Your thoughts on friendship

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In the Sacrament of penance you tell God all your sins through a Priest. In a relationship with a friend you also tell your sins. But it is different from the Sacrament itself.
I have an idea of friensahip as two people walking together on the path to Heaven. On this journey you reveal your heart to another pwrson whom you call friend. How would this be different from reveaöing yourself to a Priest in a Sacrament?
In both situations you show your weaknesses (but obviously not the psychological weaknesses in the Sacrament).
A Priest told me that you dont go tell another person your sins. If you arent supposed to reveal yourself to anyone how in the world will you have friendship with anyone?
 
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Most people don’t want to hear our sins, even if they’re our parent or our good friend. It’s kinda TMI for a lot of people.

And often we don’t want to tell all our sins to those people, because we might feel ashamed, or they might be hurt, or they might think less of us, or they might worry about us, or they might even decide to distance themselves because they don’t want to have a friend who committed such sins. Or they might think our sins aren’t that big of a deal and encourage us in bad behaviors.

You will be lucky to find one person in your entire life who can really handle hearing every sin and every “bad” thought you have. For me it was my spouse. Many people don’t even have that. (Just look at the number of discussions on CAF about “I don’t think you should tell your husband you had feelings for another man” or “I don’t think you need to tell your wife you cheated if you’re not going to do it again” etc.)

You can show parts of yourself to everybody else, but in the end God is the only one who will know you absolutely through and through, good and bad, and you can’t hide anything.
 
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Friendships exist at different levels of intimacy. In some cases, certain intimacies are better made mutually exclusive from others. Certainly the priest cannot be right in an absolute sense, however. If you sin against your friend, part of seeking forgiveness is admitting to your friend the sin. Perhaps the best rule is to ask yourself whether the revelation of any particular sin to your friend will either help, hinder or be irrelevant to his salvation. If irrelevant, the revelation is frivolous. If a hinderance, you become a stumbling block to your friend.
 
Well, I kind of…you know…find it extremely important that we reveal important things to a friend. I mean, it is important that we can talk about sexuality…That is something I thing is an ok subject to discuss with a friend.We have to discuss difficult topics in a personal way with somebody. I dont see hoq we can have close friendships without people showing their weaknesses. Are we to open up to somebody or sit alone in darkness and juat feel so ashamed that peoole wont love is if they knew?!?
 
I do think there is an element of cleansing in telling others our sins. In turn, we get help and healing from it.

“Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective.” - James 5:16
 
There’s a difference between talking about sexuality with a friend in a general topic way, as in talking about how you’re straight or gay or have trouble with lustful thoughts or whatever, and telling them about all the times you masturbated or had an impure thought. Also, not everybody feels the way you do about discussing sexuality with friends. I have many friends whose company I enjoy but I would not talk about my sexuality with them because they don’t want to hear about that. I may have a handful of very intimate friends with whom I would discuss some aspects of it, but I wouldn’t get deeply into details of my personal business if you know what I mean.

Also, sexual sins are not the only ones out there. There are sins of pride, greed, envy etc that are just as serious as sex stuff if not more, and a lot of reasons why you might not want to tell your friend about these sins. Do you really want to tell your friend that you are envious of his career success and that you were secretly glad when he got passed over for promotion because you didn’t want to have to act like you were glad for him?

OP, if you have had intimate friendships, you know that they have boundaries, and these boundaries get more apparent as we get older. When you’re a teenager, friendship is really heavily built on sharing, perhaps oversharing. That’s part of why we see younger people coming onto this forum and just spilling all kinds of stuff that is really a faux pas to bring up among relative strangers when you are a bit more adult. As people get older, friendship is not necessarily about having a super close intimacy because that’s reserved for a handful of people, like a close family member, a spouse, a spiritual advisor. It’s not something you just have with all your friends. People don’t want that level of involvement and it’s not because they are bad friends, it’s just that they don’t have the time/ capacity to be on that level with more than a couple of people. Your friends usually don’t want to be your spiritual advisors or your confessors.
 
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I like how you talk about this!
I am here only refering to Galatians 6:2.
 
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