I was recently at a friend’s house for dinner, a lovely evening of friendship, conversation, and conviviality, when I was struck by the fact that being friends with all there, I could not remember the last time we had a dinner together, not eating together at a bar, not even at an actual restaurant, not going to someone’s home after having drinks to fortify ourselves with nachos or pulled pork, but a night wherein we come together with the purpose of sharing a meal, of breaking bread with friends. But why does this matter? We all have something on which to eat, somewhere to sit, and something to eat at home; why take the time travelling to another house when I can throw my dinner in the microwave or cook something quickly, turn on the television and ‘veg out’ until I am tired enough to go to bed. Why do anything else? It is because, of course, that not only does a communal dinner feed your belly, it feeds your spirit as well. 

Gathering people together to enjoy each other’s company in good food and drink, in lively conversations and play is obviously good. But in a negative framing, it makes impossible that all too common experience of returning home from work and immediately replacing the work laptop’s beguiling glow with the even more insidious glow of the television or phone, replacing true friends with parasocial mimikery of friends, true conversations with voyeuristic eavesdropping; in short replacing reality with a simulacrum designed not by God for our betterment and salvation but by soulless megacorporations trying ever and ever more to steal all our time and all our treasure.

We are beset in these days with a noise that prevents any sort of real interaction with others, for even when we are engaging in conversation with our friends, our phones are but a handsbreadth away, ready to lure us in if we have the slightest moment of not being maximally stimulated. It creates in us a subconscious technologization of our friends and family, an equating of these humans with our screens and measuring them both based on the scale of social media and finding humans lacking when they are not as constantly stimulating as the algorithm designed to trap us within its grasp. By gathering together to talk, to eat, to relax together, to play a card or board game together, we are choosing the human scale, a scale that is sometimes mundane but one that is real.

Yet in a positive framing, it is not simply that it helps you to avoid the mad excesses of modernity, but it helps you to grow as a person both mentally and spiritually. Study after study has shown the positive effects of good conversations and time spent with friends. It provides too an opportunity to grow as a well-rounded man through conversations with your peers or elders. It is a strange effect of the modern schooling system that is carried into adulthood: we often fear interacting with those outside our two- or three-year age range. We find our friends within that range and, in doing so, cut ourselves off from the wisdom, example, and advice that our elders have to give, and cut off the wisdom, example, and advice which we can give to those younger. For in receiving we are drawn further into adulthood and maturity, and in giving the same we help those younger grow from the milk of childhood to eat the meat of adulthood.

Perhaps most importantly, it provides an opportunity for your friends—assuming they are true friends as St. Thomas would have them—to speak together about the Faith as well as to pray together: to truly build one another up in orthopraxy and orthodoxy. Now, that is not even to say every conversation must or should be about the finer points of Canon Law as it applies to this or that controversy, nor even that every conversation must be a reflection upon some saints’ life, but the very fact of having good friends creates good conversations, conversations that draw you up no matter what they may be about, whether work, school, books, or even the weather. 

It may—perhaps with some justification—be retorted that one’s schedule is too busy or perhaps even that one does not have friends with whom to ingest and imbibe. To the former, I say that I simply do not believe you; we moderns—for goodness only knows I am more guilty of this most—can find time for a legion of useless, insipid, or evil events, pastimes, and activities, so that a night is certainly achievable to put aside for one’s friends. To the latter, I encourage you to look around to your neighbors and co-parishioners, invite those whom you but know in passing, invite those whom you know more but vaguely; they are all but your future friends and confreres. Now this is all certainly easier said than done.

There are real hurdles to jump; one must get people, food, plates (if you do not have them). But it is beneficial and necessary in the long run; after all, “it is not good for man to be alone,” and without the help of our brethren we will simply wallow in ourselves until we finally grow bored of that as well. Let us remember that too, that despite the isolation that seemingly pervades our society, we have friends everywhere if we have but the courage to look up from our screens and out into the wide green world. For as it is written, “behold how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell in unity.”