bajo la tormenta. Alejate de mi, escapa ve que ya no debo verte. Entiende que aunque pida que te vayas, no quiero perderte. La luz ya, no alcanza..... No quieras caminar sobre el dolor descalza....... Un Angel te cuida....... Y puso en mi boca la verdad para mostrarme la salida.... Y alejate de mi amor.... Yo se que aun estas a tiempo.... No soy quien en verdad parezco.... y perdon no soy quien crees YO NO CAI DEL CIELO Si aun no me lo crees amor............ y quieres tu correr el riesgo veras que soy realmente bueno en engañar y hacer sufrir a quien mas quiero.. Alejate de mi pues tu bien sabes que no te merezco

Remove yourself from me and do it soon before I lie to you. Your sky is made grey, I now walk below the torment Remove yourself from me, escape, see that now I should not see you Understand that although I ask that you go, I don't want to lose you. The light now, it does not rise You don't want to walk through pain barefoot An angel cares for you And put in my mouth the truth in order to show me the exit And Remove yourself from my love I know that you still have time I am not who I appear to be And I'm sorry, but I am not who you believe, I did not fall from heaven If you still don't believe me, love, And you want to run the risk You will see that I am truly good at deceiving and making suffer those whom I love the most Remove yourself from me since you know well that I do not merit you

So what does a Spanish love song have to do with Aristotelean friendship? I put my favorite line from the song in bold. Essentially, the voice of the song is acting completely selflessly here. He loves her and wants to be with her. To be with her gives him pleasure. Nonetheless, he knows that it is better for her to not be with him and is therefore willing to sacrifice all pleasure derived from his relationship with her for her greater good. True friendship is desiring the good of another and devoting yourself selflessly to that regardless of what you get out of it.

True friendship, however, is not about you just being a slave to everyone else. You would be acting as a true friend to those people by doing so, but that does not necessarily equal a true friendship because a true friendship must be reciprocal. That means that both of you are dedicated to the relationship not for pleasure, but for the other person's good. One of the primary reasons our nation's divorce rate is so high is because people marry when they are still only on the second level of friendships: friendships of pleasure. These friendships easily decay and fade away because they are based on common interests, transient sensorial feelings, and emotional stimuli. True friendships endure because they are based on a choice to pursue the good of the other. In a true friendship, you see and desire the beauty of their soul.

God has already shown himself to be a true friend to us by the incarnation and redemption, so that part of the true friendship will never be lacking. In fact, God is incapable of having any other type of friendship because he is entirely self-sufficient (no friendships of use) and is already the highest perfection in every thing, so his happiness can in no way be increased by us (no friendships of pleasure).

The question then remains, do we solidify our relationship with God as a true friendship by being true friends to Him?

Part 2: Consequences
Part 3: Real Life Implementation