I spent this last summer at a Catholic Worker house in Los Angeles, and I was very lonely. It’s a sprawling, dusty city, and I didn’t know anyone. People are long and slender and all know celebrities. I, on the other hand, am short and fat and cry out of anxiety when I meet someone that has 7 followers on bandcamp.

The other interns at the LA Worker and I drove through the desert to get to a monastery. It was a scorching day, and bare trees and cactus broke out of the scorched earth. We turned the corner and the dessert opened up to a cool green oasis. We wandered around a bit, and I left the verdant escape of the main grounds to walk the stations on the outskirts of the campus where it was dusty and scorching. I sat at the foot of the winding hill and asked god for a word.

As I climbed up the hill, burning lungs full of dirt, and as each station unfolded, I saw Jesus’ friends. Saint Veronica tended to Jesus’ face. His mother watched him in anguish, comforted by the people Jesus spent his time with. Simon helped him carry the cross. The women of Jerusalem met him.

A tender and receptive god. A god who gets sleepy and rests their head on you. A god who trips will hold your hand to steady god’s self.

A god who meets you at the well to talk relationships and cryptic wisdom.

A friendship god.

God whispered in my little ear on that dusty hill, “Take care of your friends and take care of them good. That’s how my kindom comes.”

So I walked back down that hill and we drove back through the scorching desert, mirages glistening on valleys in the highway. I looked at the text on my phone, and learned one of my dear ones had been arrested.

What am I to make of this?

We live in a culture of violent isolation. Each family to a house, each house in its own lot. A lot on stolen land, earned through 8 hours of creating things you then have to buy back. Whiteness and capitalism chips away at every ounce of tender. At every ounce of connection, solidarity, the interconnection between bodies and lands and lived lives.

Despite American evangelicalism’s purported family values, Jesus ministry valued chosen connections, friendships, neighborhood, over the nuclear family. Hell, one could even argue Jesus was anti-family. He said “If you come to me but will not leave your family, you cannot be my follower. You must love me more than your father, mother, wife, children, brothers, and sisters—even more than your own life! Whoever will not carry the cross that is given to them when they follow me cannot be my follower.””

Jesus ministry offers us a radical alternative to the selfish, heartbreaking isolation of the nuclear family, but he also offers us an alternative to the draining and arrogant concept of traditional christian charity. Where as charity systematizes and asks compliance in return for services, Jesus ministry breathes life and receives breath. It’s responsive, organic, it gives and recieves. Yes, Jesus healed and rebuked and preached. But Jesus also let a woman pour fine perfume on his feet and wipe it with her hair.

Jesus’ friends criticized her. They said she could have sold the perfume and given the funds to the poor. Honestly, a fair point. I think I would have done the same. But he came to her defense. “She has done a beautiful thing.” Receiving compassion and connection was more important in this moment than doing the pious thing.

When, in christian charity, would we ever see something like this?

I guess friendship is always gonna be messy that way.

When I was up on that dusty hill, walking the stations of the cross, I stopped the longest at the station where St. Veronica washes Jesus’ face with a cool, damp cloth. She, with internal bleeding, who had faith Jesus would heal her, who reached out and touched him. She was healed by his cloth. Then she comforted him in his anguish, in his dying hour. In his most vulnerable hour, she turned the cloth of healing back on Jesus.

This is the gospel of solidarity. Of mutual aid. Of chosen family.

Jesus says, “Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. No longer do I call you servants, for a servant does not understand what his master is doing. But I have called you friends, because everything I have learned from My Father I have made known to you.”

Where the nuclear family and christian charity give us static isolation, Jesus offers us the vibrant movement of friendship. It will always be more complex, sticky, messy.

And it will be our salvation.