So let’s talk about it! What is spiritual friendship, how do we create it, and why has it become so out of reach for us space-age folk?
It sounds kinda weird but it’s true, she’s a bit of a legend.
She’s been a “voice crying in the wilderness” for the evangelical church to take spiritual formation seriously since 1995, when she started Soul Care.
In an attempt to reach new audiences, I’ve spent the last year and a half posting clips of my mom’s teaching as instagram reels on Soul Care’s page.
We were seeing slow but steady growth on her views and engagement until one fateful day, we posted a video of her teaching about spiritual friendship and it went nuclear.
Hundreds of people were commenting, and sadly a massive percentage of them were expressing a lack of this type of friendship in their life, and even a total lack of any kind of friendship.
We’ve actually posted that video ~10 times to Soul Care’s social media, and it gets over 100,000 views every single time. It’s responsible for roughly 85% of followers at this point.
It’s been fascinating to us that out of all the topics covered on her page, this one above all else has struck a nerve for people. I see the energy around this post as an indicator that the world has a deep hunger for this type of friendship right now, and yet has never been less equipped to create them.
So let’s talk about it! What is spiritual friendship, how do we create it, and why has it become so out of reach for us space-age folk?
1000 years ago, a Cistercian monk by the name of Aelres of Reveleax wrote a massively influential book called Spiritual Friendship.
In it, he argues that there are three kinds of friendship:
This third kind of friendship is reminiscent of the type of friendship that Jesus speaks of in John 15:13 when he says,
“Greater love has no one than this, that a person will lay down his life for his friends.”
This is a self-giving love that has its source in God. It’s more than a mutual enjoyment, it is a window into the heart of God. A portal into Glory.
My mom also wrote a book about spiritual friendship in which she defines it this way:
“Ordinary friendships are generally characterized by intimacy, trust and mutual enjoyment of one another. Spiritual friends share those qualities, of course, but are also characterized by another element: spiritual friends actively help us pay attention to God. Similar to the way other spiritual practices connect us to God, our soul friends help us sit with him. They have the capacity to help restore life to the soul.” - Mindy Caliguire, Spiritual Friendship
To me, spiritual friendship goes beyond simply talking about God with friends.
It’s about engaging one another at the soul level, and experiencing God together.
Before we go into the how, it’s best to start with the who.
Engaging a friend at the soul level requires a heroic amount of vulnerability and honesty. Sadly, Christian culture often makes this difficult, as it can tend to be performative and hyper image-conscious.
As my mom says in her viral video, you don’t just dive into the deep end with people that have not yet earned your trust, but through time and discernment, the safe people in your life will become apparent.
One common trait I look for in trustworthy people is humility, which is often disguised as curiosity. People who ask good questions and listen more than they speak often make the best friends.
It also helps to look for people with depth. Many people go about their lives with a deep lack of consciousness to their inner worlds, and sometimes even their outer worlds.
Find people who pay attention to the sound that rain makes as it falls, or the colors in the sky after the sun goes down, or the way their feelings shift throughout the day.
Find people that follow up on things you told them about your life a month ago.
Find people who are sensitive to beauty, pain, suffering, and God.
To me, many of the things that keep us from this deepest form of friendship find their root in the way we think about relationship.
As Christians, we often view the journey of walking with God to be a matter of obedience, personal righteousness, and becoming “like God” through sheer will power. From my perspective, this is usually because sin is seen as a list of rights-and-wrongs that are corrected by discipline and better performance.
Biblically understood however, sin is much deeper than that. It is better understood as a disease, darkness, or delusion plaguing the human race. Jesus’ ministry was about healing and forgiving sin, rather than just correcting it and demanding better behavior.
People in 12 steps recovery communities grasp this better than anyone. Perhaps that is why so many millions of people have found it to be such a safe space to grow and heal from addictions that cripple them.
Heather Kopp writes in her recovery memoir, Sober Mercies: How Love Caught Up with a Christian Drunk
"The particular brand of love and loyalty that seemed to flow so easily in recovery meetings wasn't like anything I'd ever experienced, inside or outside of church, But how could this be?
How could a bunch of addicts and alcoholics manage to succeed at creating the kind of intimate fellowship so many of my Christian groups had tried to achieve and failed? Many months would pass before I understood that people bond more deeply over shared brokenness than they do over shared beliefs.”
So the foundation of a vibrant spiritual friendship is a shared safety, mutual desire for growth and healing, and a shared desire to know God.
Transactional Friendship
Mindy writes in her book on spiritual friendship :
"Often we have unspoken agendas for other people. We may not even be aware of them until we find ourselves angry or disappointed in someone—and realize they just weren’t meeting our expectations. When I am tempted to move toward friendship with someone I enjoy but from whom I also want something, that’s when an agenda creeps in.”
There’s an insane amount of messaging in our culture that makes friendship out to be transactional, even in subtle ways. Friends are often seen as stepping stones for our own growth, and our decisions on who to befriend and who to ignore is often based on our assumptions of what we stand to gain from the relationship.
I think its really important to seek out creating friendships with healthy people that inspire you, but I’ve often found that the most life giving friendships can form with the people I expect to connect with the least.
It’s worth pausing when you are in a season of seeking out new friendships to ask yourself if there might be a subconscious agenda you’re approaching the relationship, outside of a pure desire for connection.
People can sniff these things out pretty easily and most people will put up their defenses quite quickly if they feel that you’re trying to get something out of them.
Once you’ve got a solid foundational understanding of what builds and destroys these safe, unagenda-ed relationships, it then becomes a matter of invitation.
Sometimes normal relationships naturally open into rich spiritual friendships, but often there’s some initiating that has to occur.
And speaking from personal experience, that can feel really vulnerable.
Asking someone to pray for you in the midst of something really painful you’re experiencing can be scary. Letting someone see into your wounding is always an act of bravery, and often it needs to be preceded by a willingness to see and feel those things in ourselves.
My experience has been that I often disassociate from my pain or wounding as a form of temporary relief. Even when a friend asks me with sincerity how I’m doing, I can struggle to put words to anything when I’m in a state like this. I need to be brave enough to see and feel my own pain before I can step into a space of sharing it with a friend.
So in short; know yourself, invite people into depth, and seek to experience God, rather than just talk about God.
Cultivating these types of relationships — this deepest form of friendship — is quite the act of rebellion in our day and age. We’ve never been more isolated, and we’ve never been more distracted from our inner world and the inner worlds of our friends.
I wrote this post because I believe it’s important to remember what relationship can be.
It’s not just a way to fill our time and avoid the hard feelings that can come with being alone. It is one of the most important paths to walk in our journey of knowing God. It is part of the meaning of our existence.
That’s why I so emphatically urge people to take their friendships seriously.
I hope this was helpful if you’ve felt stuck in surface level friendships, or have lost sight of the gift our friends are in our lives. I am by no means an expert on any of this, just a guy who cares a lot about it and wants to share the small collection of wisdom I’ve gained in my nearly 30 years of life in case there’s anyone a few steps behind me.
I’m lucky to have a mom who literally wrote a book about this very topic and has always encouraged me to take my friendships seriously, demonstrating that very principle so powerfully in her own life.
Share this with someone who is a spiritual friend to you!
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