Is your reunion group about true friendship? True Friendship requires wanting what is best for another person! Wanting what is best for another person requires virtue. The Greek word for virtue means excellence. The ancient Greek philosophers insisted that virtues are the highest human good necessary to live the abundant life. They believed that the virtuous person is one who through a desire to do what is good and right, have disciplined themselves to develop habits that consistently direct their desires and appetites. Being good becomes their way of being. Good thoughts flow from them into action from their deepest self; good thoughts and action flow out of them … because of who they are.
This is the purpose for which God has made us! To do what is right at all times and in all places from our very core, from our own desire and love … which springs from the love of Him … that is the highest virtue of all … supernatural charity. Being virtuous and being a true friend are necessarily connected with each other. They are practically the same thing. Friendship like great music is a masterpiece. Friendship is a mutually recognized relationship of affection that occurs between two or more people who have matured in virtue to bear good will for each other. Reunion Groups based upon true friendship are rare because virtuous people are rare.
The most important thing a reunion group based upon true friendship can do for each other is to help each other walk down the path of virtue. The more friends develop virtue the more they exercise true friendship and the more they exercise true friendship the more they grow in virtue.
A strong, lasting reunion group requires true friendship and true friendship is only possible to the extent that each person is virtuous and only to that extent can each person enjoy and share in true friendship. To the extent that each person fails in virtue they fail in the ability to have true friendship. It is the virtuous person and only the virtuous person who really has the ability to desire and pursue the good of another person. In a reunion groups based upon true friendship there is something irrepressible about two or more minds working together, in a context of mutual affection and trust, to fathom God’s deepest truths. Our friendship with Jesus is our model of the shared life in reunion. He calls us friends because He was willing to share with us all that He heard from the Father. “These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full.” What a friend we have in Jesus!
Of all the virtues charity is the purest. It is a mutual love between man and God based upon a shared life. His joy becomes our joy, His happiness is ours. Sin destroys charity … it turns us away from God, ourselves and each other.
To say to another, “I want what is best for you,” is one thing. To mean it is another. And to help him achieve it is still another. Anyone can say it. It takes some virtue to mean it. It takes much virtue to do it.