Friendship is a dying art
The attack on friendship is a grave one, striking to the very core of how we live and breathe our love of God. The Catholic faithful are being offered a two-pronged temptation:
The first prong: The temptation to participate in the world’s campaign to isolate, alienate, and distract people through social media, artificial intelligence, runaway technology, divisive and hostile political cycles, etc.
The second prong: The temptation to adopt modes of “prosperity” socializing from non-Catholic Christians, modes that privilege looking and sounding like “winners” — financially, spiritually, socially, and emotionally. This Cross-denying ethic rejects the truth and the triumph of Calvary, and its mystery of suffering. It closes the door on real intimacy and drains friendship of its lifeblood.
“The Lord restored Job’s prosperity after he prayed for his friends. The Lord doubled everything that Job had once possessed.”
Failures of friendship, and the suffering of God and His people are deeply linked — the failure of the disciples to stay awake in Gethsemane and keep our Lord company in His greatest hour of need was the direct prelude to his betrayal and Passion; this is foreshadowed in the Old Testament’s archetypal meditation on suffering, the book of Job. Job’s story is as much an account and foretelling of the desolation of the righteous, as it is a painstaking account of the failure of seemingly pious friends — Job’s three friends — to properly accompany the righteous in their alotted trials.
Are you a Gethsemanian?Members of the society desire to grow in the art of friendship, and to share that art with the Church. We grow in that art through devotion and discipline:
Devotion to our Lord in the Garden of Gethsemane through the discipline of prayer, adoration, and sacrifice.
Devotion to the Lord’s faithful through the pursuit and practice of holy friendship, and the understanding, and quiet, humble accompaniment, of loneliness and suffering.