love my friends.  I love them more than words can tell.  Yet like me, none of them is perfect.  To be sure, none of them is given to immoral or evil behavior.  Still, all are, as am I, some distance from being perfect.  I would not have it any other way.  I mean what is there to be said for loving someone who is flawless in every respect.  This hardly strikes me as virtuous.  It is sort of liking praising someone for being fluent in his native tongue.  It takes a long an unobvious story to make sense of praising such a person.  Nothing showcases the majesty of love like the imperfections of humanity. 

I have friends who can get nervous about nearly anything and friends who are so phlegmatic about life that one wants to check their pulse.  I have friends who talk too much and friends who do not talk enough.  Then there are my friends who work way too much and those who have mastered the art of working way too little. 

Not only have some of my friends done just about everything that I would not do.  They have had the temerity to do so in the ways that I can’t imagine a person doing what, in the first place, reason counsels against doing. 

My risk taking friends are perhaps the ones who intrigue me the most.  There are folks who seem to have Lady Luck always on their side.  None of these people, though, turn out to be my friends.  My friends who turn out to be risk takers generally end up paying the piper.  But they are still my friends.  And I would not trade them for anything.

Finally, I have friends who never quite seem to get it; and it does not matter what it is—bless their souls.  They are forever bewildered, which itself is bewildering.   

Yet, I love them all so very dearly.  More than that: I would say that my life is immeasurably enriched because of them.  Why?  Because each imperfection on the part of one is an occasion for me to become a better human being. 

If the story of Jacob’s ladder is any indication, I suppose that wrestling with an angel can be quite the learning experience.  But that story was about a test of endurance—better: determination—on Jacob’s part.  Jacob did not learn how to be more patient or more understanding or more considerate or more careful in his choice of words.  He did not learn a skill or a new way of doing things in order to be there for the angel.

I think that there are real limits to what one can learn from wrestling with an angel, precisely because an angel has no imperfections. 

So much of our growth in life is tied to our wanting to be there for others: our spouses; our children; our friends.  We want them to flourish in spite of this obstacle; we want another to get ahead notwithstanding the shortcoming that the person possesses; and we are determined that another’s physical handicap, say, will not hold her or him back.  To this end, we have often been utterly ingenious in our approach, modifying our behavior in one way or another in order to be there for the person. 

It is in this sense that our friends often bring out the best in us, pushing us beyond what we thought were our limits. 

Think of the times when we have refused to let a friend wallow in self-pity or when we have refused to let a friend give up.  Or, to go in a different direction think of the times when maintaining a friendship has required us to be more understanding than we were prepared to be initially.  At the outset, we may have been annoyed.  But it is typically the case that we so very pleased that we made the effort to be there for the friend.  We savor the moments. 

At their best: friendships and loves are the soil of moral perfection.  They occasion our willingly exerting ourselves to do better in order to be there for the individual about whom we so very much care. 

A perfect friend could be mortifying; for there would be a very straightforward sense in which we could never be good enough for that individual.  Not only might our flaws overshadow our most heart-felt efforts, there is the simple truth that the perfect friend would never need us in the way that our imperfect friends do.  A perfect friend would not need the comfort or encouragement that our less perfect friends need.  Accordingly, a perfect friend would not give us a reason to perfect our lives because it mattered to us to be there for him.

This for me is the sublime point about the imperfections of friends.  At their best, friendships broaden our horizons by enabling us to see how we can be better people.  The same holds for parental love and romantic love at their best. 

Herein lies the importance of the divide between evil versus mere imperfection. 

The evil person is only concerned with his own interests.  Accordingly, the evil person does not take it upon himself to better himself simply because this will enable him to help a friend.  The good of helping a friend never constitutes a reason for the evil person to be a better person.  There are, course, gradations of evil, just as there are gradations of goodness.  But make no mistake about it: a person who never takes any delight in the possibility of doing something for another is a morbidly callous individual. 

When we look at the lives of individuals, there are a few truths that stand the test of time.  Wherever we find genuine goodness on the part of a person, then we will find that the individual will see herself or himself as having a reason to be better person precisely because the individual can thereby help another.  This is the defining mark of a good person.  The evil person (or morbidly callous individual) is never thus moved. 

To be sure, what we can do to help another is invariably dependent upon a host of factors.  But it is almost impossible for a healthy person not to be able to do anything at all in order to help another.  To the courtroom of social interaction, there is always something that a person can bring that will be of benefit to some individual or another. 

I very dearly love my imperfect friends.  For amid the imperfections that we all have—perhaps I more than anyone, it can truly be said that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.  Why?  Because out of those imperfections has grown an abiding love between us that has withstood the test of time—an abiding love forged in the crucible of reality and made secure by having withstood the vicissitudes of life.  We know that we love one another, all of our imperfections to the contrary notwithstanding.  To be secure in that knowledge is to have a security blanket like none other.