Love of friendship is often seen as the primary analog for charity. We lay down our lives for our friends; we are called friends, not slaves. Love of friendship is a true love that loves the good and loves that good for another. Charity is that love of friendship based on love of God and loving God for others. Charity is so universal and extensive that we can love our neighbors and enemies with one and the same love.
However, not all friendships are the same. Some are closer, some are farther, some are more or less temporary. Some are not friendships at all but merely acquaintances or co-workers that will fade away in the next chapter of life. Friendship is preferential. By charity, we are asked to love everyone; by friendship, we are asked to pick and choose.
If we truly love God, then we must love everyone, for all are made in His image and called to His friendship. How then can friendship involve preference without falling into some sin of partiality or some injustice of favoritism?
One might expect that friendship, being rooted in love, would be naturally universal in scope. And indeed, it does participate in the same divine love that moves us toward all creation. But friendship is not charity in general—it is charity made particular, focused, preferential.
Friendship operates according to choice:
The root of friendship, as Aquinas teaches, is love—but a tri-partite love involving these three elements:
Again, there appears to be a contradiction between loving everyone in charity and loving only some in friendship. The resolution lies in understanding that preference in friendship works in two ways, according to different emphases.
Merton suggests this distinction: loving God in friends and loving friends in God. The former love is called an active love; the latter is a contemplative love.
Sometimes we love someone first because we see God in them. This approach has several characteristics:
Those who help us see God most clearly naturally become the cause of our preference, not because they are better people in some abstract sense, but because they function more effectively as windows through which we see divine light.
Merton suggests a deeper truth: that the mature contemplative emphasis works in the opposite direction. Rather than loving God in friends, we learn to love friends in God. This contemplative love has different qualities:
As Merton puts it:
"When we love God in men, we seek to discover Him over and over in one individual after another. When we love men in God, we do not seek them. We find them without seeking them in Him Whom we have found."
The mystery of attraction in friendship—why we are drawn to some souls and not others, why certain encounters lead to lasting bonds while others fade into pleasant memory—finds its deepest explanation in divine providence. As Lewis observes: "We think we have chosen our peers," but in reality, "a secret Master of Ceremonies has been at work."
This mysterious attraction operates through several principles:
The Master of Ceremonies works through what appear to be accidental encounters:
But beneath these apparently accidental meetings lies the providential hand of God, gathering around the same table those souls who are called to encourage one another in the pursuit of virtue and the love of the Good.
This divine orchestration operates through the deep structure of similarity and difference:
The true friend serves simultaneously as a mirror and opposite, creating the dynamic tension necessary for mutual growth in virtue.
The contemplative who has learned to love friends in God recognizes this mysterious attraction as the work of grace preparing souls for mutual recognition. Those whom we encounter as potential friends have been shaped by their own journey toward God, just as we have been shaped by ours.
This explains why true friendship often carries with it a sense of inevitability, as if we had always been meant to know this person. When we meet a true friend, we often experience what we might call recognition rather than discovery—not the excitement of finding something entirely new, but the peace of finding something that had been mysteriously familiar.
This understanding transforms our approach to friendship from anxious seeking to patient receptivity:
What emerges from this recognition is profound gratitude—not pride in our good taste or social achievements, but thanksgiving for gifts that have been entrusted to us by God, who knows our hearts better than we know them ourselves.
The friends we thought we had chosen turn out to have been chosen for us by God Himself. Their presence in our lives becomes a reason for thanksgiving rather than self-congratulation. We prefer them not out of pride in our discernment, but out of recognition that they have been entrusted to us as particular gifts from the hand of God.