True, perfect and eternal friendship

Treasures of Our Faith with Deacon Richard Vehige

On Wednesday of the Twelfth Week in Ordinary Time, our church invites us to continue to reflect on passages from the first book of Samuel. Today’s passage (19: 8-10; 20: 1-17) is entitled “The friendship of David and Jonathan”. Our treasure, which follows, is from a treatise on Spiritual Friendship by Blesses Aelred, abbot.

The books of Samuel describe the rise and development of kingship in Israel. Samuel is a pivotal figure. He bridges the gap between the period of the Judges and the monarchy, and guides Israel’s transition to kingship.

Each section of these books focuses on a major figure in the development of the monarchy: Samuel, the reluctant king maker (1 Sm 1–12); Saul, the king whom the Lord rejects (1 Sm 13–31); David, the king after the Lord’s own heart (2 Sm 1–24). A common theme unites these narratives: Israel’s God acts justly, prospering those who remain faithful and destroying those who reject his ways (1 Sm 2:9). Along with the rest of the Deuteronomistic History, the Books of Samuel become an object lesson for biblical Israel as it tries to re-establish its religious identity after the destruction of Jerusalem and the loss of its homeland (587/586 B.C.).

Spiritual Friendship is today the best known and perhaps most influential of the thirteen surviving works of Aelred, abbot of the great English Cistercian abbey of Rievaulx from 1147-1167. During his abbacy he built Rievaulx into a place of spiritual welcome and physical prosperity, desiring to make it "a mother of mercy" to those in need. In a three-book Ciceronian dialogue Aelred defines human friendship as sacramental, beginning in creation, as God sought to place his own love of society in all his creatures, linking friends to Christ in this life and culminating in friendship with God in beatitude. This fresh new translation makes the work crisply readable, allowing the intellectual and Christian insight of this great Cistercian teacher and writer to speak clearly to today's seekers of love, wisdom, and truth.

Saint Aelred, an English Cistercian monk, was a writer, historian, and outstanding abbot who influenced monasticism in medieval England, Scotland, and France. He is venerated by the Catholic Church as a saint and by some Anglicans.