Ideally, friendships lead us into deeper communion with each other; those we love mirror the divine reality and so draw us closer to the One they reflect. In our humanness, however, we can forget that the friend is only a reflection of God and instead invest ultimate meaning in the relationship.
The practice of paying attention is the rarest of gifts because it depends upon the harshest of disciplines. So uncommon is it for us to grasp the beauty and mystery of ordinary things that, when we finally do so, it often brings us to the verge of tears. Appalled by our own poverty, we awake in wonder to a splendor of which we had never dreamed.