Spiritual Friendship, the Unsurpassed Gift
In his essay on friendship, sixteenth-century French writer Michel de Montaigne compares friendship to all other human relationships and finds it superior. Siblings usually fight with one another. Spouses are too emotionally entangled to support each other disinterestedly. Parents and children are too blinded by the psychological weight of their connection to see one another with fully open appreciation. But friends, he writes, share one mind, one heart, and one will. They are for one another even more than a person can be for themself. You can trust your friends to look after your interests more than you can trust yourself, he writes. Nothing is more intimate, nothing more lovely, than friendship . . .
In his essay, Montaigne argues that deep friendship is necessarily exclusive — it is only possible, he says, to have one such dear friend — and that exclusivity is its essence. But that isn’t the case with spiritual friendship. We can have many dear spiritual friends. Probably the more such friends we have, the more we are capable of having — the more enriched our lives will become.
Still, with luck, we may have, as I have had, a spiritual relationship that is uniquely precious to su. In an uncanny way, my friendship with Rabbi Lew was not exclusive. Our intimacy was one in which others were always welcome. Because we were such good friends, others were encouraged and inspired to be good friends too.
This is the nature of spiritual friendship. It never depends on division or discrimination between people.. Love can be exclusive. It is boundless, empty, open, and free. Spiritual friendship is too. No doubt this is an ideal we can never completely realize. But I believe it was what the Buddha had in mind when he taught that there is no element of the path more precious or important than spiritual friendship.
Norman Fischer
from When You Greet Me I Bow; Notes and Reflections from a Life in Zen