I apologise if my punctuation is off – I quote it from memory.

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I love autumn, I love it with a passion so fierce that sometimes it hurts.  The last roses are still bright, many yellow and dark blood reds.  The pinks and whites are gone.  The Michaelmas daisies are brilliant purple.  The leaves have just began to turn, especially the rowans, and the berries are hanging so heavily they look like scarlet grapes.  Rosehips are bright orange, and May blossom haws are dark wine red.

Soon it will be time for wild geese to go over, and we shall hear the creak of their wings.  Apples are huge and ripening, plums are finished.  Bran, my friend Meg’s crazy greyhound-whippet cross, loves pears and stands on his hind legs to pick the best.  He can reach pretty high up and he knows which are nearest to ripe and chooses very carefully.  Then he races off with his prize, leaping over imaginary obstacles in his excitement.  Have you ever seen a dog burying a pear?  Does he remember where it is, and what does he find when he goes back for it?  He really thinks he’s king of the orchard.

The other day I answered the telephone and recognized the person on the other end.  I asked how she was.  ‘Alright’, she said.  ‘But I just wanted to hear a friendly voice’.

How often do all of us feel like that?  I have friends who call me ‘Have you seen the sunset?’  ‘Have you seen the full moon over the fields?  Over the sea?’  ‘I just read this . . .’  ‘I just heard a joke.’  We want to share the good, it doubles the pleasure.  You hear something beautiful or funny or clever, and immediately the thought is – who can I share this with?

And in bad times we need to be able to reach out and know there is someone there in the darkness, whether it’s the black dark of deep pain, or the grey dark of weariness, disillusion, or just the feeling that there is too much to do and we are tired of doing it alone.

I am drawn again to my friend Doris Platt’s book compiled on ‘Friendship’.  Truly it is ‘Bread for the Journey’ without which our hearts starve.

All the different contributions from people famous and relatively unknown, say so many of the same things about the qualities they seek in a true friend.  They all value loyalty.  No one seems to want the friend who says they agree when they don’t, or tells you you are right when they can see that you are wrong.  It is the loyalty of honesty, of kindness that tells the truth, but without blame, without the ‘I told you so!’ and the hint of superiority when we have slipped – or even when we have made complete fools of ourselves.  And we all do that sometimes!  We usually know it and don’t need to be told.

We value the friend who will listen without necessarily being able to help, just understanding that we need not be alone!  Back to ‘I just wanted to hear a friendly voice’.

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They all valued a friend who could keep a confidence.  That sounds so easy, but it is sad how many people don’t practise discretion.  A secret or a joke can be hard not to repeat, to make others laugh, listen, cause us to be the centre of attention for a while.  But then betrayal is a high price to pay for a few minutes’ fame.  And it is not really liking.  If someone will repeat their friend’s secret to you, be assured, they will repeat yours to someone else!  In our hearts we know that!

We value reliability.  There are beautiful stories of faith and trust honoured.  A true friend does not break their word.  If they promise to do something, then it is as good as done.  You have no need to check up, to make emergency plans to cover their failure.  They will not let you down, even if it becomes inconvenient.

A friend does not exercise their disappointment or bad temper on you.  You have no need to fear their words, their harsh judgement, their harbouring a grudge or their unwillingness to accept an apology.  They choose to think the best of you.  If they judge at all, it is gently.  They remember the things that matter:  not birthdays or the fetching and carrying kind of things.  We all have lapses in those.  They remember the good things about you:  that you are funny, wise, generous, have good ideas and unusual skills.  They believe in the best in you, and help you to achieve it, even at its most difficult.

They also have good powers of forgetting:  the things you did that were not so clever or so kind.  They leave room for you to grow, to put them behind you and let them drift into the past rather than dragging them with you by remembering them.

With friends you belong in the ways that matter, even if you are a little different, occasionally march out of step with the rest.  Your friends will march to your beat for a mile or two.  Even if it is awkward for them, they will not let you know it.

‘I just wanted to hear a friendly voice’.  It is food to the hungry, water to the parched, rest to the weary, light to the lost, and strength and hope to all of us.  It halves the pain and doubles the pleasures.

Do you have such a friend?  I hope so.  If not, maybe they are around the next corner.

Are you such a friend?  That is a far more important question, and the answer to that lies within ourselves.  What you have is not always within your control, in fact it very seldom is.  And what you have today you may lose tomorrow, through misfortune, or through lack of care, lack of nourishing it and treasuring it as of the immense value it is.  Through lack of gratitude!

But what you are lies within your own power.  ‘You are what you are – because you want to be’, with God’s help, at least spiritually.  I used to think that was harsh, but it isn’t.  In the long run it is true – and just.

The word ‘friend’ is used in the Bible more than any other term for a relationship.  Christ Himself spoke of being our ‘friend’.  ‘Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends’ – St. John 15:13.

We are all children of God – that is our birth gift.  We may become friends of God, in time.  And the best way to do that is to become friends of each other.  Friendship is at the root of all other relationships that are of worth, whether of blood, of loyalties and common cause, of romantic love that lasts, or of work shared, of trial or hardship together, of survival through life.

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What we possess will all be shorn from us in the end before we stand alone at judgement.  What we are we take with us into eternity.  Let us learn to be a friend, not just to one but to as many as wish us to be.  Some may imagine they do not need friends – they are mistaken.  We all need both to give and to receive.  The latter is only partially in our control.  We can receive graciously, and with joy and gratitude.  But the giving is all with us.  Isn’t that wonderful?  There is something over which we have complete mastery – in time, and it is infinitely beautiful and infinitely precious.

I wish you friendship, now and in eternity.

Until November.