CN | Run w/ the Horses: Knowing & Naming True Soul Friends

"Friendship" Anonymous Street Art

"What's in a name? The history of the human race is in names. ... The whole meaning of history is in the proof that there have lived people before the present time (and in our present moments) whom it is important to meet" (Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy). ... Jeremiah was never popular. He was never surrounded with applause. But he was not friendless. In fact, Jeremiah was extremely fortunate in his friends. ... It can come as no surprise to find that there are more personal names in the book of Jeremiah than in any other prophetic book. + Eugene Peterson, Run with the Horses

While Red Skies, When Faith Fails, The God in the Garden, Living Under Water, Being with God, and Praying Like Monks, Living Like Fools have easily made my list for favorite spiritual reads during 2022, I think Run with the Horses maybe the spiritual resource I have returned to the most this year. Its theme of abundance over scarcity has not only shaped my prayers, but continues to transform my perspective. And its title comes from a provocative question God asked Jeremiah that I also continue to ask myself (or perhaps God is also asking me):

So, Jeremiah, if you're worn out in this footrace with men, 

what makes you think you can race against horses? 

+ Jeremiah 12:5

When I preached on "God's Abundance for Us" from Jeremiah 31:7-14 with Resurrection Church on Sunday, January 2, 2022 (due to it being the first prophetic reading for the new year in the Lectionary), Run with the Horses helped shape my understanding of God's faithful presence with Jeremiah. This humble prophet, who most would not listen to, somehow persevered in writing and sharing God's words with abundant hope during a time of scarcity of faith and love. 

A prophet lets people know who God is and what he is like, what he says and what he is doing. A prophet wakes us up from our sleepy complacency so that we see the great and stunning drama that is our existence, and then pushes us onto the stage playing our parts whether we think we are ready or not. ... A prophet makes everything and everyone seem significant and important — important because God made it, or him, or her; significant because God is actively, right now, using it, or him, or her.

+ Eugene Peterson, Run with the Horses

Jeremiah helped me then and continues to help me see what is significant and important in the eyes of God. And though this wisdom and insight comes from the one many know as the weeping prophet, God did not leave him to lament alone. Jeremiah was a poet and a prophet. He wasn't popular, but he wasn't friendless. He was a humbled man who made and kept friends who were faithful to him throughout his hardest moments in life. 

Below is an excerpt from Run with the Horses that has helped me grow in appreciation of the abundance I already have in true friends when life tempts me to see the wilderness without the wild God who meets me in desert spaces with wonderful people who I get to call "my friend." 

And if you are one of those people I have the joy of knowing as a friend, thank you for your faithfulness to me as you continue to be a poet who reveals the artistry of friendship to me and the world.

The Weeping Prophet Who Knew and Named His Friends

Jeremiah was never popular. He was never surrounded with applause. But he was not friendless. In fact, Jeremiah was extremely fortunate in his friends.

Under King Jehoiakim, Jeremiah was almost murdered, but Ahikam ben Shaphan intervened and saved him (Jer. 26:24). Baruch was his disciple and secretary, loyal and faithful, sticking with him through difficult times to the very end (Jer. 36:4, 8, 45:2). And Ebed-melek, the Ethiopian eunuch, came to his aid (Jer. 38:7-13).

"One friend in a lifetime is much," wrote Henry Adams, "two are many; three are hardly possible." Jeremiah had three.

Ebed-melek risked his life in rescuing Jeremiah. Being a foreigner he had no legal rights. He was going against popular opinion in a crisis that was hysterical with wartime emotion. That didn't matter. A friend is a friend. Ebed-melek didn't indulge in sentimental pity for Jeremiah, philosophically lamenting his fate; he went to the king, he got ropes, he even thought of getting rags for padding so that the ropes would not cut, he enlisted help, and he pulled Jeremiah out of the cistern. He acted out his friendship (Jer. 38:7-13).

No one who is whole is self-sufficient. 

The whole life, the complete life, cannot be lived with haughty independence. Our goal cannot be to not need anyone. 

One of the evidences of Jeremiah's wholeness was his capacity to receive friendship, to let others help him, to be accessible to mercy.

It is easier to extend friendship to others than to receive it ourselves. In giving friendship we share strength, but in receiving it we show weakness. But well-developed persons are never garrisoned behind dogmas or projects, but rather they are alive to a wide spectrum of relationships.

The theological ideas, historical forces and righteous causes that touched Jeremiah's life never remained or became abstract but were worked out with persons, persons with names. He never used labels that lumped people into depersonalized categories.

It can come as no surprise to find that there are more personal names in the book of Jeremiah than in any other prophetic book.

 

+ Eugene Peterson, Run with the Horses, pgs. 163-164

Bonus Friend Reflection: Anamchara and the Need for "Soul Friends" Wisdom from St. Brigid and St. Patrick

Anamchara ("ah-num-kah-ra") is Gaelic, the language of the Celtic lands, and when translated means "soul friend." This concept was distinctive in early Celtic Christianity, particularly in monastic life, where every monk was to be assigned to an older brother in the community, a soul friend, resulting in a relationship of utmost importance in the monastery. 

There is a well-known Celtic story in which St. Brigid (457-525), Abbess of the great monastery at Kildare, Ireland, once gave the advice that "a person without a soul friend is like a body without a head." In the Celtic way of thinking, having an anamchara was essential in one's life.

Celtic scholar and writer Edward Sellner says that "to be a soul friend is to provide a cell, a place of sanctuary to another where, through our acceptance, love, and hospitality, he or she can grow in wisdom, and both of us in depth." Such a relationship "came to be closely associated in Christianity with ongoing transformation, a process of conversion-reconciliation that included frequent self-disclosure." 

Ray Simpson explains: "The 'soul' in Celtic, as in biblical thinking, refers to the total self. It does not refer to a bit of a person, a spiritual bit, as in Greek thinking which splits the spiritual from the material. The "soul" refers to the whole personality: body, mind, and spirit. The anamchara was a person with whom you could talk through practical matters, reveal hidden intimacies, and break through the barriers of convention and egotism to an eternal unity of your soul." 

St. Patrick himself had a soul friend, a monk named Germanus in a monastery in Gaul (modern day France). The Life of Patrick states that during his time there with Germanus, Patrick "learned, loved, and treasured wholeheartedly knowledge, wisdom, purity, and every benefit to soul and spirit." Surely Patrick's ultimate and profound influence in Ireland was partially due to the formative time he spent under Germanus' tutelage. 

+ Tracy Balzer, Thin Places

Bonus Friend Story: Henry Scougal's Loving Letter to a Hurting Friend Sparks a Revival that Changes the World

One day in 1677, a young man named Henry Scougal sat down to write a letter of spiritual comfort to someone he knew and loved. He wrote this letter out of care for a dear friend he knew was troubled, and so in the depth of his friendship, he pointed them to Jesus, the One who lays down His life for His friends. And though Scougal as a young Scottish Episcopalian priest would have his life tragically cut short by death a year later at the age of 28, his compassionate letter reached his dear friend and impacted this person in a way that it was preserved and shared with many more friends. Scougal's letter ended up being copied, passed around, and later published. 

This letter of friendship that Scougal wrote in care and love for his friend is actually somehow still in print today, more than 300 years later. About a half century after Scougal first delivered it to his friend, two brothers, Charles and John, with the last name of Wesley were given Scougal's letter by their mother, Susanna, who had cherished the letter herself and wanted her boys to be impacted by it like she was. They were impacted, in their friendship between each other, as well as in how much their lives impacted others as a hymn writer (Charles with "Christ the Lord Is Risen Today," "And Can It Be," "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing" and "Come Thou Long Expected Jesus" among 6,000+ others) and as a minister and disciplemaker (John as the founder of the Methodist church planting movement in the Anglican Church in England and the U.S. that planted the seeds for the Great Awakening). And the Charles and John were so stirred by Scougal's letter that they shared it with their mutual friend, George, who upon reading it said, "I never knew what true religion was till God sent me that excellent treatise."

That friend was George Whitefield, who went on to become one of the great preachers of the eighteenth century and a catalyst of what would come to be called the Great Awakening in the U.S. that led to hundreds of thousands, and eventually millions of people's, families', towns', and regions' transformed by Jesus' Gospel of the Kingdom. Though Whitefield had been among Jesus' Church and a practicing Christian for years, Whitefield traced his own conversion to Christ back to reading Henry Scougal's letter to his friend, which has come to be called, "The Life of God in the Soul of Man."

Next post: CN | B.L.E.S.S. Like Jesus: Begin with Prayer Practice & Stories

Here are links to other recent City Notes (CN) books:

A Time To Heal (Shalom); Red Skies; Story of God in a Sanitation Truck; The Artistry of What's Next; Days of Song on Spot of Scorched Earth; Seeds of Hope in the Rain & the Dark; The Church is the Most Corrupt Institution on Earth; The Seamless Life; A Good Calling; Inisheer Island; Wrestling with God in Doubt; Taste Grace in World of Seculosity; I've Seen What Hope Can Do; Ubuntu and the Family of God; Baptism as the Way of Life; Childlike Wonder; Listening to God's Voice; The Cross and Peacemaking Presence; Being with God; Pray As You Can

With presence, peace, and many prayerful blessings,

Rev. Mike “Sully” Sullivan

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