By Austin Zeilstra · Contributing Writer
As we are now firmly within the Christmas season, many wise movie lovers are now returning to Frank Capra’s rightly beloved classic, “It’s a Wonderful Life.” The movie is emotional, nostalgic and excellently written, but I was struck recently by one of its most enduring quotes: “No man is a failure who has friends.”
That is a nice sentiment, but is it true? Or is this line but another bit of trite holiday word soup, printed tackily on a Hallmark card?
Carpa’s notion that friendship delivers us from failure is not original. It goes back all the way to Aristotle. That great Greek may not have said it quite the same way, but, in the eighth book of his Nicomachean Ethics, he writes, “(friendship) is most necessary with a view to life: Without friends, no one would choose to live, even if he possessed all other goods.” Aristotle, then, sees a life without friendship as the epitome of failure, empty of what is most necessary.
Shakespeare, like Clarence the angel, describes friendship in a more positive way: “When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes / I all alone beweep my outcast state” — sounds like a man who’s failed! — “Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising / Haply I think on thee … For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings / That then I scorn to change my state with kings.”
The speaker of the poem, on remembering his friend’s love, is brought out of despair, out of the weight and pain of failure and is freed to “sing hymns at heaven’s gate.” He has not failed.
Aristotle and Shakespeare echo the ultimate vindication of Capra’s proverb on friendship: the friendship we can have with Jesus Christ. As he prepared to go to the cross, Jesus told his disciples, “You are my friends if you do what I command you. No longer do I call you servants … but I have called you friends … I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide.”
What a wonder, that God Incarnate might call us friends! Who could be a failure with such a friend? Jesus even assures his disciples, who will soon flee from him in disgrace, that, if we are friends with Jesus and follow his commands, we will bear enduring fruit — indeed, “we are more than conquerors through him who loved us” (Romans 8:37). We will not bear the fruit of an Apostolic ministry, but we will bear the Fruit of the Spirit.
If we who have friends (and where better to find friends than at Grove City College) are not failures, what does this mean for us?
