Good News Reflection Today's Saint: Walburga Today’s Readings: The true meaning of friendship At the heart of the message against divorce in today's Gospel passage is the understanding of what true friendship means. Husbands and wives are, first and foremost, called to be true friends for each other. The first reading describes what a true friend is and is not. This applies to marriages and to all other relationships. True friendship is a holy relationship. In a holy friendship, no one stops caring about the other, no matter what happens. A holy friend imitates Christ, making sacrifices for the sake of the other, willing to do whatever will help heal wounds and overcome problems. When the efforts are only one-sided, it's not a holy friendship. You might handle it righteously, but you cannot force the other person to be holy. If a husband refuses to be a true friend to his wife, he has forsaken the marriage. If a wife never intended to be faithful, there is nothing the husband can do to make the marriage valid. When spouses quit being loving, by abusing or abandoning, they break their vows of unity; they are the adulterers if they marry another, not the faithful partner. The point is, our friendships and marriages are supposed to be reflections of God's friendship, evangelizing the world. He has made a Covenant of Love with us, sealed by the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross. Human friends will fail us, but God never does. When we accept God's Covenant of Love, we're agreeing to true friendship, which includes loving those whom he loves – which is everyone! Whenever we fail to love anyone, we're breaking our unity with God. The Sacrament of Reconciliation and the Penance Rite of Mass restore that unity. To remain in unity with God, we have to give his love to the people around us. To live in his friendship, we have to be friendly toward others. It's like water in the pipes: We can't feel the presence of the water in the pipes unless it's flowing from the faucet. To feel the presence of God, we have to keep his love flowing out to others. If we ever think that God has failed to be a True Friend, it's only because we have quit being a true friend to him. When things don't go our way, we blame it on him or assume that he's ignoring us. In reality, we're quitting the friendship by refusing to let him comfort us and heal our wounds and solve our problems in an unexpected way. In our covenant friendship with God, even if the people we love reject us or warp the love that we offer, we are not failures. With God in our marriages and friendships, the love we give always succeeds, because if it's rejected or the relationship ends, the love flows back to us from God directly, and we are mightily blessed in a special intimacy of mutual suffering. © 2011 by Terry A. Modica
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Friday, February 25, 2011
The true meaning of friendship
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