“A Gift Beyond Compare”
A Sermon on Friendship
Given by Rev. Tricia Brennan
Westminster Unitarian Church
September 19, 2010

Good morning.
So as you might have gathered, the focus of our worship this morning is on friendship. Why, you might be wondering? Why start this new church year on the rather prosaic note about friendships- nothing wrong with the theme,   but aren’t there other topics more exotic or thought-provoking or challenging? After all, everyone has friends, and we cherish them, don’t we? We don’t need to be reminded, by a preacher or anyone, not to take our friends for granted….if that is where perhaps I was going….

I begin the year with friendship because I think it encompasses all that we do in a church, and because even when we don’t take our friends for granted, I do think we can underestimate the significance, power and beauty of friendship in our lives.

Here’s a notion to ponder. A year ago The New York Times Magazine article “Are your friends making you fat?” posits that our social networks- our friends and acquaintances- exert huge influence on our behavior. A close friend of the same sex becomes obese and our likelihood of becoming obese soars by 171%.  A sibling has a child and we are 15% more likely to have a child within two years. But more surprising, according this study which gathered its data from the more than 15,000 people involved in the famed Framingham Heart study- is that we are influenced by friends of friends.

The study’s co- author Dr. Nicholas Christakis tells of his patient, terminally ill elderly woman with dementia who lived with her daughter as her main caregiver. The daughter was exhausted from caring for her mother for months; the daughter’s husband, in turn, became ill from coping with his wife’s extreme stress. One night after visiting the dying mother, the family doctor arrived back at his office and got a phone call from a friend of the husband, asking for help, explaining that he, too, was feeling overwhelmed by the situation. The mother’s sickness had, in effect, spread outward “across three degrees of separation.” “This illness affected the daughter, who spread to the husband, who spread to the friend, the guy who called me up,” said Christakis.

That friend of a friend connection- coined the three degrees of influence- is one reason why there is a lot of interest in this large study. The study claims that the influence of one person’s behavior can spread to a friend of a friend, even when the friend in common does not display the behavior in question. In other words, it is your friend’s weight gain that is the cause of my extra pounds even though you are still your skinny self. How so?- the study’s authors claim to be a bit mystified, perhaps the intervening friend is more pre-disposed to the behavior- weight gain or whatever- is a possibility.

For most of us, three degrees of connection connect us with more than 1000 people, all of whom, the study contends, we can theoretically make healthier, fitter and happier just by our contagious example. If someone tells you can influence 1000 people, the study’s other c0-author,  James Fowler, contends, “it changes your way of seeing the world.”

That’s how the article ends, on that sort of calculating yet triumphant note.  It’s not how this sermon ends however, for though the social connectedness of friends- how we influence one another for better or worse- is both fascinating and of value- it is not the whole story on friendship.

Who’s your best friend in the whole world? Think on him or her for a moment. If you don’t have one best friend but a few close friends, cast your mind over them all.  I suspect just thinking about our good friends can bring a smile to our face, open our hearts a little, even if such a friend has died. At least that is how it is with me, the goodness of the friendship puts me at peace like few things do.  “I count myself in nothing else so happy, as in a soul rememb’ring my good friends,” wrote Shakespeare.

Until recently a young couple from Australia- Tamsin and James- lived across the street from us with their two young children. . They were here for a year while James finished a medical residency at the Brigham and Women’s hospital. Having left family and friends in Australia, they knew no one. One day my husband Chuck met Tamsin coming up the street pushing her baby stroller. “How’s it going, Tamsin?” he asked. “Wonderful!” she said, “I have made a friend!” She glowed as she recounted how a woman from a community choir that she joined had asked her out for tea that day and what a marvelous time they had had chatting and getting to know each other.

My friend Mary’s son started at a new high school when they moved. He had a hard first year, getting used to the new place and meeting people. Early in his second year he came home one day and said, “Mom, it sure is a lot easier when you have friends like I do now.”

A definition of a good friend, in my book, is a person I can call in the middle of the night if I am in crisis or need to talk.
Another common definition of a good friend is a person who will help you move. And one pundit took that a step further, “A good friend is a person who will help you move a body.”  You get the picture- a close friend is one whom you can count on when life gets rough, or sticky or confusing or unbearable. Friendship can be a gritty occupation. A friend’s gift comes not only from how they help as from the confident assurance we have that they will be there to help if we need them.

According to a 2006 study from Duke University on social isolation, fewer people who have such confidence. One in every four people in this large scale study said they had no one to talk to about important topics, doubled from 20 years ago. At the same time, the percentage of people who talk only to family members about important matters increased substantially. The bottom line of the study is that Americans have fewer close friends.

Perhaps we have fewer friends because our culture does not value friendship enough. Friendships are the second tier relationships, with romantic relationships given the premier status. How often have we heard or used the phrase “Oh, they’re just friends”? Just friends, said with a tinge of regret or slight dismiss, as if the relationship hasn’t made it to the big leagues of romance or engagement, and was still playing in the minors. We celebrate marriages of long duration but where are the celebrations to mark the years of long-standing friendships- 10 years of friendship, 25 years, 50 years? For in truth friendships are often more durable and sustaining that many a marriage. And in fact friendships sustain marriages, for the emotional richness of friendships take the pressure off spouses to be all things to each other. Yet somehow friendships don’t count that much…

I’ve often wondered too about the phrase “no immediate survivors” written in the obituaries of people who have died leaving no living family members. Having been at funerals of people who knew how to be good friends, having seen the church full of grieving friends, I want to say- just who are all these people if they aren’t those who loved and now survive the deceased? Having myself lost good friends whose influence I feel years after their passing, I know the loss of a good friend is no small thing. Because we don’t give friendship its full accord, we can underestimate or minimize the grief and loss of a close friend when we think it is just family members who are the true sole survivors, the true bereaved.

And friendship is grace too, grace found in its voluntary nature. We are not obliged to be in relationship with our friends, the way we are with our siblings and in-laws, cousins and other relatives. Circumstance compels us to relate to neighbors and co-workers, but not so our friends.  They are chosen. We chose them, they choose us. And that I think is a power of an entirely different sort than three degrees of  influence.

Some friendships make perfect sense- you share a love of sports or politics, your sense of humor is the same, your went through the war together, you went through kindergarten together, you got divorced at the same time.

But other friendships make no sense at all.
My dad’s best friend was Pete Renehan. They did meet in the Marines but that wasn’t much of a defining experience for either of them, as far as I could tell, brief and stateside as it was. Their temperaments were different- Pete all bluster and bravado, my dad more rational, Pete a dare devil who took up flying in middle age, my Dad afraid of heights.  Their stations in life were different too, my dad a highly-educated successful attorney, Pete a truck driver who hadn’t gone to college. And then there was the Red Sox/Yankees division. But through thick and thin they remained close until death. I can see them now, Pete a beer in hand, my dad his Manhattan, talking and laughing late into the night.

Our friendships don’t have to make sense- that’s the beauty of it.
There need be no common sense reason, no calculation of right or wrong, that draws friends together. We are friends just because, because something in us is drawn to the other and we open up and voluntarily let someone in to our lives.

There is a way in which friendships are subversive. They can’t be legalized, or regulated, they arise out of the freedom to choose who we will associate with, they can be life-changing and they are fluid and surprising, even as they are long-lasting.

Ananda, the beloved disciple of the Buddha,
once asked his teacher and friend about the place of friendship
in the spiritual journey.
"Master, is friendship half of the spiritual life?" he asked.
The Enlightened One responded:
"Nay, Ananda, friendship is the whole of the spiritual life." **

In the spiritual life nowhere do our ideals meet the actual more than in how we relate to each other, in how we make, sustain and are friends.

We can practice the spiritual work of friendship anywhere, though church is an excellent place to do so. I have not been here long but I see the attention you place upon your relationships with one another. The Caring Circle formalizes that in its work but it is evident to me as I observe the how you speak to each other, how you seem to care about one another and what each is going through, how you notice who is missing, and how you enjoy one another. All that will keep you in good stead as you begin this challenging and stressful year.

One thing that I kept the Unitarian Church of Sharon in good stead as they built a new building was their explicit commitment to attend to their relationships. Their definition of success was not just a lovely new building- which they now have- it was that they would all be standing together at the end. That commitment to remain in right relationship was tested at times. That promise did not mean that there were not some bruised feelings along the way. But it was a commitment that was taken seriously by all. It did mean that people stopped and listened, and that there were times they met just to talk about how they had fallen out of right relationship with each other. It meant that they said I am sorry and I forgive you and I understand though I may not agree and let’s stay connected as we continue on.

As you move forward into this year when much will be asked of you as a community, the value you place on your relationships will ensure that you will in fact deepen rather than hurt your relationships.

In churches and especially in churches engaged in large projects as you are, we are given the chance to discover that  friendships are more that just a privatized experience. We do tend to think of friendships as a sort of “me and you” thing and forget that it is bigger and broader than that. That brings us back to the social network study I mentioned at the start of this sermon- that each friendship, each relationship has influence that extends beyond its own dyad. In a religious community, we touch on something deeper still- how we treat each other is in fact the whole of spiritual life. Even for those for whom the spiritual life very much includes a relationship with the divine, there is no authentic way to be on good terms with God without being our good terms with the people in our lives, with our friends.

So I end with a request. Sometime in the week ahead, please pause and think about your friends, those who are in your life right now, those who have been important in your past. And then take one action that will nurture a friendship. It might be to set a date to get together with a friend, it might be to re-establish connection with  someone you still care about but have lost touch with. If you had a good friend who died whose memory you carry ,you could share that with other good friends who remember him or her, or with the family members of the one now gone. The possibilities are as endless. I will join you in this endeavor, this nurturance of friendship, this gift beyond compare.

Notes:

“Are Your Friends Making You Fat” by Clive Thompson, New York Times Magazine, September 10, 2009

“Social Isolation in America: Changes in Core Discussion Networks Over Two Decades”, American Sociological Review, June 2006

** The story of Ananda and the sentence following the story were found in a sermon by Rev. James Ford called “Valentine’s Arrows: A Sermon on the True Nature of Friendship, given to the First Unitarian Church of Providence, R.I. on Feb. 15, 2009