A certain person came to the Friend’s door and knocked.
“Who’s there?”
“It’s me.”
The Friend answered, “Go away. There’s no place for raw meat at this table.”
The individual went wandering for a year.
Nothing but the fire of separation can change hypocrisy and ego. The person returned completely cooked, walked up and down in front of the Friend’s house, gently knocked.
“Who is it?”
“You.”
“Please come in, my self, there’s no place in this house for two. The doubled end of the thread is not what goes through the eye of the needle. It’s a single-pointed, fined-down, thread end, not a big ego-beast with baggage.”
—Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi, Mathnawi, rendered by Coleman Barks
Last year I made a new friend. He’s Italian, but we met while working on a project in Australia. Initially I was charmed by his friendliness. Each morning when we arrived for work he exclaimed, “Ciao, Jason!” with an enthusiasm that should have sounded saccharin but didn’t. I felt he was genuinely glad to see me. Then I noticed that he greeted everyone this way, which served to increase my appreciation. His greeting made each one feel welcomed and seen.
In the intervening year, we continued work on the project remotely, with regular sessions by teleconference, and met for in-person work this summer in Italy. Seeing him againm I noticed the sense of ease and trust had deepened. We naturally explored ways we could assist one another with our respective interests and aims. This gave me pause to ponder the meaning of friendship.
Friend is a noun, satisfying two of the criteria being both a person and a general category or “thing.” By definition nouns represent fixed quantities, abstract and immutable. Unfortunately, the conventions of language do not admit two features of reality. First, nothing in nature is permanent. Everything is either evolving or involving, coming into being or breaking down. Second, things can be of different degrees of quality and intelligence.
The experience with my new friend brought into focus that there are different orders of friend. An acquaintance becomes someone I know better. The friendship either deepens or it doesn’t. Why and how does friendship deepen?
An English proverb says, “Before you own a man as a friend, eat a bushel of salt with him.”
This is a clue. What does it mean to eat salt together? Salt suggests tears of suffering. The proverb also implies a shared taste of flavor or savor. Framed this way, friendship comes from working and suffering together, metabolizing experience with a common aim or purpose.
When I was young I spent time with a Persian man with training in the tradition of the dervishes. His was a mode of inner and outer practice, breathing exercises, sacred dances and whirling, all related to the Sufi tradition of Iran. He called us out when we referred to someone as our friend. With an expression of amazement he said “you have a friend?!”—as though it was an exceptional event. He was bemused by the looseness with which we used the term for what, in his view, is a high, shared attainment.
For the mystic Sufi poets like Rumi and Hafiz, the Friend is synonymous with God. In this is to recognize that everyone is composed of layers of intelligence, with the most intelligent part being, as it were, at the core. We may seek, as in the Vedic salutation namaste, “the God in me makes contact with the God in you,” to relate to the highest in our friends. This is expressed in the Isha Upanishad: “Of a certainty, the man who can see all creatures in himself, himself in all creatures, knows no sorrow.” This is not to ignore the obnoxious and unreliable aspects of one another, but rather to strive to relate from the finest awareness in myself to what is finest in my friend.
The idea of a fraternity or sorority, or in the ancient sense, brotherhoods of monks or aspirants working for a common ideal, points to another possible dimension of this level of friendship. In this we are not simply people with interests in common. Rather, a shared ordeal of effort yields an identical insight and common body of understanding. It is in this context that the admonitions of the Sermon on the Mount, for instance to turn the other cheek, actually make sense.
This article appears in August 2025.
