Two of man's basic needs are to love and to share. Both of these needs are satisfied in greater or lesser degree by friendship.
Interpretation
Friendship fulfills the fundamental human needs for love and sharing.
Mother Angelica highlights the essential human needs for love and companionship, suggesting that friendship plays a crucial role in meeting these needs. By nurturing friendships, individuals find fulfillment and connection, as sharing love and experiences with others enhances their emotional well-being and sense of belonging.
In practice
This quote can be shared in a speech about the importance of relationships in our lives.
I am not like a pebble on the beach - a grain of sand on the seashore or just one of millions of human beings past, present and future. No, I am a unique human being loved by God as if I were an only child - the only fruit of his creative powers.
I must not permit the evil capabilities of human nature to sour my faith in the tremendous good that is possible despite the frailty of that nature.
The sinner who suddenly realizes God's love for him and then looks at his rejection of that love feels a loss similar to the death of a loved one. A deep void is created in the soul and a loneliness akin to the agony of death.
Our memories are our own, and we cannot blame anything or anyone in the past for any pain dwelling there. If we open the door to them or keep hashing over past incidents in our minds, we have only ourselves to blame.
Man can and does rationalize his sins. He finds reasons for all his weakness, invents excuses that first calm and then deaden his conscience. He blames God, society, education, and environment for his wrong doing.
Love has been defined, analyzed, explained and excused. It has been the cause of wars, feuds, heroism, martyrdom, inordinate passion, and beautiful friendships. It pulls two people of opposite temperaments together into a married state and permits them to live happily. It makes friends understand each other without the necessity of words.
Friendship is like love at its best; not blind but sympathetically all-seeing; a support which does not wait for understanding; an act of faith which does not need, but always has, reason.
As the years progress one increasingly realises the importance of friendship and human solidarity. And if a 90-year-old may offer some unsolicited advice on this occasion, it would be that you, irrespective of your age, should place human solidarity, the concern for the other, at the centre of the values by which you live.
We were not just competitors and colleagues, we were friends. We had a lot of opportunities to reflect on this in the last year. It was a competitive brotherhood.
That is the remarkable thing about drinking: it brings people together so quickly, but between night and morning it sets an interval again of years.
You've got to reach a hand of friendship across the aisle and across philosophies in this country.
A well-made Martini or Gibson, correctly chilled and nicely served, has been more often my true friend than any two-legged creature.
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