Monthly Spiritual Themes guide Chalice Circles, small groups that gather monthly to explore meaningful spiritual themes through personal sharing. For more information on Chalice Circles, please email chalicecircles@uuprinceton.org. Our Chalice Circle thoughts and questions around the theme of Friendship this month are:

“What is so delicious as a just and firm encounter of two, in a thought, in a feeling? How beautiful, on their approach to this beating heart, the steps and forms of the gifted and the true! The moment we indulge our affections, the earth is metamorphosed; there is no winter, and no night; all tragedies, all ennuis vanish; all duties even; nothing fills the proceeding eternity but the forms all radiant of beloved persons. Let the soul be assured that somewhere in the universe it should rejoin its friend, and it would be content and cheerful alone for a thousand years.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

When in your life has a friendship changed the “season” of your inner world? Do you believe that friendships have a kind of destiny or inevitability to them?

 

“Whoever sits with friends is in the midst of a garden, even if he sits in the fire. For the friend is shade in heat, water in thirst, and a lantern in the dark. Sit with those who make your soul blossom.” – Rumi

What qualities in a friend make your “soul blossom”?

 

“If love is sudden, friendship is steady. At the moment of meeting a friend for the first time, we might be aware of an immediate “click” or a sudden mutual interest. But we don’t “fall in friendship.” And where love is often at its most intense in the period before the lover is possessed, in the exquisite suspense of the chase, and the stomach-fluttering nervousness of the capture, friendship can only really be experienced when both friends are fully used to each other. For friendship is based on knowledge, and love can be based on mere hope… You can love someone more than you know him, and he can be perfectly loved without being perfectly known. But the more you know a  friend, the more a friend he is.” – Andrew Sullivan

How does truly knowing someone deepen or complicate a friendship? Are there limits to how much or what we should know about a friend?

 

“The other element of friendship is tenderness [the first is truth]. We are holden to men by every sort of tie, by blood, by pride, by fear, by hope, by lucre, by lust, by hate, by admiration, by every circumstance and badge and trifle, but we can scarce believe that so much character can subsist in another as to draw us by love. Can another be so blessed, and we so pure, that we can offer him tenderness? When a man becomes dear to me, I have touched the goal of fortune.” – Aristotle

What makes tenderness between adults so difficult and so rare?