Augustine and Friendship By Father Bryan Kerns, O.S.A.
A to Augustinian education. We find that Truth by looking inward and finding God who is closer to us than we are to ourselves. The third value of Love is revealed through a strong sense of Christian Service that every Augustinian school focuses on. It is more than just community service. It is true love for Christ as found in our sisters and brothers throughout our communities and around the world. Each year at SAVI the core values of Truth, Unity, and Love are lived and developed. We learn from one another how we can strengthen these values. In sharing a few days together, for everyone – from students to chaperones to host schools and visitors – Augustine is alive and thriving.
s a relatively recent beneficiary of Augustinian education at the secondary level, it was a great honor to be able to speak to the participants at the tenth Student Augustinian Values Institute (SAVI-X), especially on the topic of Augustine and friendship. And so much of what we take to be friendship in this contemporary moment, mediated by social media, is not at all what Augustine would think friendship is. My students – and those at SAVI-X – seem to know this. But they also seem to feel trapped by the demands of the age: leaving social media would take them out of the space where their peers are, requiring a willing surrender of social capital. Yet there is another, doubtless better, way. The three Augustinian values of truth, love, and unity offer us a framework for Augustinian friendship. Truth in friendship requires a willingness to be candid and honest, even perhaps at the cost of conflict; this is hard-won and develops over time. Friendship also requires love, which is to say that we ought to desire the good for those we call friends; that desire for the good of another is an engine. It generates force and feeling. It motivates action. When we fuel the engine of love towards one friend, we tap into a well of energy that enables us to keep the engine firing towards others. And born of these is unity, the bond that transcends time and distance. Unity is the evidence of meaningful friendship, and the strength and stay by which friendship can withstand the winds and storms of time and life, solidifying authentic Augustinian friendship.
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