Part 3, Chapter 22
People upon people are on Facebook. When someone is on Facebook, it is not unusual for people to make requests for them to friend them. Different people have different ways of handling this, probably the two most common ways of dealing with this is either to say yes to any friend request or to be extremely selective. I saw that one person in 2014 had over 6,000 friends on Facebook. How close of a friendship can we have with over 6,000 people? It sure would be extremely difficult to know that many people, especially well. This isn’t the type of friendship that St. Francis De Sales is getting after, rather he would encourage us to be picky about whom we are friends with. Too often we mix up friendship with an acquaintance, for many people truly are acquaintances to us rather than friends. (But I don’t think Facebook would get anywhere calling them acquaintances rather than friends).
We need close friends; friends who we can follow and who can make us better. Now we don’t want to imitate our friends in what they wear, or the style of their hair, or those things that are on the outside. Many times imitating friends this way would be what we call peer pressure, or wearing what is in-style. The way we want to imitate our friends is in living the devout life. We want to be with our friends in living out those virtues that the Lord has given us. In order for this to happen, we need to be close to our friends. They can’t just be acquaintances or Facebook friends; they need to be closer than that. “Friendship demands very close correspondence between those who love one another, otherwise it can never take root or continue” (Introduction to the Devout Life, 116).
Even with the best of friendships, there are issues. Each of the friends comes to the friendship having different issues and idiocrasies. “Of course we should love him notwithstanding his faults, but without loving those faults; true friendship implies an interchange of what is good, not what is evil” (Introduction to the Devout Life, 116). Thus, a friendship should not seek to imitate faults or issues, or imperfections. These are things that friendships sometimes have to put up with. “Of course I am speaking of imperfections only, for, as to sins, we must neither imitate nor tolerate these in our friends” (Introduction to the Devout Life, 117). God is calling us to have close friends who are willing to journey with us in helping us to live ever more devoutly in Him.