Church is where your friends are: Jesus saw through the boundaries that keep people apart. Can we do the same? (testaments).

FOR AS LONG as childhood lasted, my best friend in the world was Beverly. Her family lived in the house directly across the street, yet I never saw the inside of it, nor was she ever invited into ours.

She had lots of brothers and sisters, just as I did, and we were less than a year apart, so one would think we had a lot in common. But there was a wide chasm between her side of the street and mine. There were reasons we were not welcome in each other's houses. As a child, I was never really clear on what those reasons were.

Maybe, like so many things that divide people, the answers were lost in the history. Somebody had once thrown a rock at somebody's brother and split open his head. Was it an accident or deliberate? Didn't matter. Stitches were required and hard feelings ensued between the families. Then there was the matter of curse words. Our family didn't use them. Their family did.

But the crux of the matter seemed to lie in something intangible, something my grandmother always yelled whenever Beverly was found cross-legged with me on our front porch. "Filthy girl!" my grandmother would shout, chasing my friend off the porch and slamming the gate behind her. "Protestant brat!"

I had to admit, in all the years I knew her, it seemed Beverly's hair had never been combed. It stood out from her head Medusa-style, a dark gold mat of wavy fur. And she seemed relatively unacquainted with a bar of soap, generally as covered with smudges as scabs from our frequent forages into the local hills. But I would have won no awards for hygiene myself back in those days. The Saturday night bath was presumed to be sufficient, and I only got my hair combed when my mother could catch me to do it.

After thinking long and hard about it, I came to the conclusion that a Protestant was someone who was not very clean. And I played with Beverly every chance I got.

What I wouldn't give for such a friend now! We spent the summers together joined at the heart. We had wonderful adventures, following a stream to its source and watching tadpoles at play. We collected salamanders in shoeboxes and caterpillars in jars; they didn't like it, and they often got away through the generous holes we poked in the lids. For those that were too dense to escape, we held funerals later in the summer.

We got up at dawn to race over to the railroad tracks and sit on the grass, watching for the train on its way to the lumberyard. If we had a penny to spare, we'd put it on the tracks before the train arrived and look for it afterwards, flattened into an oval with Lincoln's silhouette barely discernible.

BUT SOMETIMES PENNIES WERE BETTER TO KEEP WHOLE and to save until you had 39 of them. That, Bev and I knew, was enough to buy a whole bag of oranges at the Little Bear supermarket. Once we did just that, and sat and ate the entire dozen, right down to the peels.

When we sat on our front steps, groaning with citrus burn on our lips and ulcers inside our mouths, my grandmother came out and hollered at us. She thought we had stolen the oranges, because how could little girls come by so many pieces of fruit honestly?

No matter what anyone said or did, no matter what the unspoken history might have been, Beverly and I remained fast and loyal companions. Though I lost track of her in high school, I cannot think of my childhood apart from hers. She remains the warp on which my early memories are woven. There was no game, no scheme, no summer day that didn't include her, or wasn't the worse without her.

It is to this fierce and unshakable friendship that I return whenever I find myself reading John's gospel every Easter season. As austere as the fourth gospel is often characterized to be, it is the gospel of friendship. Jesus insists that his disciples accept the name of friends, not servants or slaves or underlings.

He invites them to share a bond more intimate than that of teacher and student, much closer than the pairing of master and subordinate expected at that time. Jesus spoke meaningfully about how there could be no greater love than to lay down your life for your friends--which is what he intended to do. All he asked in return is that his friends remain in his love.

Remain is an important word in John's gospel. Jesus uses it frequently, so that it becomes the refrain of his commitment. He remains, the disciples remain, and we are invited to remain in a circle of dedication that cannot be broken. This friendship has staying power, beyond the separations and obstacles that emerge in our world and challenge our loyalties. No matter what lies ahead, we remain together. Are we agreed?

As we move beyond childhood, it gets harder to find the sort of people willing to seal a friendship by eating a whole bag of oranges with you at one sitting. Who will refuse to let go of your hand when the gatekeepers are threatening to exclude you and the current of history is moving you in opposite directions? A true friend will. But how many of those do you have? Remain with Jesus, and you will have one. And a very important one at that.

But how do we know this? Unlike Beverly, who sat beside me every day with her unruly hair and happy brown eyes, Jesus makes only rare public appearances these days. What we've got as evidence that he remains with us are the sacraments and the church.

Already the eyes glaze over: Oh yes, those. Our problem lies in our perception of this highly misunderstood and eminently misunderstandable inheritance. As my liturgy teacher used to say about the Eucharist: Never mind making the leap of faith that this bread is really Jesus; first we have to make the leap of faith that this round, flat wafer is really bread.

Our sense of the sacraments has been distilled down to a poverty of forms: a touch of wheat and sip of wine now stand in where a meal used to be. A sprinkle of water is left to signify a brisk plunge into the river. A quickly recited laundry list in the confessional is the pale echo of an honest acceptance of responsibility for our offenses against love.

If this is all that "remains" of Jesus' friendship for us, it makes sense that we find it hard to see. Jesus becomes less like the genuine friends we have known and more like the invisible horse I kept in my pocket to ride when I was running particularly low on ways to amuse myself. If Jesus is such an invisible friend, it is no wonder religion gets to be a game no one really wants to play until they've run out of options.

MINIMALISM IN OUR CELEBRATION OF THE SACRAMENTS may make Jesus seem present only in a ghostly way among us. But it's our idea of church that really makes him vanish like smoke.

Try this experiment at your next dinner party. Use the word "church" in a sentence and see how many of your guests disappear, or at least experience brain fade before your eyes. Jesus is the one who remains in us, and church is the community where we remain in him, presumably. So why do we confuse church with a building or a ritual hour or pious people we really don't know or like very well? Try substituting this definition for church: the people you most like to be with, the ones who are your friends and remain with you through thick and thin. Is this just a game, or is it a more precise definition? Jesus said his mother and sister and brother did not have legal rights to these familial titles, but the ones who lived with him in real communion did. So why think of church in terms of legalities and technicalities? Why not claim church wherever the spirit of Jesus truly remains visible?

This might shift the membership a little, but we wouldn't be the first people to face this problem. Peter once came to a household of Gentiles to find them seized with the Holy Spirit--before they'd ever been baptized. He insisted they be baptized right away, to get them on the right side of the rope (Acts 10:44-48).

Jesus said he had other sheep to lead that his regular flock knew nothing about (John 10:16). Who's to say this "other flock" doesn't include folks we normally exclude: the good-hearted Buddhist, the truth-seeking atheist, the un-churched grandchild we're always worried about? Jesus said one day his other sheep would be included in the one fold so that there would be one flock and one shepherd.

If it's good enough for Jesus, I suspect it's good enough for us. So these days we may consider church "happening" wherever two or more are gathered in Jesus, in name or in spirit.

I THINK OF AN EVENING SOME YEARS AGO WHEN I HIT A LOW point and spent the night on and off in tears. The sorrow seemed too deep to share, and though I mentally reviewed my list of regular companions, I didn't feel I could reach out to any of them with this. In the midst of my struggle, someone called whom I knew slightly through business contacts. I had picked up the phone in error, thinking it was someone else.

As soon as I realized my mistake, I attempted to end the call, but the man on the other end heard my muffled voice and asked, "Are you all right? Do you want me to come over?"

"That's not necessary," I replied at once.

"Let me rephrase that," he said more gently. "If I came over, would you talk to me?"

Surprised at a near-stranger's concern, I said yes. And I found more comfort in that conversation than I might have expected from anyone in my "normal" parish community.

These days I "do church" in all sorts of unorthodox places. I've got some so-called lapsed Catholic neighbors, and we are quite happy to share the joys and burdens of our lives with each other. They know I attend the Catholic church right down the street. I know they don't. We don't judge each other by that yardstick, remaining rooted in our friendship and mutual concern.

I engage in letter-writing campaigns with social activist friends, some of whom are motivated by faith and others who back away at the mention of God.

We all know people who are "natural Christians," who say no and do yes, like the son in the parable who refused to help his father yet winds up doing it anyway.

Remaining in Jesus, being rooted to his vine, makes us fast friends with all those who are branches in the common cause of compassion, reconciliation, justice, and charity. If they happen to be members of the Catholic community, all the better. But I wouldn't refuse a true friend wherever I found one.

By ALICE CAMILLE, author of Invitation to Catholicism (ACTA Publications, 2001) and collaborator on the homily service Prepare the Word, available from TrueQuest Communications.