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Good morning. Whether you love it or not, the fact remains that the US sitcom Friends has captivated a lot of people. Episodes from its ten seasons have now been viewed an estimated 100 billion times. And while the series exerts an emotional pull for many of us who watched at the time before the days of streaming, it resonates with younger viewers, too. My wife and I watched the special reunion programme released this week with my 15-year-old daughter, who has been desperate for this moment. She and her friends have watched every single episode! And yes, we do chat about how the series could have been more diverse, and how the gay jokes jar. But it’s aged remarkably well, considering, and evokes far more than mere nostalgia for Nineties fashion and a time before smartphones. One of the producers explained, on the reunion show, how the series was principally about ‘that time in your life when your friends are your family’. I don’t think we talk much about friendship in our culture, which is probably why the series speaks eloquently for us. But in the pandemic, I’m sure we’ve experienced afresh how friendships can have a higher calling - albeit expressed unglamorously in the form of a humble box of eggs left on the doorstep, or a text to see how we’re doing. The words of the Irish poet and philosopher John O’Donohue evoke, for me, the nature of our potential as friends. He writes of the ‘Anam Cara’, or ‘soul friend’ - the term used by the early Celtic church to describe someone who, in a sense, walks with us as God might: to be actively present, listening, loving … and helping us awaken more to who we are and what our life is all about. Perhaps that’s where friendship and family do begin to blur: For ‘where you are understood,’ he says, ‘you are at home.’ That’s not to pressurise our friendships. It’s in the mundane that we often taste the sublime. The sharing of a coffee and a slice of cake in the garden, or even at the dining room table, as restrictions ease, is sacramental when we share in the goodness of a moment we may once have taken for granted. The best bits of the Friends Reunion programme, for me, were simply when all six actors got back together in a room again for the first time, and hugged, and looked each other in the eye. And yes, there were laughs aplenty but it was perhaps the tears that spoke most tenderly of what it means for any of us to be home again with friends.