In an age of sexual obsession, social climbing and mere business contacts, is there a place for friendship? And how would it fit into a Christian Science way of life anyway?

We were hazy, but one thing seemed clear: to simply issue aphorisms on the subject wouldn't help. We needed to dig.

As it happened, two members in attendance had been friends for years and became our guinea pigs. As we deconstructed their relationship into its components, we found they're very much opposites. One's an extravert, the other an introvert. One loves to overstate, the other to understate. Oddly, the extravert relates best to individuals while the introvert does best with groups. How on earth had they managed to stay friends and avoid major arguments? "We knew intuitively we needed to cut each other a wide swath, because we are so different," theorized one. To which the other responded, "Well, we'd sit there across a table being amazed at how the other one saw or handled something. I disagreed, envied and learned all at once."

This got the juices flowing and one member ventured a few aspects he'd read about or experienced in friendships. He said you knew you had a friend when you felt comfortable with the other, safe to be yourself with them. His test: "Could I feel OK cutting a fart in their presence?" Some felt that might put an unnecessary strain on things and even our two lab rats said they'd stifle any such activity in each others presence.

So, we went to the other extreme as a member spoke in favor of not getting too comfortable with a friend: "I might go to sleep, not grow." He saw the bottom line as spiritual transcendence. "Here's this whole alternate universe across from me — how do I get to know and feel some of it?" Another member chipped in that we should always keep in mind our friend's and our own spiritual well being and progress in the relationship. The best way to do that, said he, was to live out from the one Ego that includes everyone as divine idea.

A member talked of the love and empathy friends had shown him when his dear roommate passed away. Several wept with him as he lost control. They and others called and spent time with him. This helped him deal with the loss and adjust to the new circumstances. It also provided soothing arms where he could gently, slowly find meaning in the earthly relationship and its divine afterglow.

We looked carefully at Mary Baker Eddy's forbidding paragraph about " existence without personal friends." (See the Readings in Science and Health, p. 266). We reckoned "personal" to Mrs. Eddy meant dualistic and could only agree with her. After all, if we're basing anything on such unsteady legs, we'd have to be courting trouble. We saw the need to keep every friendship or relationship in constant alignment with divine intent.

This got us to a consideration of enemies. Christianity and Christian Science have much to say on the subject: is it that we're a contentious people or just that there's some hidden blessing in such relationships? As one member put it, an enemy is a "double portion from God." Enemies can certainly force us to grow, to live impersonally, infinitely.

Are enemies actually projections of our own shadow? Jesus and Mrs. Eddy seem to have thought so (See the Readings from Matthew and Miscellaneous Writings, pp. 8 and 9). One member said, "Love your own inner enemies." He said whenever he had a problem with someone else, most of it had to do with some part of himself needing conscious acknowledgement and handling in Science. The "enemy out there" is extremely important — without it he'd be unable to spot his own dark side, parading as another person.

Does sex complicate friendship? Some of us would never mix the two, while others felt ideally we should be friends with our lovers and sex partners. It usually doesn't work out that way, perhaps because of the strong desires, passions and jealousies unleashed by sex. But as one member pointed out, any regular non-sexual friendship can have all sorts of passions and jealousies working away; so whether sex is or is not included, every relationship needs handling by "living the other as one's self."

We next discussed friendships where one friend is attracted sexually/romantically to the another who does not reciprocate. Two of our members are specialists in this line of endeavor. And it's painful on both sides. The best that can be done is to find the (probably) childhood causes of the attraction, dispel them through suffering and prayer and then find other wellsprings in the relationship — if such there be — to carry it forward. One member says he has successfully transited this course with a friend over a period of years and is now quite satisfied they never had and never will have a sexual liaison. The friendship meanwhile has blossomed in ways whose meanings might have been stunted by sex.

Here are some snippets from the meeting.

1) As our relationship with God grows, our relationships with people will also grow.

2) In friendship, quality is more important than quantity.

3) Man does not grow in Science, but the belief of man — i.e., the mortal — does, by becoming less.

4) This week's Golden Text for the Lesson on Sacrament in the Christian Science Quarterly is, "Bear ye one another's burden, and so fulfill the law of Christ." (Galatians 6:2) A member translated it as, "Dispel each other's false beliefs by living the one I or Ego as all."

5) Various architectural proposals for the World Trade Center site show New York's (and possibly America's) transition from the Freudian phallic phase where size is all (the old towers) to the genital phase where meaning, relationship and altruism prevail in the multi-use community-oriented structures to come.

For the next three weeks we'll explore Family. Notes covering the sessions devoted to this subject will be posted on or about February 1st.