an affirmation
I just had coffee with a friend I've known since middle school. Following the 20th-century American pattern, we were friends all through school, and then rarely saw each other after graduation. Recently, though, we've picked up the thread (without Facebook, bucking the 21st-century pattern) and started hanging out again a bit.
In school, we naturally gravitated to each other: he was friendly and outgoing, had a weird sense of humor, knew how to dress, was superintelligent and didn't see any need to hide it, was a gifted musician, and loved to sit around with friends and laugh and talk philosophy and science and religion and culture. We were dear friends.
He was raised Catholic, but, like many in our crowd, began to leave religious matters aside for what he probably perceived as more challenging sets of ideas. He didn't abandon the concept of spirituality, certainly, but the claims of most religious people in his life may have begun to look absurd. In our crowd, I was one of a very few spirited participants in traditional Christianity. They, and he, respected that greatly; we had many many late-night discussions about whether or not you can know that there's a God, and whether or not there's any good reason to get from there to being, say, Baptist.
Sadly, since I was often a spokesman for thoughtful Christianity, my friends' picture of what a Christian looked like was undoubtedly influenced by my character —– and at that point I was not necessarily a great role model. When not rigid and pedantic, I was crass and cruel. I was quite capable of fussing about my friends' smoking habits, moralizing about their drug experimentation, and on and on. It's a testament to the true openness of our little crowd that they accepted me. At any rate, he was rather firmly agnostic as I recall, and (I hope) we were worthy adversaries in our friendly discussions and explorations. At least he was that for me. (Our friendship and its religious and philosophical debates were fairly well-known: in our senior English class, the teacher cast us as the two leads in the roundtable reading of Inherit the Wind —– impishly, he cast my friend as religious-right Brady and me as hardened atheist Drummond. The teacher couldn't have known that I loved Drummond and had dreamed of portraying him since about 5th grade.)
Sometime right after graduation, when he was moving away, I gave him "Mere Christianity" and a Bible. Looking back, I'm somewhere between aghast and amused that I thought my gesture would be taken as anything but self-righteous priggery.
Life happened; we moved through it; here we are, in our mid-40s, and we've reconnected. As often happens, we picked up right where we left off, brothers in so many ways. Somewhere along the way, he himself reconnected with the church. Recognizing what many supersmart 10th-graders can't, that there's much beyond our powers of intelligence, he's now a world-wise believer.
This spring he gave me a palm cross he made at Easter. I pinned it in our kitchen. I see it often and think of him and our friendship and our journey. Over coffee just now he explained his gift more thoroughly: when he made it at Easter (out of palms from the previous Palm Sunday, a tradition in his church), he was thinking of me and all I'd meant to him. He said I was an inspiration to him, and he was thankful that God had placed us in each other's orbits, and crossed our paths so fortuitously over the years.
Wow. God moves, often despite his followers, in a mysterious way.
In school, we naturally gravitated to each other: he was friendly and outgoing, had a weird sense of humor, knew how to dress, was superintelligent and didn't see any need to hide it, was a gifted musician, and loved to sit around with friends and laugh and talk philosophy and science and religion and culture. We were dear friends.
He was raised Catholic, but, like many in our crowd, began to leave religious matters aside for what he probably perceived as more challenging sets of ideas. He didn't abandon the concept of spirituality, certainly, but the claims of most religious people in his life may have begun to look absurd. In our crowd, I was one of a very few spirited participants in traditional Christianity. They, and he, respected that greatly; we had many many late-night discussions about whether or not you can know that there's a God, and whether or not there's any good reason to get from there to being, say, Baptist.
Sadly, since I was often a spokesman for thoughtful Christianity, my friends' picture of what a Christian looked like was undoubtedly influenced by my character —– and at that point I was not necessarily a great role model. When not rigid and pedantic, I was crass and cruel. I was quite capable of fussing about my friends' smoking habits, moralizing about their drug experimentation, and on and on. It's a testament to the true openness of our little crowd that they accepted me. At any rate, he was rather firmly agnostic as I recall, and (I hope) we were worthy adversaries in our friendly discussions and explorations. At least he was that for me. (Our friendship and its religious and philosophical debates were fairly well-known: in our senior English class, the teacher cast us as the two leads in the roundtable reading of Inherit the Wind —– impishly, he cast my friend as religious-right Brady and me as hardened atheist Drummond. The teacher couldn't have known that I loved Drummond and had dreamed of portraying him since about 5th grade.)
Sometime right after graduation, when he was moving away, I gave him "Mere Christianity" and a Bible. Looking back, I'm somewhere between aghast and amused that I thought my gesture would be taken as anything but self-righteous priggery.
Life happened; we moved through it; here we are, in our mid-40s, and we've reconnected. As often happens, we picked up right where we left off, brothers in so many ways. Somewhere along the way, he himself reconnected with the church. Recognizing what many supersmart 10th-graders can't, that there's much beyond our powers of intelligence, he's now a world-wise believer.
This spring he gave me a palm cross he made at Easter. I pinned it in our kitchen. I see it often and think of him and our friendship and our journey. Over coffee just now he explained his gift more thoroughly: when he made it at Easter (out of palms from the previous Palm Sunday, a tradition in his church), he was thinking of me and all I'd meant to him. He said I was an inspiration to him, and he was thankful that God had placed us in each other's orbits, and crossed our paths so fortuitously over the years.
Wow. God moves, often despite his followers, in a mysterious way.
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