Friendship

In both that passage and the greeting at the school of the prophets, the gospel of Jesus Christ is understood in terms of friendship. Alma makes clear that "fixed, immovable, and unchangeable" friendship means bearing one another's burdens, mourning with mourners, and comforting those who need comfort.

In both cases, friendship is understood as inseparable from the believer's relationship with God. It is made possible by grace. It requires obedience to him. It means standing as a witness of God "at all times and in all things, and in all places." I infer that we stand as witnesses precisely by being a friend, and we are a friend in the acts of charity that Alma describes: bearing other's burdens, mourning with them, and comforting them.

Elder Henry B. Eyring, First Counselor in the LDS Church's First Presidency has pointed out that the friendship required by the gospel means more than sympathy:

The way it is to be done is clear. Those who have accumulated more are to humble themselves to help those in need. Those in abundance are to voluntarily sacrifice some of their comfort, time, skills, and resources to relieve the suffering of those in need. And the help is to be given in a way that increases the power of the recipients to care for themselves.

Besides programs for aiding those hit by disaster, Mormons have a program of providing monthly visits by the priesthood to the members of each congregation. We call those visits home teaching. And the women's organization of the Church, the Relief Society, has a program for providing monthly visits to the women in the congregation, visiting teaching. In principle every Mormon household has at least one and probably two visits each month.

There are many good things that one can say about both of these programs, but it would be less than honest not to admit that we sometimes struggle with them. We struggle to accomplish the visits. We struggle to make the visits genuinely meaningful.

We have important successes in these programs. I'll not forget the home teacher who, seeing that we were then a young couple with little money and no manual skills, cheerfully cut down three large, dying cottonwood trees in our front yard, cleaned up the debris, and hauled the wood to the dump. Most Mormons have similar stories about good home teachers or visiting teachers. There are many such faithful Mormon men and women who perform extraordinary service for their friends, even if those friends have been assigned to them. But there are also many of us who continue to struggle to be the kinds of friends we ought to be.

In places where a majority of people are LDS, Mormons sometimes struggle with being good neighbors to those who are not LDS or those who are not as engaged in Mormon worship and culture as we would like.

Some of us have a difficult time dissociating our political views (usually, but not always conservative) from our religion. As a result we sometimes have difficulty being good neighbors to those who don't share those politics, Mormons and non-Mormons alike.

Sometimes we are clumsy. We want to be good neighbors. We want to be friends. But we have yet to learn how to do that well, so we do it poorly.

Like Joseph Smith, we sometimes find ourselves struggling to meet the ideal of divine, gospel friendship. Yet in spite of those struggles, we are informed by the ideal of immoveable, grace-full friendship that blesses the lives of those around, just as Joseph Smith was. It remains an ideal to which we hope to conform, and sometimes we succeed.

For Mormons religion is about belief and it is about sacred rites, but most of all it is about friendship "through the grace of God in the bonds of love."