On Friendship: from Msgr. Robert Hugh Benson

Msgr. Robert Hugh Benson, a convert from Anglicanism and the son of the Archbishop of Canterbury, wrote a wonderful little pamphlet in 1912 titled, The Friendship of Christ. I'm blessed to have a copy. It's an especially significant little booklet in the Facebook age when people revel in their thousands of "friends" many of whom they've never met "face to face" and never will. This is how words are stripped of meaning. But that's a subject for another day.

Be a little child in Christ's presence;
It's the quickest way to His heart!

Real friendship, according to Benson, is "this mysterious thing...as mighty as it is mysterious." And part of that mighty mystery is that:

It is bound to rise, so far as it is true to the laws of its own development, to a pitch of passion far beyond that of ordinary relations between the sexes. Since it is independent of those physical elements necessary to a love between husband and wife, it can rise mysteriously higher in certain respects, than the plane which those elements sustain. It seeks to win nothing, to produce nothing -- but to sacrifice all.

Have you ever had a friendship like that -- a person you would call a "kindred spirit" or, as Anne of Green Gables described, a "bosom friend." This is no casual acquaintance, but a friend of the heart, one whom you would trust implicitly with your deepest secrets.