By Donna Corso
Friendship … ah, what a wonderful, warm, fuzzy feeling! True friendship, that is. Whoever said that man’s best friend is a dog, or that diamonds are a girl’s best friend,
may have missed the boat on friendship!
A 2006 survey said that the number and quality of friendships for the average American has been declining over the last twenty years. The study states that 25% of Americans
have no close confidants, and that the average total number of confidants per person has dropped to two. Modern friendships seem to have lost the importance that they had
long ago. Perhaps in our automated and emotionally isolated society we just no longer feel the need to rely on others for our survival. Survival these days often comes at
the push of a button.
Friendship is certainly much more than a matter of survival, though. So, how do we make and keep friends? Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “The only way to have a friend is to be
one.”
Most of us may think of friendship in terms of people that we share our day-to-day activities with. In this book we will expand the meaning of friendship to include our
relationship with God. Perhaps that’s where it needs to start anyway.
I’ve always felt a deep connection with God, even as a child … and I think I’ve carried on a conversation with God all my life, one way or another. Of course people
probably thought I was talking to myself, but is there really a difference?
When Linda Ratto, SNS Director, dangled the carrot of possibility in front of me, inviting me to consider writing a companion guidebook for either The New Revelations or
Friendship with God, I pondered which one I would write. The New Revelations had always been one of my favorites of Neale Donald Walsch’s Conversations with God series. Yet
something kept nudging me towards Friendship. I had a fleeting thought … wouldn’t it be nice if an actual voice would just tell me which one to choose? Why couldn’t God
just whisper in my ear, “Yes, Donna, you are to write the guidebook on Friendship with God because you indeed have a friendship with Me.” Of course, it doesn’t usually
work quite that way, or does it?
Several minutes after I had that thought, the phone rang. It was my “Miracle Minute” … a daily inspirational recorded voice message from Rev. Mary Manin Morrissey. And what
was her message for the day? She started with a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson: “A friend may well be the masterpiece of nature.” Then she went on to talk about friendship.
Well there was my answer! I knew in that instant I didn’t need to ponder this any longer. God had spoken to me … yes, on the phone! Of course I was to write the guidebook
on Friendship!
Looking back at my growing up years, I hadn’t defined my relationship with God as a “friendship.” That would have somehow seemed too personal, too intimate, almost too
familiar. After all, I’d been taught, in my religion and culture, that I was a lowly human being, a sinner who needed to be cleansed, saved and made worthy to be in “His”
presence. And God was … well, God was God, for God’s sake! He was up there and I was down here! Sure would make for a long-distance friendship, wouldn’t it? Yet even as a
child I felt there was something wrong with that whole idea of separation. In fact, there seemed to be many dichotomies in religion. I was taught that God was all love;
then I learned about the wrath of God. I was told that God was everything and everywhere; yet I was told if I did (or didn’t do) certain things I could end up in hell, and
“He” sure wasn’t there! I loved my religion but some things just didn’t make sense to my childlike mind.
In my teens I read my first metaphysical book, a biography of Edgar Cayce, and was comforted to learn there were others who felt the way I did. In fact, Edgar Cayce was a
Presbyterian, as I was during my first twenty-one years. He was a devout Christian who read the Bible in its entirety once for every year of his life, yet he recognized the
contradictions and misinterpretations contained in it and other spiritual texts. Knowing that I wasn’t alone in my questioning, I began to combine aspects of traditional
religion with my own newly-acquired metaphysical understandings. I became a seeker, hungry for every spiritual delight I could taste. For a time, I was literally a
church-hopper, and it was not unusual for me to go to church three or four times during the work week and to three different churches on Sunday.
It’s been over forty years since those early days of searching. No longer does it seem important to me to seek out a particular building to sit in for an hour each Sunday
or to repeat special prayers and recitations. I talk to God in my mind and in my heart nearly all the time. That’s my church. That’s my prayer. My relationship with God is
within me and it’s ongoing. And it is, indeed, a friendship of the deepest kind. I invite you to take this journey joyfully. After all, Life is too short to take it too
seriously, and friendship is, and should be, fun! So let’s just enjoy this exploration together, shall we?
