“The Beginning of Devotion”: Attention in Interreligious Friendship

precis: In this essay, I show how friendship across religious difference at its best trains our attention on both the singular person of the friend and the eternal. I suggest that interreligious friendship offers a meaningful perspective on religious reflection on friendship and on ecumenical and interreligious studies. At the heart of this essay is a consideration of the French philosopher, theologian, mystic, and activist Simone Weil’s notion of friendship. Weil saw friendship as sacramental; for her, it was a miracle. Friends, bonded, need each other, but their experience of need does not lead them to limit each other’s freedom. As each needs and is needed, they do not unite but remain two, free, together. This notion of friendship, mined from the Christian theological tradition, is a helpful way to think about friendship across difference, especially interreligious friendship. I first describe interreligious friendship as a place for attention, practice of attention, and prize of attention, then demonstrate how interreligious friendship can train each friend in attention to self, other, and difference. Finally, I argue that attention to difference is an important corrective to the more familiar appeals to common ground in pursuit of the common good and peace.