“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.” (John 15:15)
In writing the title of this short piece I oscillated between two variants where the difference is a single word. I initially contemplated ‘Ecumenical Friendship as Ecumenical Reunion’, but finally chose ‘Ecumenical Friendship and Ecumenical Reunion’. The latter, I hope you will agree, is less contentious and, despite its inevitable blandness, is the more dialogical and process-oriented title. I also felt that in positing ‘Ecumenical Friendship as Ecumenical Re-union’ I would have run the risk of oversimplifying the complex reality of ecumenical interactions and also of somehow declaring ‘mission accomplished’, without acknowledging the work that still lies ahead. For instance, we need to be better at working out how we can translate the ecumenical friendships (personal and corporate) we have developed in various contexts, into the empirical dynamic of ecumenical re-union. This is both a spiritual process, involving metanoia – repentance, and one that requires developing better practices and conduits for it. (Both of these are easily the subject of another article!)
Nevertheless, in choosing ‘and’ rather than ‘as’, I mean not to say that it is wrong or false to affirm ecumenical friendship as a form of ecumenical reunion. Far from it. I have experienced it as such many times. Not in an overly emotional or romanticised way that would prioritise personal feelings and experiences over scripture or over aspects of faith that are part of the dogmatic and theological DNA of the Eastern Orthodox Tradition, to which I belong. No, I have most definitely experienced ecumenical friendship – and very much continue to do so – in the full joyous sobriety and accountability that defines genuine friendship between fully-realised, mature persons. In fact, I cannot perceive of ecumenical engagement outside of this paradigm of friendship, and this is one of the reasons I wanted to write something in acknowledgement of this dynamic.
The other reason why I think it is important to speak about ecumenism in terms of friendship as a path to a fuller Christian unity, is because of Christ’s words in John 15:15, quoted above. Christ reframes his relationship with his disciples as friendship, and thus he reframes the understanding of the Apostles between themselves along the same paradigm of friendship. It is not an abolition of the service and dependency that defines the servant-master relationship, but the refocusing of their meaning. The quality of friendship is inseparable from mutual dependency, not in a functional sense, but at a deep, intimate and personal level. Moreover, friendship is service. Friends put themselves in the service of the ones they call friends, which is to say they pay attention to their needs, to their life story, and are there to support and to build them up when needed.
Ecumenical friendship is essential to ecumenical reunion, because only in friendship do we become stakeholders of the other person’s life story and we begin to understand from within the decisions that shaped their life and made them who they were. In that sense, ecumenical friendship is ecumenical reunion. As personal friendship does not require nor seek the absorption of the other person into my life story (that would be a form of abuse, a form of bullying), but seeks to grow in knowledge of the other; ecumenical friendship is similarly driven by the impulse to grow in knowledge of the other.
The late Metropolitan Kallistos Ware (1934-2022), who was simultaneously a deeply ecumenical and utterly orthodox Orthodox bishop, would often quote with great satisfaction and almost as his own, the words of the Belgian Cardinal Leo Jozef Suenens (1904-96): “If we are to unite, we must first love one another. If we are to love one another, we must first get to know one another”.
Ecumenical friendship is, at its most elementary, about getting to know one another – about being genuinely curious and fascinated about one another. This requires generosity and a form of positive humility. It is the first and vital step towards growing to love one another. Mutual love is the pre-condition for the realisation of unity. This is to say that when we have begun to love one another, we will have reached the unity, for which Christ continually prays, and to which he calls us, as part of our fraternal repentance.
Fr Dragos Herescu is the Principal of The Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies (IOCS) in Cambridge and the parish priest for the Romanian Orthodox Parish of St John the Evangelist, also in Cambridge. He teaches postgraduate courses on the topics of Christian spirituality and secularisation on the degree programmes offered through the Institute and the Cambridge Theological Federation. He is also an Affiliated Lecturer of the Divinity Faculty, University of Cambridge. Father Dragos graduated with an MPhil in Theology with the Divinity Faculty, University of Cambridge and is in the last stage of completing a doctoral thesis with Durham University, on the secularisation paradigm in the context of Eastern Orthodoxy, with particular focus on the Romanian context. Fr Dragos is also a Trustee for the Society for Ecumenical Studies.