Friendship Through A Glass Darkly

When my oldest child was small, he would sometimes ask me what I was doing with my laptop as I paced around from one end of our tiny rental lot to the other trying to pick up a free WiFi signal from one of the nearby hot spots so that my blogreader would load up new posts.

“She’s trying to talk to her imaginary friends,” my husband quipped once in answer to the question. The joke has stuck. Mama’s imaginary friends have married, divorced, had babies, lost babies, suffered illness, found jobs, celebrated promotions, fretted through firings, moved away, moved home, lost faith, found faith, laughed and cried, in one online community after another, and those tides and sorrows and joys come into our home as prayers and worry and hope shared, and our joys and sorrows and fears and hopes go out in return.

I spent time with two of those “imaginary” friends last week. It’s a marvel to me whenever someone I knew first as words and thoughts and stories on a screen–someone whose personality was revealed to me in turns of phrase rather than tones of voice–stands physically before me, made manifest with facial expressions, body language, tics and fidgets and all that comes with being in one another’s physical presence.

We see each other as but through a glass darkly, much of the time. I don’t mean just online. My online friendships are no more complete or incomplete in understanding and knowledge than my in-person friendships. They often feel more intimate, more quickly, as we share those things foremost on our minds from behind the protective distance of a little screen, knowing we can turn it off and walk away if we feel too vulnerable. Online or in-person, we see just bits and pieces of the incommunicable whole.

But for all the human limitation in every friendship, the inability to ever truly know another as well as we know ourselves (and how well is that, really, much of the time?), there’s an awe whenever we fall through one barrier, through the looking glass, and discover something more of the other to know and love.

During my visit to my friend’s house, an observer commented on how comfortable we are with one another, how it shows in our bodies and voices. Before we ever met in person, we’d become comfortable with each other–we counted it up and realized we’ve known each other under one internet pseudonym or another for over a decade. Meeting her for the first time felt like remembering something I didn’t know I knew: Ah, that’s right. This is who we are together.

And it occurs to me now, thinking of the joy of seeing how the bits of my friend that I’ve encountered over the years fit so very well into the whole of her, into the person I’ve come to know, that this must be similar in quality if not in scale to what a Saint must experience entering into the Beatific Vision. Underlying the awe and the wonder and the magnitude of it all must be the grounding, comforting sensation of recognition. Here is the Person they’ve spent their lifetimes building a relationship with from a distance; sometimes closer, sometimes farther.

My online friends have taught me a lot through their willingness to share themselves with me, as have my in-person friends. As we’ve shared each other’s burdens and celebrated each other’s victories, I’ve learned that joy isn’t a hothouse flower that needs the perfect, ideal conditions in which to thrive. Even when our lives become battlegrounds, there’s still room for the stubborn weed-flowers of joy and laughter and friendship and love to spring up in the churned-up mud of the trenches, if we keep our eyes open for them.

It’s not uncommon for the more obnoxious type of online atheist to refer to God as an “imaginary friend,” because, like my online friends, friendship with Him is invisible to the outside observer except in its effects on us. There’s the same mix of intimacy and distance, familiarity and continual discovery. There’s the freedom to walk away or draw closer at any time.

My life is so much the richer for drawing closer to my “imaginary friends,” and the benefits of that were clear to me last week. Halfway through Lent, I’m reminded to draw closer to the Friend I encounter each week in the Eucharist and the Scripture, so that someday I can look upon His face and say: Ah. That’s right. This is Who You Are, and who I am, and who we are together.

Image credit: Bluesnap via https://pixabay.com/en/sunset-through-glass-glass-window-234723/