“I Have Called You Friends”: Toward a Pedagogy of Friendship in the Classroom

Introduction

The image printed on this page is an icon that was painted in the 7th century called Christ the True Friend. In one hand, Christ holds the book of the Gospels. With his other hand, Christ gently enfolds the body of Saint Mina, a Coptic martyr of the 3rd century. The icon is a reminder of Christ’s words to the disciples in John 15:15: “I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father” (NRSV). Jesus goes on to say that he has chosen them and appointed them to bear fruit that will last.

Like all icons, Christ the True Friend is a visual invitation. It is a window through which we see God and ourselves. As we gaze upon it, we are invited to imagine where we are in the image. Are we Saint Mina, befriended by Christ? Or have we been called to befriend another, thus assuming the role of the Christ? Like a text, an icon offers us many possible interpretations, many possible vantage points through which to see. Where we see ourselves in the image may change depending on our circumstances. What does not change, however, is the theological claim of this image—it is Christ who is the “True Friend.” Christ is the theological and visual focal point of the image. He rightly stands at the center of the image and at the center of the artist’s inquiry. Something is always at the center of any inquiry. Some image or idea draws our eye and catches our attention. The reason for that is because an artistic imagination has shaped the experience of those gazing upon the image. The artist has thought carefully about what will make for a meaningful encounter with the image, about how to invite those on the outside looking in to find their place inside the image.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Christ the True Friend.

Just as there is a focal point on a canvas, so too there is a focal point in a classroom. The reason for that is because a pedagogical imagination has shaped the experience of those engaging the class. This means that I must reflect beforehand on what kind of focus will make for a meaningful classroom encounter. There are any number of worthwhile pedagogical models: instructor-centered, where the instructor’s expertise stands at the center of our endeavor together; learner-centered, where students and their experiences with the material are focalized; or subject-centered, a Parker Palmer-esque model where students and teachers alike sit around the wisdom of the subject itself. Each of these models have their merits, but as I reflect on what it is that I want for my students, once again I am drawn to the image of Christ the True Friend and to the words of Jesus in John 15:15. I want my students to be drawn into Christian virtue formation—into friendship with God and with one another, and I want those relationships to bear fruit beyond my university’s gates and into the world. It would be easy, however, to make two faulty assumptions. The first faulty assumption might be that my role as faculty is only academically driven. I might think wistfully about students’ virtue formation but assume that is a role best left to a pastor or university chaplain. The second faulty assumption might be that the work of the classroom is only academic. Here, I might assume that the church service or university chapel service are the only spaces where students cultivate Christian virtue. While both assumptions might appear reasonable, the problem with them is that they lead to a divided life, one where mind and heart are bifurcated.

As a counter to this epistemology, I suggest the following: the classroom is exactly the place for cultivating friendship with God and with others, and it is in fact the role of the faculty member to create a classroom space where this might be possible. Drawing on the icon here and the insights of the 12th-century Cistercian abbot Aelred of Rievaulx and others, I propose a pedagogical imagination that focalizes Christ the True Friend at the center of the classroom, holding in one hand the bounded other(s)—the texts that we read—and all of us other(s)—teachers and students alike—as his friends.

Friendships of authority and utility

To suggest that Christ is the “True Friend” is also to suggest that there are other forms of friendship that might inform (or misinform) our pedagogical epistemologies. Friendship, for example, was a central virtue for ancient Greek and Roman philosophers. About friendship, Aristotle said the following: “Without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods.” ¹ At first glance, the effusive nature of Aristotle’s words are compelling. Upon closer examination, however, Aristotle’s reference to “other goods” highlights an uneasy commodifying of friendship. For Aristotle, friendship is a “good,” much like something a person owns. Aristotle then categorized this good hierarchically. The lowest form of friendship was one rooted in the pursuit of some mutual benefit, a friendship of utility. The second form of friendship was based solely on pleasure: two people become friends because of a mutual love and interest in the same activity. The final form, deemed the highest, what Aristotle referred to as the “friendship of the good,” was based neither on utility nor on pleasure but on the mutual pursuit of virtue. Each of these three rungs on Aristotle’s hierarchy of friendship communicates the following: I like someone because he is good, pleasant, or useful. Friendship is a commodity—the highest commodity, to be sure—but still a commodity.

It is not difficult to imagine how these tendencies are manifest in the university classroom. Take, for example, a question raised by a (brazen) student early in my teaching career: “What is the cost–benefit analysis of my being in class right now?” My student’s cheeky question underscores a fundamental reality. His imagination about what teaching and learning should look like had been shaped long before he entered my classroom. The pedagogical world he imagined was one where students did the work, earned the grade, and got out. His pedagogical imagination was centered in a soulless quid pro quo.

Imagination plays a central role in our classrooms, and our imaginations are not value free. As a social institution, the classroom is what Christian Smith has called a “morally animated enterprise,” one where we “act out together a larger implied account of how things ought to be.” ² As such, David Smith rightly notes that teaching itself is similarly “embedded in a morally animated narrative about who we are that bids to shape our imagination.” ³ Narratives that shape our collective imaginations are reified through our pedagogical practices. Because this is the case, as teachers our self-reflection is vital to the work of Christian virtue formation in the classroom. We must ask ourselves what kind of classroom we want to imagine, and to what end we are reifying practices asynchronous with this vision. To that end, Smith challenges us to ask a vital question: “What if we took a fresh look at each of our teaching practices and wondered whether they really resonate with the kingdom of God?” ⁴

For James K. A. Smith, the language of the “kingdom of God” underscores precisely the pedagogical shift that must take place in order to center our classrooms in Christ. In Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation, Smith offers an anthropological, theological, and ecclesiastical reframing of imagination pertinent to the classroom. Smith argues that a Cartesian anthropology, which equates cognition with ontology (“I think, therefore I am”), has reduced us to “thinking things.” ⁵ It is not difficult to envision how this schema curates a pedagogical imagination counter to Christian virtue. A Cartesian anthropology reduces teachers, students, and the books they read into “storehouses of facts.” ⁶ The resulting classroom dynamic is utilitarian at every level, devoid of emotional investment: teachers and books are “containers” of facts that students must master. Once stored in (what is surely) a transitory mental space, students themselves become storehouses of facts. Rather than embracing a Cartesian anthropology, or even an anthropology centered on belief, Smith argues for a model rooted in Augustine’s notion of love. The human heart is restless, Augustine said. ⁷ This restlessness produces a desire that would only find its resting place in the love of God. Drawing on Augustine, Smith argues that we are not creatures who think first or even believe first. Instead, we are creatures who love first: “The most basic way that we intend the world is on the affective order of love. This love constitutes our fundamental and governing orientation to the world…And the way our love or desire gets aimed in specific directions is through practices that shape, mold, and direct our love.” ⁸

If Smith’s instinct is correct, then a classroom curated on a social imaginary of cognition is fundamentally at odds with who we are. My own experiences have taught me that this dissonance rarely manifests itself outright. For students, this dissonance is often expressed not through assigning a lack of meaning to the subject, but instead through the strong sense that the subject is more meaningful than a teacher’s pedagogy implies. The Bible that comes alive for students in a small group setting, and the God whose Spirit is engaged robustly in a worship service, is in the classroom reduced to a sacred text that is engaged only in a scholarly way and whose God is nowhere to be found. For teachers, this dissonance is expressed in a similar bifurcation of head and heart, where their prayer life is kept such a secret that students do not even know that it exists. The classroom is then a lonely place, where everyone involved expresses a tacit hunger for something they do not even know is possible and cannot even articulate. If we want to change course, we must begin by asking ourselves a hard question: Toward what end is my pedagogy aimed? As David Smith has rightly noted, no pedagogy is ever innocent. ⁹ For our teaching to offer something more than scholarly self-aggrandizement that leaves student and subject at a distance, we must rightly orient our pedagogies. If our ontology is oriented towards the heart, towards love, then our pedagogies must also aim in this direction. What this means, borrowing a line from Theophan the Recluse, a Russian Orthodox monk of the 19th century, is that our pedagogies must descend from the mind to the heart. ¹⁰ One way we can do that, I argue, is in cultivating a pedagogical imagination where Christ the True Friend—and Christian friendship—stands at the center of the classroom.

Friendship in Christian tradition

Situating Christ as the True Friend at the center of the classroom counters faulty assumptions about the use of authority and the benefit of utility. Instead, love is the central value, and it expresses itself in the virtue of Christian friendship. Indeed, friendship finds its fullest expression as a distinctly Christian virtue, one modeled by the interrelationships of God as Father, Son, and Spirit. First and foremost, friendship has its origins and foundation in the character of God. ¹¹ The God in whose image we are made is a relational being. Orthodox theologians refer to the perichoresis, the doctrine of loving interrelations present among the godhead. Taken from the Greek words meaning, “to dance around,” the godhead is involved in a mutual dance in which each member is intertwined. ¹² In this dance, each person of the godhead is lovingly attended to. For the 12th-century Cistercian abbot Aelred of Rievaulx, friendship was the primary means through which Christ’s love enters the world. ¹³ For Aelred, friendship begins in Christ, continues in Christ, and is perfected in Christ. Playing with the etymology of the Latin word for “friend,” Aelred notes the entwining of love with friendship: “Now I think the word amicus [friend] comes from the word amor [love], and amicitia [friendship] comes from amicus. For love is a certain ‘affection’ of the rational soul whereby it seeks and eagerly strives after some object to possess it and enjoy it. Having attained its object through love, it enjoys it with a certain interior sweetness, embraces it, and preserves it.” ¹⁴ Friendship, for Aelred, cannot exist without love. ¹⁵ Indeed, so strong was this conviction that Aelred (re)interprets the famous Johannine statement, “God is love” (1 Jn. 4:8), to read “God is friendship.” Those who abide in friendship abide in God, Aelred said. ¹⁶

As a whole, Christian tradition offers rich descriptions of friendship, both before and after Aelred’s time. Augustine of Hippo was one of the first Christians to write about friendship. While he did not devote any one book exclusively to friendship, Augustine interspersed insights about friendship throughout his sermons and in both of his major works, Confessions and City of God. In his Confessions, Augustine offered an insight that successive Christians would adopt, namely, that in order for a friendship to be true, it must be given by God: “For though they cling together, no friends are true friends unless you, my God, bind them fast to one another through that love which is sown in our hearts by the Holy Ghost, who is given to us.” ¹⁷ This is a view that C. S. Lewis would later share.

Famously, Lewis viewed friendship as one of four different “loves.” Lewis’s discussion of friendship begins by tracing the historical value placed on it at different time periods. For the ancients, friendship was prized because it was virtuous, while in the Romantic period friendship was largely rejected due to its lack of Eros. ¹⁸ While Lewis viewed friendship through a decidedly Christian lens, he appeared to share elements of the ancient Greeks’ view of friendship, namely, that friendship could lead to virtue or to vice. ¹⁹ Lewis even shares the Greek view that friendship is built upon a common interest—friendship must be about something. Friendship is born, Lewis says, when one person says to another, “What! You too? I thought that no one but myself…” ²⁰ Friends, in contrast to lovers who gaze at each other face to face, stand side by side, eyes looking ahead. ²¹ From then on, friends are those who see the same truth, ²² even as their friendship is not necessary for survival, only for enriching their lives. ²³ Lewis, however, Christianizes these insights by acknowledging that friends are one of the gifts that God gives to those he loves: “A secret Master of the Ceremonies has been at work. Christ, who said to the disciples, ‘Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you,’ can truly say to every group of Christian friends, ‘You have not chosen one another but I have chosen you for one another…’ [Friendship] is the instrument by which God reveals to each the beauties of all the others.” ²⁴

And this is where a Christian model stands in stark contrast to an Aristotelian model: Christian friendship is not a commodity to be bought, sold, or otherwise utilized. When I frame myself as the indisputable “expert” in the room, I keep the subject, the students, and God at a distance. This pedagogical posture commodifies the subject as a thing to be mastered rather than an “other” with whom we are all in relationship. This pedagogical posture also communicates that students are not my equals in the learning experience, and therefore, they have nothing to teach me. Students’ relationships with one another are undoubtedly affected, and they are forced into competition rather than collaboration. Opportunities to be challenged and changed—by the bounded other and by human others—do not exist. Indeed, they cannot, because we are not having a conversation—with each other or with the subject. When relationships are framed in these ways, learning is utilitarian, static, and forgettable. In short, any model of “friendship” in which a faculty or university system lords power over another is one that precludes genuine connection and with it, learning. By contrast, Christian friendship is a relationship of loving attentiveness given to us by God, through which Christ’s love enters the world.

Christ the True Friend in the classroom

Such an epistemology has many practical implications for the university classroom, but here I will highlight three. First, when Christ the True Friend stands at the center of the classroom, we are invited into a relationship of loving attention to the bounded others that we read and to each other. Where this implicates us is first and foremost in the type of reading posture that we adopt. Here, the contrast between curiosity and studiousness offered by Paul J. Griffiths provides a useful insight. Curiosity is an appetite for new knowledge that seeks to “control, dominate, or make a private possession of it.” ²⁵ By contrast, the studious do not “seek to sequester, own, possess, or dominate what they hope to know; they want, instead, to participate lovingly in it, to respond to it knowingly as gift rather than as potential possession, to treat it as icon rather than spectacle.” ²⁶ Two things about this are critical for a reading posture oriented toward Christian friendship. First, we assume that the books we read, the authors we encounter, and the friends who sit with us around the classroom, are not things to be mastered. As Griffiths rightly says, anything that can be mastered becomes a spectacle rather than an icon. ²⁷ Second, a reading posture rooted in Christian friendship is one that invites loving participation. Assuming these two modes—that we cannot fully “know” what we read—and that we are loving participants in the reading process—cultivates intellectual humility, vulnerability in the classroom, and intimacy with the subject, one another, and God. Such a reading posture presupposes friendship with the books—the bounded others—that we encounter.

In The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction, Wayne Booth notes that, like friends, books “knock on my door,” offering some kind of “company.” ²⁸ Rather than asking whether a book or play, poem, movie, or TV drama will turn me toward virtue or vice, Booth says we should assess it for what kind of “company” it offers. ²⁹ If Aristotle and Cicero were correct, as Booth believes they are—that friendship is the highest good or virtue—and the quality of our lives is linked with the company we keep—then the quality of our lives will also be linked with the literary company we keep. ³⁰ When a book, author, or idea knocks on our door, we must assess what kind of company it is offering to us. Following Aristotle’s hierarchy of friendship, Booth says we begin with the obvious point that we feel friendly toward anyone who offers us some sort of benefit or gift. Classical tradition highlights three kinds of friendship based on the kinds of gifts a friend may offer: friendship that is pleasurable, friendship that leads to profit or gain, and friendship that is good for its own sake. ³¹ This third kind of friendship is pursued for the sake of the friendly company itself. As a character in Malcolm Bradbury’s Rates of Exchange puts it, speaking of books as friends: “Yes, every day I read them and I become some more of a person.” ³² Various books or authors will offer us various things, not all of which will enable us to become “some more of a person.” What the author of John’s Gospel offers to us, for example, is different from what is offered by a running magazine, and that is different than what is offered to us by Fifty Shades of Grey. One offers eternal life. Another offers some kind of utility—help in developing a skill. Another offers, arguably, a kind of “pleasure.”

In A Theology of Reading: The Hermeneutics of Love, Alan Jacobs critiques Wayne Booth’s view of books as friends. Jacobs believes we may indeed love books as friends, and that love guides our interpretation. Nevertheless, Jacobs says, “If our love is only preferential—if we select some books as the proper and worthy recipients of our love, while excluding others from that charmed circle, as is always the case with the Aristotelian forms of love—it fails to achieve genuine Christian charity. Charity demands that we extend the gift of love to all books, and receive the gift of love when it is offered to us.” ³³ Indeed, it is love—the love displayed in the godhead—which frames Jacobs’s understanding of books as friends. Drawing on the perichoresis, the eternal loving dance in which the persons of the Trinity are intertwined, Jacobs says that in our imitation of Christ, we too learn with our neighbors “perichoretic movements.” Because we are made in the image of the dancing, relational godhead, we too are relational, and we too must “dance.” In a “dance of faithfulness,” we offer loving attention to our neighbors and in return receive the “gift of their otherness.” ³⁴ When we encounter these bounded others as our friends, to borrow a line from Griffiths, we become truly studious, inhabiting a world of “gifts, given things, which can be known by participation.” ³⁵

Here students and teachers alike are faced with a host of challenges. What if we think we know the bounded other very well already, and that he has nothing more to teach us? Or, what if we are suspicious of the things our bounded neighbor says, and we are apt to discredit her altogether? Or what if our neighbor says something not in keeping with our picture of him, producing a painful cognitive dissonance? Whether it has been introducing liberation theologian James Cone’s idea of the “Black Christ” to a largely white audience and hearing their discomfort; or asking students to consider reading the serpent in the Garden of Eden in a different way than they were previously taught; or highlighting tragic and rarely preached stories about abuse and sexual assault in the biblical text; I sit with my students in these moments and feel their unease. And, I understand well the temptation to read indifferently, to read suspiciously, or not to read at all. I understand well the temptation to assume I already know my bounded neighbor well enough no longer to engage him. What motivates these reading postures, and how do they impact us?

Two things motivate them, it seems: fear or arrogance. When we read suspiciously, we engage in a kind of Nietzsche(ian) “discernment” that is not really discernment at all. Where there is only suspicion of the claims of a bounded other, our conclusions are preestablished. Fearing the humiliation of being fooled, Jacobs says, is the origin of the hermeneutics of suspicion, an adolescent fear of being caught believing what everyone else has ceased believing in. ³⁶ When we refuse the offer of friendship that an earnest bounded other wants to offer us, we resist the opportunity to be changed. Similarly, if we assume that we know the bounded other well enough that she has nothing left to teach us, we also resist change. Jacobs draws on the image of the wayfarer, the status viator, one who is on the way, to suggest that interpreters who still seek to know, are true wayfarers. They are teleologically minded, moving toward a goal. By contrast, the comprehensor, assuming there is nothing left to learn, has already arrived. Such a person has come to the end of interpretation. Suspicious that anything new can be known, Jacobs claims the following:

Suspicion elevated to a cardinal principle is not just arrogant—not merely the assertion of antique and pagan magnanimity, though that is bad enough—it is also, and more troublingly, still the annulment of hope. The hopeless interpreter, in the lassitude of despair, can neither receive nor offer gifts: Having petrified the personae of human discourse and thereby transformed them into the res of commodified “texts,” he or she has nothing left to love, and in the end lacks even the consolation of interpretation itself. ³⁷

Indeed, far from offering an overly sentimental or uncritical treatment of friendship, Aelred of Rievaulx does not suggest that every human other we encounter is to be a spiritual friend. Rather, those whom we choose to befriend are to be tested for their adherence to virtue. As Aelred rightly offers,

For since your friend is the companion of your soul, to whose spirit you join and attach yours, and so associate yourself that you wish to become one instead of two, since he is one to whom you entrust yourself as to another self, from whom you hide nothing, from whom you fear nothing, you should, in the first place, surely choose one who is considered fitted for all this. Then he is tried, and so finally admitted. For friendship should be stable and manifest a certain likeness to eternity, persevering always in affection. ³⁸

Second, when Christ the True Friend stands at the center of the classroom, our knowledge is intimate, service-oriented, and wondrous. We know in order to experience intimacy and wonder at our mutual participation in God. ⁴⁰ Turning my attention once again to the image of “Christ the True Friend,” I am invited to consider where I am in the image, and how that manifests in my own classroom. Personally, I am decidedly not Christ in this image, instead taking my place alongside Saint Mina, astonished that Jesus might offer his friendship to me. In that way, I have no more prominence or authority than my students. I am among them, I am one of them, I am held by Christ, and I am invited to wonder at the bounded others who offer their friendship to me. The classroom does not belong to me, or to them, but to that Other—Christ the True Friend who enfolds us all. My role, then, is not to lord power over my students but to take my place alongside them as one of many “little Christs.” My role is to give myself over not to mastery of a bounded other but to being mastered by a bounded other and, where appropriate, to speak with transparency about the ways in which that is happening. What this means is that I need my students just as much as they need me. What this all comes down to is love, as Henri Nouwen has said: “If there is anything I have learned from teaching, it is that loving your students is the basis for a real learning process from both sides.” Indeed, cognitive science backs this up: we learn best from people that we love. ⁴¹ If love and mutuality, not power or fear, is centralized in the classroom, real learning is more likely to take place. The vocation of the Christian university faculty is first to love our students and to acknowledge a mutual dependency on the Christ who calls us both friends. And, the vocation of the Christian university faculty is also to model a personal and infectious love for Christ because when students love Christ, they are more likely to learn from him, too. When Christ the True Friend stands at the center of the classroom, our knowledge is rooted in intimacy, service, and wonder at our shared participation in God.

Finally, when Christ the True Friend stands at the center of the classroom, our relationships bear fruit that will last. In the context of a Christian university classroom, what is the “fruit that will last”? To return again to the language of the Johannine Jesus, namely this—abiding in love. To abide in the love and the friendship offered to us by those bounded others who knock on our door and ask us not to memorize or to master, but to experience transformation. To let these dear ones be our neighbors and friends, to allow them to surprise us, to challenge us, and to keep calling to us. And to abide in the love and the friendship offered to us by the others Christ has called friends.

A practical word about friendship-building pedagogies

If we are to cultivate a pedagogical imagination rooted in Christian friendship, do well to heed the words of David Smith:

Imagination, in the sense that matters here, is not something that simply wells up out of the inner world of teachers and students. Imagination is fostered and sustained through an ongoing backdrop of social practices. The questions asked and not asked, the examples offered, the images used, the assignments, room layouts, and grading criteria, all of these provide what Etienne Wenger calls an “infrastructure of imagination.” An infrastructure of imagination is a kind of symbolic scaffolding provided by our practices that supports or fails to support particular ways of imagining the nature and purpose of what we are doing, and within which we develop an “identity of participation,” a sense of who we are supposed to be in this setting. ⁴²

First, I have found that personalizing assignments reminds us that we are not “thinking things” but are instead, oriented toward love. I invite my students to befriend the texts and authors that they read through an assignment called “Letters to the Author.” ⁴³ This assignment requires students to relay the fundamental points an author is attempting to convey, in an effort to remember and to understand the material. “Letters to the Author” also underscores for students that the author was a real person at a real place and time. Because the author is engaged as a real person, students find, to borrow a line from Griffiths, that every knowable is a beautiful but damaged gift. ⁴⁴ I have found that reading in this way cultivates in students an empathy for a point of view that may differ from their own. They are forced to get inside the mind and heart of an author with whom they may disagree, attempting to read charitably. This assignment also compels students to take some sense of ownership for class discussion over a particular subject for the day. Practically speaking, the assignment is also useful because it works at multiple levels on Bloom’s Taxonomy of Learning. ⁴⁵ I have also used the ancient Christian practice of lectio divina to personalize the reading experience. ⁴⁶ While typically used in conjunction with sacred texts, lectio divina can be used with any kind of reading assignment. Lastly, I have attempted to personalize the reading experience by asking students not merely to read, but to become participants through assigned practices. In asking church history students to perform an Ignatian Examen for a week, or to attend a service at a Greek Orthodox Church and to reflect on the experience during the week we cover that subject, I invite them to become participants in what we are learning.

Second, in my position of authority, I have found it vital that I model intellectual humility, vulnerability, and wonder, virtues all closely related to the aspirational virtue of love. One practical way that I have done this is to join them in their assignments. In the Hebrew class that I teach, when I ask students to recite their favorite Old Testament passage in Hebrew and offer an exegetical and meditative word on it, I do the same. I model a continued astonishment at a language I have taught for many years when I invite them into the ways that God continues to speak to me through it. I model intellectual humility when I take their questions seriously, admitting that I don’t know everything. In sciences and math, where authority and utility are often normative, friendship in the classroom might mean modeling continued astonishment at the subject, pausing to experience wonder. Here the admission by teachers that we do not know everything is fundamental to a pedagogy rooted in befriending our subject.

Finally, I have found assigning students to “Covenant Groups,” assigning them to have “Coffee with the Professor,” and even giving them the option for group-based essay exams to be useful ways for students to befriend one another. In particular, Covenant Groups which allow students one day every couple of weeks to sit together around circles of six or seven students, sharing what is happening in their lives and seeking the collective wisdom of the group, helps students feel less alone in the larger classroom. Each of these assignments has been fruitful in reminding students that they are not competitors with one another, but collaborators, even friends.

I hope that each of these assignments is a reminder of our shared commitment to Christian friendship in the classroom and to the central place of Christ the True Friend. As David Benner has said, “Christ, who said to his disciples, ‘You have not chosen me but I have chosen you,’ might say of Christian friends, ‘You have not chosen each other, but I have chosen you for each other’” (emphasis mine). ⁴⁷ And above all else, to look to the image of Christ the True Friend and to see a picture of who we are called to be. “Here we are, you and I, and I hope a third, Christ, is in our midst.” ⁴⁸