​We continue this week with a short selection from the book of Fr Robert Hughes Benson, "The Friendship of Christ":

See how full are the Gospels of this desire of Jesus Christ for deep friendship with man! For the most part, it is of His Humanity that the Gospels tell us; a Humanity that cried to Its kind -- a Humanity not only tempted but also, as it were, specialized in all points like as we are. "Now Jesus loved Martha, and her sister Mary, and Lazarus. " "Jesus, looking upon him, loved him" it seems with an emotion distinguished from that of the Divine Love that loves all things that It has made; loved him for the ideal which he in particular might yet accomplish, more than for the fact that he merely existed -- loved him as I love my own friend, and as he loves me. 

It is these moments, probably, above all others, that have endeared Jesus Christ to humanity - - moments in which He displayed Himself as truly one of us. It is when He is "lifted up" -- not in the glory of triumphant Divinity, but in the shame of beaten Humanity, that He draws us to Himself. We read of His works of power and are conscious of awe and adoration: but when we read how He sat weary at the well-side while His friends went for food; how in the Garden, He turned in agonized reproach to those from whom He had hoped for consolation -- "What? Could you not watch one hour with Me?" -- we are conscious of that which is even dearer to Him than all the adoration of all the angels in glory: tenderness and love and compassion. Or again; -- Jesus Christ speaks to us more than once in the Scripture in deliberate statement of this desire of His to be our friend. He sketches for us a little picture of the lonely house at nightfall, of Himself who stands and knocks upon the door and of the intimate little meal He expects. "And if any man will open -- (any man!) -- I will come in to him and will sup with him and he with Me." Or again, he tells those whose hearts are sick at the bereavement that comes upon them so swiftly, "I will not now call you servants . . . ; but I have called you friends." Or again He promises His continual presence, "Behold, I am with you all days." And, "as long as you did it to one of these My least brethren, you did it to Me." 

​[It is] clear in the Gospels that Jesus Christ first and foremost desires our friendship. It is His reproach to the world, not that the Savior came to the lost, and that the lost ran from Him to lose themselves more deeply, not that the Creator came to the Creature and that the Creature rejected Him; but that the Friend "came unto His own, and that His own received Him not."

We continue this week with a short selection from the book of Fr Robert Hughes Benson, "The Friendship of Christ":

The emotion of friendship is amongst the most mighty and the most mysterious of human instincts. Since it is independent of those physical elements necessary to a love between husband and wife, it can rise mysteriously higher in certain respects. It seeks to win nothing, to produce nothing -- but to sacrifice all.

On the other hand, there is hardly any experience more subject to disillusionment. When my friend fails me at a crisis or when I fail my friend, there is hardly any bitterness in life so bitter. And, while friendship itself has an air of eternity about it, seeming to transcend all natural limits, there is hardly any emotion so utterly at the mercy of time: We form friendships, and grow out of them.

There is but one supreme friendship to which all human friendships point; one Ideal Friend in whom we find perfect and complete that for which we look in type and shadow in the faces of our human lovers.

It is at once the privilege and the burden of Catholics that they know so much of Jesus Christ. [To know God] is a greater wisdom than all the rest of the sciences put together. To have a knowledge of the Creator is incalculably a more noble thing than to have a knowledge of His Creation. 

​Yet Catholics, above all others, are prone -- through their very knowledge of the mysteries of faith, through their very apprehension of Jesus Christ as their God, their High Priest, their Victim, their Prophet and their King -- to forget that His delights are to be with the sons of men more than to rule the Seraphim, that, while His Majesty held Him on the throne of His Father, His Love brought Him down on pilgrimage that He might transform His servants into His friends. For example, devout souls often complain of their loneliness on earth. They pray, they frequent the sacraments, they do their utmost to fulfil the Christian precepts; and, when all is done, they find themselves solitary. They adore Christ as God, they feed on Him in Communion, cleanse themselves in His precious Blood, look to the time when they shall see Him as their Judge; yet of that intimate knowledge of and companionship with Him in which the Divine Friendship consists, they have experienced little or nothing. They long, they say, for one who can stand by their side and upon their own level, who... himself suffer with them, one to whom they can express in silence the thoughts which no speech can utter; and they seem not to understand that this is the supreme longing of His Sacred Heart is that He should be admitted, not merely to the throne of the heart or to the tribunal of conscience, but to that inner secret chamber of the soul where a man is most himself, and therefore most utterly alone.