There are five of us. We’ve been meeting on Friday mornings for over two years now. We began as a Lenten faith-sharing group at our church and after Lent was over, we just kept on meeting to discuss the upcoming Sunday readings, using the Emmaus Journey’s questions as guides (not as required answers). What binds us is our shared love for Christ and for his Church. We don’t talk much about other things.

I think we really are just like the two men walking on the road to Emmaus, talking about our Lord, about our experiences of the Lord, and sometimes, he actually does visit us, I believe, if only to make us realize it is good to have friends who share the faith—not the politics, not the culture, not anything else, really—just faith in him.   From time to time, someone joins us and then falls away, though they are always welcome, but frustrated perhaps by our lack of interest in social things, activist causes, or church politics—or by the absence of koom-ba-yah/warm fuzzies of one kind or another (such as support groups of various kinds often aim to evoke). I can think of one who seemed to want to focus on emotional and family experiences, and another who wanted to dwell on social justice issues. Like the two men on the road to Emmaus, we don’t get into those things. It’s not that they’re unimportant; it’s just that we want to talk about him, that’s all. Maybe we have endured because we love him first, and then consequently, we love each other and the Church—but he, our eternal Lord, is our topic.  All the rest is time-bound detail.

The travelers to Emmaus are nameless. Who they are or what they do for a living is unknown. They aren’t important persons. Neither are we. Most of us attend Mass daily, but none of us has a prominent role in our church.

We are simply friends, but friends in the very best sense of that term—in what is meant by “spiritual friendship,” so often praised by the saints, and I have come to see what a blessing that truly is, just as the saints say it is.