For the past several years at Thanksgiving, it has been my custom to publish a piece on “Ten Things I am Thankful for.” This year, I am interrupting the pattern to reflect on one source of gratitude, the friendship of Laura Grace Alexander.
Laura Grace Alexander was born and raised in Frostproof, Florida to one of the state’s leading citrus families. Frostproof got its name after its orange groves survived the Great Freeze of 1895, which otherwise nearly destroyed the citrus industry in Florida.[1] Laura Grace—“LG,” as her friends called her—did not go into the family business. She played basketball, studied English and then theology, and became a teacher. Though she did not go into the family business, Laura Grace was a remarkable purveyor of spiritual fruit to all who knew her, especially her friends.
According to the ancients, friendship is among the sweetest fruits we may enjoy in this life. Friendship is a bond of affection. The ancients regularly observed similarities between terms for “friendship” and terms for “love” in Latin (amicitia, amare) and, more justly, in Greek (philia, phileo). The nature of friendship comes into sharper relief by comparing it with two other bonds of affection: marriage and family. Like the bonds between husbands and wives, parents and children, brothers and sisters, friendship is an enduring bond, not an ephemeral attachment. Friends can go days, months, and even years without seeing each other and, when they come back together, pick up right where they left off. Though it is an enduring bond, unlike the familial bond, friendship is not a natural bond. As one chooses one’s spouse, so one chooses one’s friends. Which is why, the ancients counseled, one must choose one’s friends wisely: first, judge; then, love.[2] The grounds for choosing a friend, however, are not identical to the grounds for choosing a spouse. What we look for in a potential friend is not a suitable mate. What we look for in a potential friend is “the beacon-light of virtue.”[3] Friendship is a union of like-minded souls, drawn together by the mutual recognition of virtue for the mutual cultivation of virtue, along with whatever other common interests, aims, and, yes, friendships that union of like-minded souls might come to embrace.
Friendship, thus defined, is a relation of mutuality, a relation of giving and receiving. Friends give and receive words. Friends give and receive each other’s burdens, hopes, and joys. Friends collaborate in noble labors. And friends share in rest. Indeed, according to Oliver O’Donovan, friendship is a form of sabbath-keeping.[4] Friends repose in “wasting” time together: eating, drinking, and conversing. As Cicero observes, the mutuality of friendship is what distinguishes friends from other objects of love: friends can love us back.[5] For this reason, every friendship is an implicit promise, creating a horizon of expectation. We may expect from our friends love and all that love requires. Moreover, every friendship is an implicit obligation.[6] Our friends may expect from us the same. For this reason, friendship is also a risk. Friends can disappoint us and betray us, and we can prove ourselves to be unworthy friends. But friendship, especially Christian friendship, which stands under the promise of forgiveness, is worth the risk: “without friendship life is no life.”[7]
Laura Grace’s life was a life rich in friendships. The “beacon-light of virtue” shone in LG’s athletic, intellectual, and spiritual gifts. But what made Laura Grace such a good friend was that she knew it was better to illuminate others than merely to shine.[8] She enriched others with her gifts, elevating those she befriended by her friendship. The gifted athlete became the coach, leading the Frost Proof High School women’s basketball team to a State Championship in 1987. The high school valedictorian became the high school teacher, first at her alma mater, then later at the Geneva School, instilling the love of learning in the hearts of countless young men and women, including one of my sons. The seminary’s distinguished alumna, who would go on to study theology at the University of Oxford, became one of the seminary’s most generous supporters and, beyond that, one of the seminary president’s dearest confidants, encouragers, and friends.
Laura Grace’s friendships involved her in many noble labors. She was one of the founders of the Geneva School in Orlando, Florida and, a year later, became one of the founding members of St. Paul’s Presbyterian Church. Laura Grace supported both institutions in numerous ways throughout the years. For Laura Grace, these labors were always labors of love because they were collaborations with friends. As Laura Grace was a friend in noble labors, she was also a friend in rest. She made friends kayaking and cycling, and introduced many friends to lobstering, a favorite family hobby. Laura Grace loved to host and participate in what she called “great conversations”: conversations about great books, conversations around great meals, conversations about our unsearchably great God and his great works of making, redeeming, and consummating all things. Memories of these great conversations with Laura Grace continue to “add a glory” to the lives of the friends who have survived her.[9]
One of Laura Grace’s greatest gifts to her friends was her example of what the Heidelberg Catechism calls “patience in adversity.” Laura Grace was diagnosed with cancer in 1986, and she lived with cancer, or with the anticipation of its return during seasons of remission, for the rest of her life, until cancer finally took her life earlier this year. Yet throughout this bitter trial, Laura Grace never became bitter. Quite to the contrary. Laura Grace rejoiced in adversity and confessed to her dying day that the “lines” of God’s providential “lot” had fallen to her in “pleasant places” (Psalm 16:5-6). The daughter born in Frostproof, Florida died with a frostproof faith in God’s good providence, the sweetness of which her friends continue to taste and relish. And because we know, as Laura Grace knows, that Christian friendships stand not only under the promise of forgiveness but also under the promise of the resurrection of the dead, we know that our great conversations with Laura Grace will resume one day when Jesus Christ returns to consummate his Father’s eternal kingdom. If “life is no life” without friendship in this age, then life will be nothing but friendship in the age to come: friendship with the triune God, friendship with all God’s people, friendship around the table at the Wedding Supper of the Lamb, who loved his friends and laid down his life for them that they might live forever with him (John 15:13).
[1] John McPhee, Oranges, 37, 46.
[2] Cicero, On Friendship, 40-41.
[3] Cicero, On Friendship, 16.
[4] Oliver O’Donovan, Entering into Rest, 144.
[5] Cicero, On Friendship, 26.
[6] O’Donovan, Entering into Rest, 138-39.
[7] Cicero, On Friendship, 41.
[8] Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II-II, q. 188, art. 6, resp.
[9] Cicero, On Friendship, 13.
