02 February 2023, The Tablet

Shaped by tenderness, the most beautiful thing on earth

by Timothy Radcliffe

The Dominican friar Pope Francis has asked to lead the retreat for those attending the Synod in October reflects on love and friendship.

When I was very ill recently I jotted down some memoirs. This was an act of gratitude for my life which I thought might not last much longer. What I discovered was that my life has largely been shaped by friendship. Fr Bede Jarrett, who refounded the Dominican community in Oxford more than 100 years ago, wrote of friendship as “being to me the most beautiful thing on earth”.

When I came to make my final commitment to the order usque ad mortem, until death, the big question for me was this: could I ­flourish and be happy in this odd way of life which ruled out marriage? Part of me longed for an exclusive relationship with another person. I would be the most important person in the world for them and they for me. Without that, would I shrivel up and become a dried up old stick? It did not help that I joined the order in 1965, just two years after sex was invented, according to Philip Larkin. Sexual fulfilment seemed like a right. 

 

Thomas Merton loved to tell his novices a story from the Desert Fathers. There was a rich woman who wanted to have a pet hermit on her estate; it was the latest lifestyle accessory, like a personal trainer. One day, to test His Holiness, she sent along a beautiful prostitute. He said to the prostitute: “I’m a dried-up stick; you are wasting your time.” The rich woman shouted: “That man’s a phoney; throw him out.” I looked at the old friars in my province and saw that most of them were not at all dry old sticks. They were humanly alive and happy. They had remained young in heart. That gave me the courage to proceed. 

 

But just a few years later, after I had been ordained, I fell deeply in love. It happened to be with a woman, not that it matters. I had given myself to the order for life, and here was someone who also loved me with whom I could share my life. Wasn’t this the relationship for which I had longed? Had I made a dreadful mistake? 

 

We both came to see that we must love each other as we are. She believed in my Dominican vocation and I in hers. It was as this friar that I am that I must love her as she was, and she me. She came to stay at Blackfriars so that she could understand my life, just as I must hers. Forty-five years later, we are still the closest of friends. 

 

Forgive me for a vast oversimplification, but over many years, with occasional muddles and mistakes, I came to believe that we are all called to participate in the mystery of the divine love, but differently. God’s love is particular, for each of us as we are in our uniqueness. And at the same time, it is universal, excluding no one. As they say: the good news is that God loves you. The bad news is that God loves everyone else as well. Everyone of us is called to live both the particularity of God’s love and its universality. And here is where the gross oversimplification comes. Some of us are called to be rooted in the soil of a particular passionate love of another. The sacrament of this is marriage but it can take different forms. But if this is your vocation, you will be summoned beyond that exclusive relationship. It will be prised open by the arrival of children, friends and even strangers. The particular love may be your soil, but it needs to overflow in wider friendship, ­otherwise one gets bogged down in a narcissistic introverted relationship which D.H. Lawrence called égoïsme à deux. Two Brahmin women were said to have fulfilled the command to give alms by swapping equal gifts. Be warned: they were reincarnated as ­poisoned wells! So every passionate committed love also needs the outreach of friendship if it is to flourish. 

Some people, priests, Religious and some laypeople, are called to be planted in the soil of God’s wide-open love. To love the stranger at the door, to belong to whoever turns up. Think of Mother Teresa of Kolkata. Think of the wonderful outreach of St Martin-in-the-Fields to the homeless. When I fell in love, I discovered that this was my soil, the humus, in which I could put down my roots and ­flourish. But this does not get us odd bods out of forming profound loving friendships with individual people. Unless we learn to love particular people then our love will be cold and empty, like dried-up old sticks. St Aelred, the twelfth-century Cistercian Abbot of Rievaulx, warned Religious against “a love that in addressing itself to all, reaches no one”.  W.H. Auden joked: “We are here on earth to do good to others. What the others are here for, I don’t know.”

 

A hundred years ago, Dom Hubert van Zeller, then a novice at Downside Abbey, wrote in alarm to Bede Jarrett, our English Dominican provincial, when he fell in love with someone known only as P. We do not know whether P was a man or a woman. It does not matter. Bede wrote back: “I am glad because I think your temptation has always been towards Puritanism, a narrowness, a certain inhumanity … Your tendency was almost towards the denial of the hallowing of matter. You were in love with the Lord but not properly in love with the Incarnation. You were really afraid … I believe P will save your life. I shall say a Mass in thanksgiving for what P has been, and done, to you. You have needed P for a long time. Aunts are no outlet. Nor are stout and elderly provincials.”

So we all are called to share in the mystery of God’s love in all sorts of ways: through spousal love, and through wide open charity, through eros and agape. But every Christian also needs to flourish through friendship. We are disciples of the one who said to us “I call you friends”. All forms of Christian discipleship include the art of friendship. Even hermits are famous for their friendships. Think of St Anthony the Great, the Desert Father whose friendships were legendary. 

 

For all of us, I suspect, the challenge is to reach out in friendship without being uprooted from one’s own particular soil. For example, how can I become a person of deep friendship without undermining my marriage or my religious li­fe? Friendship is a sign of the Kingdom, when “the wolf shall live with the lamb and the leopard lie down with the kid … They will not hurt nor destroy all my holy mountain, for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea” (Isaiah 11: 6-9).

Can you think of any easy friendships between men and women after the Fall until Jesus walked with a band of friends, women and men, to Jerusalem? We Dominicans are officially called “The Order of Preachers”. And the earliest Dominicans in the thirteenth century preached through deep friendships between men and women.  St Dominic clearly loved the company of women. When he was dying he confessed that he “has been more excited by the conversation of young women than being talked at by old women”. Blessed Jordan of Saxony, his successor, wrote the most beautiful love letters to a Dominican nun, Blessed Diana d’Andalò, overflowing with mutual tenderness. St Catherine of Siena was surrounded by her circle of beloved friends – the men and women, old and young, lay and Religious known as the Caterinati, the “Catherine people”. 

 

Today relationships between men and women have often become uneasy, fractious and fraught. Studies show that in America, men and women have become afraid of intimacy. We preach the Kingdom by reaching out in friendship. That is why sexual abuse in our Churches is so poisonous and destructive.  

 

I will not attempt a definition of friendship. In my experience, the ground of friendship is the delight in being with another. You bask in his or her presence. Being with them lets one flower and flourish in a way that no other does. You need to be with them. In the liturgy we often say “The Lord be with you”. That is the divine friendship. Not God necessarily doing something. Just being with us. 

C.S. Lewis wrote that this “being with a friend” is founded on seeing things together. Lovers look at each other; friends look in the same direction. I quote: “‘Do you care about the same truth?’ The [one] who agrees with us that some question, little regarded by ­others, is of great importance can be our Friend. He need not agree with us about the answer.” Recently, I preached at the memorial service in Oxford of a friend. He was a scientist, an agnostic Jew, a lover of art and a poet: Simon Altmann. We did not agree about faith in God, but we loved to search for understanding together. 

 

Owls can hunt in the dark because one ear is slightly higher than the other, so they can zoom in on their prey. Because our views are not quite the same, conversations with friends can be a delight. Gareth Moore, the Dominican philosopher, was a good friend who alas died young from cancer. We loved to argue. One night at 10pm I went to ask if he could celebrate Mass at the local convent the next morning. We began to argue, and suddenly we became aware that the sun had risen. We had argued for eight hours and we had not even had anything to drink! Unusual for a Dominican. 

 

When Gareth discovered that his cancer was terminal, I asked him what he wanted. He replied: “I want to finish my book” (which he did); “I want to have time with my friends” (which he did); and, “I want my death to be a gift to the brethren” (which it was). I am writing a book at the moment with another Dominican friend, Lukasz Popko. He is 33 years younger than me, Polish, and a real biblical scholar. It is our differences that make our conversations delightful. 

My first job as a priest was to be a university chaplain in west London. My boss was a Catholic nun, Sr Gerry Hall. She loved extremely fast motorbikes and strong gin and tonics. Cardinal Heenan visited her convent when she was a young nun and afterwards wrote to the reverend mother that he was shocked to see a young nun in a mini-dress. Gerry put on that same dress, zoomed around to the archbishop’s house, stormed up the stairs and burst into the cardinal’s office. She said: “Your Eminence, if you think this is a mini-dress, you have no right to comment on women’s fashion.” 

 

At the chaplaincy, with Sr Gerry’s help, almost 50 years ago, I discovered that most wonderful thing, a group of friends, men and women, whose friendship endures to this day. We were each more ourselves for belonging to this group. The closer we became to each other, the more individual we were. The more we were “we”, the more each of us was himself or herself. 

 

But it is not always so easy. Each profound friendship brings into existence a dimension of my life and identity that has never existed before. I become someone I have never quite been before. Rowan Williams, in his brilliant book on Dostoevsky, says that every profound conversation unfolds another dimension of myself, which hitherto had only existed potentially. He quotes Bakhtin: “Dialogue … is not a means for revealing, for bringing to the surface the ready-made character of a person; no, in dialogue a person not only shows himself outwardly, but he becomes for the first time that which he is – and we repeat, not only for others but for himself as well.” Every profound friendship is an invitation for me to become someone new. 

 

So we are not quite the same person with our different friends. Who I was with Gareth is not quite the same as who I am with Lukasz. There can even be tensions, contradictions. I grew up in a warm and loving family that was in many ways conservative and trad­itional. When I became a Dominican, I became the brother and friend of people like Herbert McCabe, who loved to go to the pub, and sing revolutionary Irish songs that would have horrified my family and old friends. Who then was I? Was I many people? 

In Madeleine Thien’s novel about Chinese immigrants in the US, Do Not Say We Have Nothing, one of the characters says: “Don’t ever try to be only a single thing, an unbroken human being. If so many people love you, can you honestly be one thing?” So if we open ourselves to multiple friendships, we shall not have a neat, tightly defined identity. 

 

When I was a student in France in the late Sixties, the cry was “il faut être cohérent”. One must be coherent. No. We are fragmented people, work in progress. Coherence lies ahead, in the Kingdom. Then the wolf and the lamb in each of us shall be at peace with each other. St John says: “It does not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when he [Christ] appears, we shall be like him for we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2). If we have closed, fixed identities written in stone now, we shall never be open to the adventure of new friendships who will unfold new dimensions of who we are. I suppose that I have learnt not to worry about not fully knowing who I am. 

 

In the Old Testament and in Aristotle, it is agreed that one could only be friends with good people. The good person could not befriend the wicked. Friendship was for the virtuous. If the wicked had friends, it was always to plan some naughtiness. Jesus scandalised the world with impossible friendships. He ate and drank with prostitutes and tax collectors. I guess he enjoyed their company. Jesus reached out in friendships which overthrew all the boundaries: friendships which should not have been. At the Last Supper, he said “I call you friends” precisely to the disciples who he knew would mostly betray, deny and desert him. In the end, he was murdered for his impossible scandalous friendships. 

 

That is our vocation too, to make friendships the world thinks impossible. When we fall in love, we surrender to the gravity of attraction, but friendships are made and sustained. Pierre Claverie was a French Dominican, the Bishop of Oran in Algeria. At his episcopal ordination, he said to his Muslim friends: “I owe to you also what I am today. With you in learning Arabic, I learned above all to speak and understand the language of the heart, the language of brotherly friendship, where races and religions commune with each other. And again, I have learned the softness of heart to believe that this friendship will hold up against time, distance and separation. For I believe that this friendship comes from God and leads to God.”

For this friendship with Muslims, he was murdered along with a young Muslim friend, Mohamed Bouchikhi. His funeral was attended by hundreds of Muslims who murmured: “He was our bishop too, he was the bishop of the Muslims.” At his beatification, a play by a young French Dominican called Pierre et Mohamed, a celebration of their friendship, was performed. Mohamed’s mother was there and she kissed the actor who played her son. 

 

This is adapted from a talk given in the St Martin-in-the-Fields autumn lecture series.

 

Timothy Radcliffe OP is a former master of the Dominican Order, an itinerant lecturer, broadcaster, preacher and retreat-giver.