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The actor Mark Gatiss talked this week about a ghost story that he has adapted for television this Christmas. He mentioned people close to him that have died and how he can’t bear to delete their numbers from his mobile. They’re like ghosts in his phone, he said. I too have these ghosts, their numbers still in my contacts list. On Wednesday another of my friends died, the 14th I have lost since the first lockdown of March 2020. They range from friendly acquaintance to peoples I’ve known for half my life, close friends who enriched my world immeasurably. Some succumbed to Covid, others struggled to get diagnosis and treatment for other illnesses. Their names are now a roll call of regret – for not only the lives lost, but for the times we didn’t spend together because of lockdown and the conversations we will never now have. As well as the sadness, these losses highlight for me the importance of friendship. Our concern when people die is rightly for the families they leave behind. But grief’s tentacles reach into friendship too, for the people who once enriched our lives and sustained us. On Tuesday, at the funeral of politician Sir David Amess in Westminster Cathedral, the preacher Canon Pat Browne spoke of the MP’s capacity for getting on well with people, whoever they were. Friendship, said Canon Pat, was Sir David’s great gift to others. A gift can mean a skill or talent, and some have it, for generosity and hospitality. A gift is also something freely offered, without the obligations of family connections, nor is it driven by the impetus of sexual desire. When C.S. Lewis wrote of philia, the Greek word for the bond of close friends, he said it is the least natural of loves, in that it is not biological, not needed for our species’ continuation, but according to the classical world, that makes it of the highest order because it is freely chosen. Christianity also recognizes the importance of friendship to the human condition, with the Gospels recording how much Jesus’ friends matter to him too, as he visits and shares meals with them. When Mary and Martha tell him that their brother, his friend Lazarus, has died, he is devastated, and weeps. This love experienced in friendship can be the closest people get to what Christian theology calls agape, a selfless love totally committed to the well-being of others. As the theologian Oliver Quick said, if someone loves another just for their sake and purely desires their well-being, then that is akin to the love of the Father and Creator of mankind. Thank God for our friends.