Yesterday I had a less than productive session with a friend on Skype. You know the kind I mean, when you spend most of the airtime bickering and arguing and being defensive or trying not to be defensive. One of several things that came out was how differently we understand friendship.
This began when she mentioned that I have a beautiful singing voice (like, big deal!), and how much I could use my talent to benefit the church. Except...as I mentioned to her, I would far rather just sit in a coffee shop to chat and gossip with people who want to be friends with me than entertain a bunch of church people who otherwise don't care crap about me as a person. She thought that maybe this would be a marvelous opportunity, my gifts in music and other things, for actually connecting with people with the same kinds of interests and we could become friends.
Except.....
That is not how I do friendship. To me, all we need to have in common is the fact that we are human beings and the desire to be friends.
She didn't like hearing that, and resounded that in that case, I will have a very difficult time making friends. After all, how can we be friends, if we do not have common ground? My reply: sometimes we have to create common ground, and my experience is unfailing that when people of mutual goodwill are ready and willing to create between them common ground, then mountains can be moved.
I have in the past tried to form friendships based on common interests. It almost never works, and for the simple reason that friendship is a lot more than having common interests. But I don't think of friendship in terms of what's in it for me. And I am afraid that people in general, including church people who don't really have a relationship with the Lord they purport to worship, are not interested in extending themselves in true friendship. But real friendship also requires unconditional love, and who really has time for that?
The people I know as my friends are quite a diverse bunch. In some cases we have interests in common, for example Spanish and English language exchange. But with those individuals, even had we met under other auspices, we would still like each other, we would still grow to love each other. For me, friendship has nothing to do with common interests, common tastes or common anything. Friendship has everything to do with extending ourselves in love towards one another, with making ourselves open and vulnerable. It comes from the humility and the desire to learn from one another, to learn and appreciate different perspectives and different ways of living.
Of course, there are limits. It would be very hard for me to be friends with a white supremist, or a misogynist, or with someone who is severely homophobic. Or to a church lady so stuck in her middle class privilege that she is simply going to dismiss any perspective that is different from her own.
I did have to end a friendship with an individual who became a white supremacist. Very difficult and painful. I had spent seven years remonstrating with him, and he simply became worse, so I finally cut off contact for my own survival and well being. Sometimes we have to practice social amputation, but only when all other measures are exhausted.
But where we are very different, but each have the will and desire to open our lives and actually learn from one another, those are the kinds of friendships that for me are the strongest, that flourish, because it isn't about me, it is about us. As Christians, if we really are Christians, if we really intend to become Christians, friendship is always a verb. It is how we are towards one another. It is living out the kind of unconditional love that is not confined to our own circles, but is to widen the circle, including among us anyone who will come, because if we are really interested in living the life of Christ, then we have to make ourselves open to one another. And vulnerable. Otherwise, we are not going to grow, Otherwise, our lives will remain spiritually sterile and we will simply go through life as crabbed and shrunken little people utterly consumed by our own petty self-interest. The church, unfortunately, is full of people like that.
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