(Paul Simon wrote the lyrics and he and Art Garfunkel recorded it long ago. It’s kind of a melancholy song at first hearing but later reflection reveals it to be a song about the unspoken quiet comfort of longtime relationships that are greater than acquaintance with one another.
Perhaps you have heard the song. It’s been done by several artists. Here are some of the lyrics:
“Old friends, Old friends, Sat on their park bench, Like bookends…Old Friends, Winter companions, The old men, Lost in their overcoats, Waiting for the sunset….Can you imagine us, Years from today, Sharing a park bench quietly? How terribly strange, To be seventy. Old friends, Memory brushes the same years, Silently sharing the same fear…Long ago, it must be, I have a photograph, Preserve your memories, They’re all that’s left you.”
Memories and photographs are what remains. Why, then, do we become friends if in the end that’s all we have left? The answer is simple: It is friendships that make life worth living each day that we have life.
Think about the first sentence of Dr. Crane’s meditation on—–)
FRIENDSHIP
When a man says friendship I think he utters the deepest word in human speech. It ranks even a little higher than love, being a sort of unselfed love, love with the hunger and itch extracted.
We do not love our friends; we like them. We love our children, wife, parents, and kinfolks. We like apples and custard pie and a cozy fire and a good bed and slippers—and a friend.
Like goes farther than love. Like is a voice from the subconscious self, a cry from the inward and unknown me. It lies behind the will, beneath the judgment, in the far darkness of our secret soul…
Whence, then, come friends? And who are they? And how can one make them? All answers to these pathetic questions seem to me to be unsatisfactory, partial, and by the way. The rules of the wise will not work. We do not make friends by being noble and good. Friendships do not arise from similarity in tastes…
The fact is the secret springs of friendship are totally mysterious…As I look over my friends I find I like them as a dog likes his master. So I conclude that his emotion must originate in some Newfoundland or St. Bernard region of my nature, and is one of those instincts not yet eliminated by evolution, something I share with dogs.
For all that, I honor it as the best thing I am conscious of. I am prouder of liking my friends than of any other of my small bunch of virtues. When I think if Bill and Lige and Al and Ralph and Newt, I get a kind of warmth about the cockles of my heart no other contemplation can produce.
And the biggest hurts I have ever felt are those made by the disloyalty of others whom I had thought friends and trusted. Nothing is so salt and nauseous as the taste of Judas in the mouth of memory.
And it seems to me—for this is, after all, a sermon—that religion, rightly taken, is a friendship for God rather than a love for God, and that we would translate all the Bible’s admonitions to love God by the paraphrase to be friends with God.
To love God has a conventional sound, but to be a friend of God—that is a searching and swordlike word. It means to like him, not to avoid him, to seek his presence, to be at home with him, to the cheered, consoled, to be quieted by the thought of him.
Speaking for myself, I can say that I never came into this comfortable relationship until I had swept away all I had ever been taught, dared to presume upon the debt God had incurred toward me, and I took my rightful place as his son at his table.
It does not require any assumption of holiness or sinlessness to do this. It only needs to presume upon the vast nobleness, kindness, and forebearing wisdom of such a heart as Jesus reveals to us. It requires a tremendous burst of moral courage to believe God likes the kind of man I am. But I do believe it and the result is the greatest ethical dynamic of my life—the friendship of God.