The beloved cardinal wrote that strong friendships are a source and test of virtue.
Friendship is good for your health, believe it or not. Yet many adults struggle to make time for friends, especially after having kids.
As our schedules fill with work, family, and endless activities, getting together with friends is often the first thing we cut.
It’s easy to let friendships drop by the wayside. It’s tempting to think that work and family life is enough to meet all our social and emotional needs.
But it’s worth making the extra effort to plan time with friends. There are even spiritual benefits to building and maintaining strong friendships — just take it from the saints.
One saint who championed friendship was John Henry Cardinal Newman. This brilliant writer and theologian continues to affect the lives of countless Catholics 135 years after he died.
A high-ranking Anglican bishop, Newman couldn’t resist his growing interest in Catholicism, and finally “swam the Tiber” in 1847 after 22 years as an Anglican clergyman. He took a special interest in university education, and his legacy lives on today at “Newman centers,” Catholic student centers at secular campuses around the world.
Here are four reasons John Henry Newman encouraged strong friendships:
“The best preparation for loving the world at large, and loving it duly and wisely, is to cultivate an intimate friendship and affection towards those who are immediately about us,” Newman wrote in his sermon “Love of Relations and Friends.”
God, he said, grounds “what is good and true in religion and morals, on the basis of our good natural feelings.” As we act toward our friends and family, so we learn to act toward God and people in general.
This idea of Newman’s is similar to Mother Teresa’s famous comment that working for world peace should begin with loving one’s family.
2. Befriending and loving people takes practice. The more effort we make to love our friends, the better we learn to love God.
“Love is a habit, and cannot be attained without actual practice,” Newman wrote. He offered the following examples of ways that friendship forms the heart to be devout and truly charitable:
- Trying to love our relations and friends
- Submitting to their wishes, though contrary to our own
- Bearing with their infirmities
- Overcoming their occasional waywardness by kindness
- Dwelling on their excellences, and trying to copy them
3. Love of friends and relations gives “form and direction” to the “love of mankind at large, making it intelligent and discriminating.”
When a person does not have close friends whom they know well, they easily make errors in judgment when trying to do good on a broad scale, because their goodwill is not grounded in reality.
“Men of ambitious and ardent minds,” he wrote, “are especially exposed to the temptation of sacrificing individual to general good in their plans of charity.”
This temptation is far less likely, however, when “men cultivate the private charities,” that is, have a circle of good, close friends and family.
4. Close friendship offers a chance to “exercise Christian love” to a point of “perfection.”
Practicing charity in close relationships, as between spouses or roommates or friends, is “a special test of our virtue.”
Many friends, upon living together, “find it difficult to restrain their tempers and keep on terms,” he wrote. But “the Saints of God” bear patiently with each other, as they have “the love of God seated deep in their hearts;” thus “a faithful indestructible friendship” at close quarters “is a lively token of the presence of divine grace in them.”
This weekend, see if a friend can come over to watch the football game or to grab drinks after the kids are in bed. Or go a little bigger and invite some friends for a Saturday game night or Sunday afternoon hike.
Friendship takes extra effort, especially when you’re busy and tired. But St. John Henry Newman reminds us: That effort is always worth it.
