dosti
Friendship is death.

I do not often pray in mantras, but this evening, one phrase dominated my mind like the pulse of church bells on the quarter hour, or the refrain of some popular song. It was like a line from a familiar poem that kept coming up and relating itself to whatever was on the screen of my mind at that particular moment, and it always made some strange, mystical sense no matter how far I drifted from those original words.

Dosti. Friendship is death.

It’s true, you know. And not just friendship, but any sort of solid relationship you wish to form. If you ever wonder why we have such weak marriages, such disintegrated families, such empty camaraderie, such pitiful churches and spiritually dead Christians, it is all for that same reason. Friendship is death, and we don’t want to die. And we live in a culture that makes death an unusually easy thing to avoid.

Friendship, in any real sense, means leaving the echo-chamber of our own thoughts and interests, laying down our own needs and wants and desires, and putting our fingers on pulse of another, absorbing ourselves unnaturally into their world. Their needs and their cares, spoken or unspoken, become our needs and our cares. We not only leave ourselves unclothed with the things we need and the things we want, but we open ourselves to the extreme pain of rejection and betrayal. It is death. Even to know how to speak the language of another man’s heart requires that the self is buried that the culture of a new and frighteningly different human being may be donned.

We live in a culture that affirms my life, my interests, my possessions. And there is nothing morally wrong with that. The only problem is that my life is death. It is worse than death—it is hell. What I choose for myself, by myself is idolatry, and I have proven this to myself over and over again. I will become addicted to books, movies, weirdness, wordplay, games, philosophy, conversation—God save me—even being a Christian becomes an addiction for me from time to time. I am simply putting on those things that make me feel good, going through the motions to define myself and make everyone (myself included) recognize that I am a worthy person.

And this? This is not life. How do I know? First, because at the end of the day, neither the deeds I have done, nor things I have accumulated for myself provide satisfaction, and second, because I have tasted life from God, and its incredible flavor makes everything else I consume ash by comparison. I know there is hope outside of my hopelessness, there is life outside of my listlessness, and there is a true God beyond my puny, impotent idols. And I know that the hope and the life He gives He gives without cost. Except...

Dosti. Friendship is death.

Immediately, it costs me everything. He asks me to surrender every little thing I have worked so hard to define myself by, and He does not promise that He will give it back. But if I am to know Him, I must give it all away. Even though I know that by forfeiting this shadow of living I will gain true life, it is still so hard to let go of it. It is all I know. And I have earned it, though my righteousness be but filthy rags, they are my rags, and what immense struggles I have met with to achieve them.

But then at long last comes that moment where absolute faith swallows absolute fear, and you think, for a moment, you are going to fall off the world, but when you open your eyes, you find that you are standing on your head.

Dosti. Friendship is death.

What an odd jubilation. Suddenly, my prayers are on backwards. No longer do I cry, “Oh Lord, preserve my life,” but “Oh Lord, may I slip on the ice and expire, may some vehicle plow into this mortal frame that I might have no obstacles to serving you.” Like Peter, I pray, “Not just my feet, but my hands and my head as well.” My zeal itself becomes something of an ironic idol, but an adorable one.

Do you know what I think heaven would be like? Not sitting on a cloud and playing a harp, certainly, although doing so in the presence of God would also be quite heavenly. But I see heaven as that place where God is with us continually. As one of His angels who is near Him wherever I am, I would want to be in Hell, that place where I have no other comforter but Him, at the bottom of human misery, by His strength offering a glass of water to a soul tormented by the flames. Heaven is that place where His law is written on our hearts, where our zeal to obey His commandments is more overpowering than even our drives to eat and sleep and have sex are in this life. (Can you imagine if we fulfilled all of His commands with the vigor of “Be fruitful and multiply?”)

And then I meditate on this image, I want to taste death’s sweet nectar all the more. Yet the Lord forbids it, and here I sit, my ass before a computer, and my head in the highest clouds. But heaven is not merely a promise forthcoming, it is a reality that is becoming now. Christ invites us to die daily--Christ invites us to be a part of the hidden Kingdom as it becomes the Kingdom manifest And having walked a mile with death, and written a page with death, I have become a closer friend to Jesus, and a nearer participant in His work.

For friendship is death.