on friendship.

I found this gem of a quote by C.S Lewis in the Draft folder of my old blog (don't ask why I was poking around there hehe). I don't know why it never saw the light of the day; perhaps it was just waiting for now. I am thankful every day for the gift of friendships I'm so richly blessed with and would like to dedicate this to you who I call friend and kindred spirit..

To the ancients, friendship seemed the happiest and most fully human of all loves; the crown of life and the school of virtue, the modern world, in comparison, ignores it. How has this come about?

The first and most obvious answer is that few value it because few experience it. Friendship is, in a sense not at all derogatory to it, the least natural of loves; the least instinctive, organic, biological, gregarious and necessary.. without Eros none of us would have been begotten, and without affection, none of us would have been reared; but we can live and breed without friendship. The species, biologically considered, has no need of it..

In some ways, nothing is less like a friendship than a love affair.. Above all, Eros (while it lasts) is necessarily between two only. But two, far from being the necessarily number for friendship, is not even the best. Two friends delight to be joined by a third, and three by a fourth, if only the newcomer is qualified to become a real friend.

Of course the scarcity of kindred souls sets the limit to the enlargement of the circle; but within those limits we possess each friend not less but more as the number of those with whom we share him increases. In this friendship exhibits a glorious 'nearness by resemblance' to heaven itself where the multitude of the blessed increases the fruition which each has of God. For every soul, seeing him in her own way, doubtless communicates that unique vision to all the rest.

That, says an old author, is why the seraphim in Isaiah's vision are crying "holy, holy, holy" to one another (Isa 6:3).

- C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves