One of the curiosities of life and literature is that the language of whimsical humor and fairy-tale carries truth as profound as it is lightly worn. The humor of Lewis Caroll's "Alice" stories, whether "In Wonderland" or "Through the Looking Glass", has given the English-speaking world much wry wisdom and teased us with deceptive simplicity. James Thurber's stories have delighted us with their whimsicality and the sting of truth. The comedies of Shakespeare, like "Midsummer Night's Dream", or Mozart's sublime opera, "The Magic Flute", belong to this same enchanted world. When we breathe this enchantment, even for a moment, we are like Cinderella the morning after the ball. We've lost a golden slipper! With fairy-tale words and magic flutes we are somehow brought closer to the bed-rock of our emotional reality, seduced really, into a simpler feeling for what is truly true in life. For such enchantment is the twin-sister (or brother) of reality.
The Little Prince is one of these stories which linger in the mind and memory for a very long time. People who read it as children will say, "It's my very favorite book. I'll never forget it". I first heard the story read at evensong in my college chapel on my first term at Oxford. I felt myself changed and have lingered over the book's wisdom for forty years or more. The theme that grasped me then, as now, is Friendship and its expanding circles of meaning in my life. Friendship as perhaps the fundamental reality of our humanness where we seek to expand our own sometimes limited horizons to include people of all creeds, classes, and colors; people of differing sexual orientation; and people with beliefs very different form our own. How far away the poor people of New Orleans are from our own world! In our own denomination and its congregations, friendship and it twin brother (or sister?) tolerance, are not just ideals, but necessities. Friendship is or should be a thing of ever expanding circles; the inspiration of both true fellowship and social action, but before we put the spirit of friendship to work we must truly pause and reflect on what friendship is in itself.
Friendship needs a heart refined in the matters of human sensitivity and response. There is much in the emergence of friendship too sensitive for words, or for the crasser assumptions of human motive and expectations - the shallow business of "winning friends and influencing people." This is not friendship, but power masked as friendship, for feelings of friendship lie closest to feelings of modesty and restraint. By no means false modesty, but the wise recognition that the appearance and growth of true and lasting friendship is always slightly unexpected and a little miraculous, perhaps unique. For, in friendship, we begin to share the thoughts and feelings of someone other, really other, than ourselves with all the changing chemistry of familiarity and strangeness which makes real friendship so profoundly enriching. In one way or another, we play out the quiet psycho-drama of the Fox and the Little Prince!
True friendship, like true love, is always a little unfathomable, a still point in a turning world. We do not really "make" friendships, we allow them. Like love, friendship is something that happens to us, presupposing a mutual, if unspoken invitation, though sometimes frank words of genuine affection may help. Where we seek to "win friends and influence people" we may end up by frustrating what friendship really requires. Friendship grows out of the freedom of individuals to accept each other's silent invitation, apart from the anxiety which accompanies our more self-conscious attempts "to get to know" another person. This is especially true in romantically- toned situations where the courtesies and formalities are always more important than we think. These is, alas, an over-easy familiarity or an unnecessary reticence which intimidates friendship. What is needed is some combination of warmth and restraint.
There's much in the nature of friendship we can't understand or wholly explain. Why do certain friendships, apparently so real at the time, pass away? Why do others only become more fully conscious with passing years or geographical separation? Friendship is so important to us emotionally, yet more elusive than we care to admit. For a variety of reasons we sometimes fake it however good-heartedly, but sometimes we're looking for mere acquaintances or glib good-neighborliness, not to be confused with the real thing. The claims and sensitivities of friendship are difficult enough to honor even where affection is genuinely felt. Sometimes we do not really care for those we call our friends or maybe we care for the wrong things in our relationship with them. "Running with the wrong crowd" is not confined to the teenage years! We sometimes cherish people only for their wealth, their professional prestige, or their social usefulness. This is what we may desire from friendships, but not what we most deeply need.
I don't want to be overly precious or pious about friendship or sentimentalize it. Friendship has, when trust and affection have grown, a robust and even hilarious quality. Friendship has to do with "cutting loose" as well as restraint and modesty. I do not want to dwell on its ideal qualities, its growing openness and spontaneity, the lack of either subservience or superiority, the alternation between a certain shyness and impulsive concern, for life falls short in friendship as in much else. And yet, it is upon the warmest and most refined moments of friendship that some our wisest insights into human life are based. Friendship is the touchstone of so much else. We realize that friendships help our closest links with our deepest humanness and emotional reality, and the very fresh possibility of friendship with those whom, for whatever reason, we either do not and will not understand. We're not called to an equal depth of friendship with all men and women, but one experience of true friendship teaches us the need to allow our circles of friendship and affection to spread as widely as they can. It is one of the painful glories of our imperfect humanity that, if we let ourselves, we are increasingly able to speak across the barriers that separate. As the poet Auden says, "Our life and death is with others."
Kurt Vonnegut once said that love is "too strong a word." It's true! Frightful things are sometimes done in the name of religious or romantic love. Love may, in the end, redeem us all, but in the meantime, it is friendship that best builds the fragile lovely bridges over which we pass to a more genuine affection, trust, and yes, deeper self-knowledge. Where the deeper spirit is truly abroad, the love that truly transforms existence may not be far away. As the Little Prince returns to greet the Fox, the Fox tells him "And now here is my secret, a very simple secret. It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."