Why are you friends with who you’re friends with? Think of the people you like to spend time with – whether you’d call them an acquaintance, a dear friend, or even your partner. Why are you friends with them at all?
I think most people would say that it’s because of their good qualities – their personality, their values, the characteristics you share with them. In a church setting like this, I would call those spiritual qualities. There might be people you just like to share certain activities with – like bowling on a Friday night. But even then, if you would use the word “friend” to refer to that person, and ask that same question again--why are you friends with them?—you would probably start talking about what kind of person they are, and what you like about that.
You could move in even closer, and think about a person you fell in love with, and perhaps married. Why did you fall in love with them? At weddings, most people give wedding vows, which are really statements about why you are happy being connected to that person. You have probably heard many wedding vows, and perhaps written your own. They are a way of saying explicitly: “This is why you’re my best friend.”
So, whether it is two guys who like to go fishing together, or a married couple, it’s pretty common at one time or other to look at why you are friends with that person, and perhaps even tell them. “I am your friend because of what kind of person you are.”
But Leon Festinger has a very different answer…and it doesn’t sound spiritual at all. Festinger was a cognitive psychologist who introduced many theories to the field of psychology. One was the theory of cognitive dissonance, which addresses what happens when people who two contradictory beliefs at the same time. That is a theory you could explore from a spiritual point of view, but instead I’m going to talk about other research he did. I want to tell you about his housing studies at MIT.
Festinger got interested in that question: “Why are you friends with who you are friends with?” and his way of researching it was to look at married couples who moved into student housing at college. None of these students knew each other before coming to MIT, so it was a “clean slate” to study friendship formation from. They moved into various dorms and condos that consisted of multiple levels, and long hallways. After they had been there for a while, he asked them “Who are you friends with?”
The answer was not very surprising – but still kind of unsettling if you think about it. If you can someone living in 3B who they became friends with, you can probably guess for yourself what the answer was. The people in 3A, and in 3C. Who are they not likely to be friends with? The people in 2H. It’s so obvious: people became friends with the people they lived closest to, and didn’t become friends with people who lived further away. A few more interesting tidbits were that the people who lived next to stairwells had more friends than the people who lived farther away from the stairs. If there was an apartment near the laundry room, the people who lived there had lots of friends. It was all about geography.
He was really just proving what people should already know. It’s a combination of two ideas that are hard to disagree with. First: people develop strong relationships with people that they talk to frequently. Second: people talk with others who they share the same place and time with. To put it even more plainly: when a person is around others all the time, they will talk to them – and as a result of talking, they will most likely become friends. Nothing earth-shattering about that.
I’m a teacher at the University of Minnesota. That means teaching three courses a semester, serving on committees with other people, and holding office hours. What does my social network at the university look like? It changes a little bit every single semester: some relationships grow stronger, some weaken. It has everything to do with exactly when my classes are, who I’m on a committee with, and where and when my office hours are. One semester I’ll have early morning classes on Mondays and Wednesdays, and sometimes a Tuesday night class. There are other teachers there I consider close friends, but if they happen to teach on Thursday afternoons, I lose touch with them. Instead, there’s another teacher I don’t know very well who also has a Tuesday night class, so I’ll probably see them every week as we’re coming and going from our classes, and I’ll get to know them. I bump into them, we chat, I learn about their lives, and next week I know to ask, “How’s your dog?” or “Did your daughter get that job?” That’s how friendships form.
It’s nice, but it’s also a little disturbing to think about. Who is decided who my friends are? An unnamed person in the scheduling office somewhere who has decided when and where I’ll be teaching. I’ve been at the university for nearly 30 years, and I still have no idea who that person is. If I look at my closest friends and ponder that question: “Why are you friends with them?” it’s a little jarring to say “A geographical accident.”
Let’s take a more extreme example. One situation in which people are thrown together, literally, is prison. It’s not surprising that people who are assigned to become cellmates often become friends. But it’s not just other prisoners that you share the space with. In the TV show “Orange is the New Black,” about female inmates, there’s a male guard who falls in love with a prisoner. That’s a fictional TV show, though: that wouldn’t happen in real life, would it? Actually it does – all the time. In England, there have been over 50 examples of guards and prisoners falling in love. Any time you put people together in the same time and place, they make friends—even though the two people who became friends had nothing to do with being put in the same time and place with the other person.
You may be thinking, “But wait, it’s not just about that. You don’t become close friends with everybody you are thrown together with.” Many people have co-workers that they don’t like, for example, and being stuck in the same room with them for years doesn’t solve that problem. So really a more accurate way to describe it is to say that geographical accident creates the pool of who your potential friends might be, and it’s unlikely that you’ll make friends with people who you rarely see. But within that pool, it’s still true that we gravitate toward people that do have personal characteristics and values that we share. Sometimes I see this physically happening in the classroom. Two students who didn’t know each other happen to take the same course, and they happen to sit wherever they’re sitting on the first day. Many students will stay in the same place, and when I say “Get in groups to discuss this question,” almost everyone just turns their chairs to face their closest neighbors, so they won’t make friends with someone on the other side of the room. But sometimes when you have discussions and students hear each other making comments in those discussions, they recognize a kindred spirit. Someone who thinks the same way, values the same things. And then they will probably start sitting together. So geography is part of the picture: glimpsing people’s spirit is another part.
There’s an old expression: “Birds of a feather flock together.” The “of a feather” part refers to those shared values and qualities. Swedenborg’s description of the structure of heaven reinforces that, especially his comment from Heaven and Hell 49 that “not many individuals leave their own community to go to another, because leaving their community is like … crossing over into another that does not suit them.” In other words, heaven is an embodiment of birds of a feather flocking together for all eternity.
But Leon Festinger, the psychologist who did those housing studies, had a different take on that saying. He says: ““It’s not so much ‘birds of a feather flock together’ as it is, ‘birds who happen to flock together grow similar feathers.”
Grow Similar Feathers
A few years ago, I gave a sermon about grieving, and I made the observation that angels in heaven have nothing to grieve about—there is no death or loss, no disease or physical injuries, no loss of money or possessions. Yet grieving is a key part of our spiritual growth on earth. I was thinking about that when I was thinking about how friendships on earth are formed vs. how they are formed in heaven. They are quite different, aren’t they? So once again, I am left pondering why it is important that we make friends on earth, based on geographical accidents, rather than just find those kindred spirits like they do in heaven. That takes me back to Festinger’s saying, “Grow similar feathers.” On earth, we are in the spiritual development phase. We are put on earth to grow. And we don’t do that in isolation. We need to grow feathers in order to fly, but what kind of feathers do we grow?
How can we find people with the same values as we have when we don’t have fully formed values yet? A bird may be born a particular species and have no choice about that, but humans have infinite choices about what kind of person we want to become. If we live our lives a certain way, we could become a peaceful dove, or a wise owl, or a cheerful goldfinch, or a scavenging vulture. We may have hereditary inclinations, but we also have vast freedom. What kind of bird do you want to become? What feathers do you wish to grow?
This brings us to another question about your close friends: this time the question is not how you came to become friends with them. This time the question is: how have they affected your life? How have they shaped your thinking, your habits, your values, your emotional and spiritual health?
If you look at all the people in your life, there must be people who you are happy to be shaped by – people you look up to and consciously choose as role models. And there must also be people who you try notto end up like. It is seeing the wide range of birds that helps us choose which kind of feathers we want, and which kind of feathers we don’t want. That is where your freedom lies.
Let’s return to the awkwardness of realizing that you didn’t choose your friends in the first place. They are in your life because of a scheduling coordinator at the university, or because they ended up in the same job you did, or if they’ve been your friend since kindergarten, it might be because their last name was close to yours in the alphabet, and the teacher had the kids sit alphabetically. Earlier I called those “geographical accidents.”
There is another name we could choose for the factor, though. We could call it “Divine Providence.” Sometimes people think of Divine Providence only in terms of things like whether someone gets in a car crash or not, whether they suffer the “slings of outrageous fortune” or are spared. Isn’t it nice to think of God as being the one who decides, “I will insert this new person into that other person’s life”? So friendship is a good symbol for life in general: it is a blend of things that we had nothing to do with—gifts of providence—and also of free choice. And maybe we’re not always clear on what part is providence and what part is free choice, just as we may be mixed up about whether why we are friends with who we’re friends with.
But it is worth taking a minute to look at all of the different kinds of people God has chosen to put into our lives, all the range of birds, good and bad. Many will be make you angry or irritated or disgusted; others will bring you joy and wisdom. God says “Here is the range of feathers you could grow – now choose.”
It’s important that you did not choose those people in the first place, because if you had always had that choice, you would have only chosen the ones with feathers like yours already. It’s important to talk to people who are different than you are – who see the world differently, who have different values and interpretations. That is one thing that worries me about modern technology. In some ways it overrides the geography factor, because technology has made it possible to seek out like-minded people and spend all our time just reinforcing our old ideas. Some people, when they are in a crowd of real people, choose to spend that time texting friends who aren’t there, or visiting Facebook pages centered around a particular interest or belief. I don’t think that is what God intended: I think He created life in such a way that we will be forced to talk to people who are not like us. It is only through that process that we can really make informed choices about what kind of feathers we want.
But it’s also nice to hear Swedenborg’s description of societies in heaven, those flocks, and realize that once our process on earth is completed, we can then fully enjoy that feeling of belonging that comes from being in your own flock. Amen.
READINGS
Old Testament reading: 1 Samuel 9:1-19
There was a Benjamite, a man of standing, whose name was Kish son of Abiel… Kish had a son named Saul, as handsome a young man as could be found anywhere in Israel, and he was a head taller than anyone else.
Now the donkeys belonging to Saul’s father Kish were lost, and Kish said to his son Saul, “Take one of the servants with you and go and look for the donkeys.” So he passed through the hill country of Ephraim and through the area around Shalisha, but they did not find them. They went on into the district of Shaalim, but the donkeys were not there. Then he passed through the territory of Benjamin, but they did not find them.
When they reached the district of Zuph, Saul said to the servant who was with him, “Come, let’s go back, or my father will stop thinking about the donkeys and start worrying about us.” But the servant replied, “Look, in this town there is a man of God; he is highly respected, and everything he says comes true. Let’s go there now. Perhaps he will tell us what way to take.”…
So they set out for the town where the man of God was. As they were going up the hill to the town, they met some young women coming out to draw water, and they asked them, “Is the seer here?” “He is,” they answered. “He’s ahead of you. Hurry now; he has just come to our town today, for the people have a sacrifice at the high place. As soon as you enter the town, you will find him before he goes up to the high place to eat.... Go up now; you should find him about this time.”They went up to the town, and as they were entering it, there was Samuel, coming toward them on his way up to the high place. Now the day before Saul came, the Lord had revealed this to Samuel: “About this time tomorrow I will send you a man from the land of Benjamin. Anoint him ruler over my people Israel; he will deliver them from the hand of the Philistines. I have looked on my people, for their cry has reached me.”
When Samuel caught sight of Saul, the Lord said to him, “This is the man I spoke to you about; he will govern my people.” Saul approached Samuel in the gateway and asked, “Would you please tell me where the seer’s house is?” “I am the seer,” Samuel replied. “Go up ahead of me to the high place, for today you are to eat with me, and in the morning I will send you on your way and will tell you all that is in your heart. As for the donkeys you lost three days ago, do not worry about them; they have been found. And to whom is all the desire of Israel turned, if not to you and your whole family line?”
New Testament reading: John 15:9-17
“As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love. If you keep my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commands and remain in his love. I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete. My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command. I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you. You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you might go and bear fruit—fruit that will last—and so that whatever you ask in my name the Father will give you. This is my command: Love each other.
Reading from Swedenborg: Heaven and Hell #41, 44, 49
The angels of any given heaven are not all together in one place, but are separated into larger and smaller communities depending on differences in the good effects of the love and faith they are engaged in. Angels engaged in similar activities form a single community…. Kindred souls gravitate toward each other spontaneously, as it were, for with each other they feel as though they are with their own family, at home, while with others they feel like foreigners, as though they were abroad. When they are with kindred souls, they enjoy the fullest freedom and find life totally delightful…. All the communities communicate with each other, but not through open interaction. Actually, not many individuals leave their own community to go to another, because leaving their community is like leaving themselves or their life and crossing over into another that does not suit them. Rather, they all communicate by the outreach of the aura that emanate from the life of every individual.