Category: FRIENDSHIP

  • Indeed, when we’re harmed by others, we feel sorrow, but not when we harm ourselves. God demonstrates that those unjustly harmed by others gain renown, while those who harm themselves receive injury. This distinction encourages us to endure external injustices courageously but avoid self-inflicted harm.

    —St. John Chrysostom

  • The love of friends is good, but friends must be loved in God, not for themselves alone, for only God does not perish or change. People look for rest in the physical world and fix their hearts on things that pass away, not moving through them to recognition of the God who made them. True life and true love are found in Christ alone.

    —St. Augustine

  • Friendship can be a dangerous enemy, a seduction of the mind lying beyond the reach of investigation.

    Use careful scrutiny when choosing friends due to the susceptibility to corruption as a result of an unhealthy group of peers.

    —St. Augustine

  • Even good and beautiful things, like the love of friends, can become stumbling blocks if people set them up as substitutes for the God who is their ultimate source. All human loves pass away, and people err in loving friends as substitutes for God, who alone is eternal and unchangeable.

    —St. Augustine

  • The person who just expresses love for his friends but fails to acknowledge their love for him is not a true friend.

    —St. John Chrysostom, On Living Simply

  • Parthenope (2024)
    A24

  • And what was it that I delighted in, but to love, and be loved? but I kept not the measure of love, of mind to mind, friendship’s bright boundary: but out of the muddy concupiscence of the flesh, and the bubblings of youth, mists fumed up which beclouded and overcast my heart, that I could not discern the clear brightness of love from the fog of lustfulness. Both did confusedly boil in me, and hurried my unstayed youth over the precipice of unholy desires, and sunk me in a gulf of flagitiousnesses. Thy wrath had gathered over me, and I knew it not. I was grown deaf by the clanking of the chain of my mortality, the punishment of the pride of my soul, and I strayed further from Thee, and Thou lettest me alone, and I was tossed about, and wasted, and dissipated, and I boiled over in my fornications, and Thou heldest Thy peace, O Thou my tardy joy! Thou then heldest Thy peace, and I wandered further and further from Thee, into more and more fruitless seed-plots of sorrows, with a proud dejectedness, and a restless weariness.

    Confessions
    St. Augustine

  • There is no objection to having old friends if you can attract them to repentance with you. If you cannot, then let your relationship with them be superficial. If they are dangerous to you, then you should prefer your relationship to God over your relationship to them. Even if you encounter difficulty, bear it for the sake of the Lord. Remember what Abram the father of fathers did when the Lord called him. He left his family, kindred, and country to walk behind God (Genesis 12.1). Likewise, in order to preserve your repentance for the sake of God, you leave all who hinder you.

    —H.H. Pope Shenouda III, The Life of Repentance and Purity

  • If a stumbling block comes to you from the person dearest to you, the one as dear to you as your eyes, or even if it comes from the person who helps you the most, who is like your right hand, stay away from him.

    …

    The stumbling might come from your dearest relatives and loved ones. The majority of youth who become corrupt do so through the corruption of their very dear friends, who influence them.

    —H.H. Pope Shenouda III, The Life of Repentance and Purity

  • In sorrow the Comforter is near.—”Very present in time of trouble.” He sits by the crucible as a Refiner of silver, regulating the heat, marking every change, waiting patiently for the scum to float away, and His own face to be mirrored in clear, translucent metal. No earthly friend may tread the winepress with you, but the Savior is there, His garments stained with the blood of the grapes of your sorrow. Dare to repeat it often, though you do not feel it, and though Satan insists that God has left you, “Thou are with me.”

    When friends come to console you they talk of time’s healing touch, as though the best balm for sorrow were to forget, or in their well-meant kindness they suggest travel, diversion, amusement, and show their inability to you to appreciate the black night that hangs over your soul; so you turn from them, sick at heart, and prepared to say, as Job of his, “Miserable comforters are ye all.” But all the while Jesus is nearer than they are, understanding how they wear you, knowing each throb of pain, touched by fellow-feeling, silent in a love too full to speak, waiting to comfort from hour to hour as a mother soothes her weary, suffering babe.
    Be sure to study the art of this Divine comfort, that you may be able to comfort them that are in any affliction with the comfort with which you yourself have been comforted of God (2 Cor. I.4). There can be no doubt that some trials are permitted to come to us, as to our Lord, for no other reason than that by means of them we should become able to give sympathy and succour to others. And we should watch with all care each symptom of the pain, and each prescription of the Great Physician, since, in all probability, at some future time, we shall be called to minister to those passing through similar experiences. Thus we learn by the things we suffer, and, being made perfect, become authors of priceless and eternal help to souls in agony.

    The Gift of Suffering
    by F.B. Meyer