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Life flings miles and years between us,
It is true,—
But brings never to me dearer
Friends than you! ~ Dorothy Scarborough,
I recently got together with a few high school classmates to share some memories. (Mike Stapleton, Ray Levias, me and Keith Blume)
I was struck by how life has shown each of us —
- We are no longer young and precocious.
- We are old and sobered.
There was no sense of bitterness, only a humble acknowledgement —
- We’re all on our last lap.
- The end is in sight.
It felt good to be sharing this exquisite moment together. My friends’ humility filled me with a feeling of kinship — hard to describe.
So as I often do, when challenged to describe the indescribable, I turn to my good friend Joe Nagy for the words.
On Friendship, by Joe Nagy
In the college where I teach, we have a core curriculum that asks the following questions:
- What does it mean to be human?
- What does it mean to live a life of meaning and purpose?
- What does it mean to forge a more just society for the common good?
- What does it mean to understand and appreciate the natural world?
We don’t have courses in these topics.
Instead, we incorporate the questions into courses in literature, history, social sciences, natural sciences, philosophy and theology.
Of course there are no final answers.
The point is to live the questions, and perhaps then we may live ourselves into a meaningful answer.
After about five years of teaching these questions, I have come to understand that there is no point in pondering them alone.
The questions only have meaning if you ask them in community and the most profound answers come when you ask them of friends.
How many people do you know whom you can engage in dialogue about the deepest questions of the human heart?
Count them as your friends.
For myself, I can count them on two hands. Everyone else is an acquaintance.
Those friends I do have, I will take Shakespeare’s advice and “grapple them unto my soul with hoops of steel.”
Each summer, we vacation in Maine, and we invite a roundtable of friends to join us for a few days. It is a sort of revolving seminar – a conversation that you can only have with those whom you love. We do not discover any answers. It is enough to share the questions.
My latest mini-roundtable is an irregular coffee shop meeting with my minister and a member of our Lutheran congregation.
Dave is a retired epidemiologist who chaired a department in a major university, then took a job with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, advising communities on cleaning up toxic waste sites.
In retirement he is teaching a course on ethics and the environment at a local university. He had to invent the course, because he discovered that no one else was teaching it.
Now when he attends scientific conferences, he finds that they are calling him out of the audience to join a panel, because he is one of the few experts on environmental ethics.
Our conversations range from theology to education to family to community building to the arts. And never a word about how the Yankees did – though I confess I love the Yankees as much as anyone.
If I could design an afterlife, it would be an eternal round table with all my meditative council as regulars:
- Socrates and Plato
- Augustine and Aquinas,
- John Stuart Mill and John Henry Newman,
- Emerson and Thoreau,
- Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King
and my Maine and Fairfield friends.
Heaven will have to wait. But the closest that we can get to heaven in this life is the bonds we forge with family and friends.
So in keeping with Joe’s lovely thought, let’s all take a moment to be grateful for those whom we call friends.
Just a thought…
Pat and Joe
Postscript: Joe, how I remember those summers in Maine.