Friendships: Forgiveness, Acceptance, and Compassion
Friends. Everyone has some, at least that what we like to think. Some people have a lot of friends but on occasion there arises an individual who claims they don’t have any. They are friendless and there is something about meeting a friendless person that saddens the heart.
Then there are Facebook and social media friends. Social media friends are comprised of two groups, those previously known and those whose only interaction is via the social media platform they have in common.
The first group, previously known people, include individuals are people they’ve known since in some educational arena (e.g., a school or university), another social setting such as church, or from a work setting. These maybe, and typically are, individuals who fell out of contact for a variety of reasons but have re-met via the platform and re-ignited they relationship.
The other group are people who have never met except in some Facebook or other impersonal interaction. That group is comprised of individuals that would not recognize each other on the street, have never had a moment of personal, unscripted interaction. They became “friends” with the click of a button because of some common issue, interest or another friend on the platform. The laughter they shared is a LOL or HAHAHA on-line. These friends who give support with a comment “It’s going to be OK”, “I know how you feel” or “I care about you, it will get better.” These are friends who are “mind friends”, friends who exist only in a concept and whose relationship has no rock of reality. Mind friends can share humor, viewpoints and even support and concerns. Most of the time they are positive and when they are not, the unfriend button makes the break up easy. The friends lack a personal connection.
Mind friends can be very supportive through the platform and be another source of emotional support But how are these actions the same as sharing a moment with another where you laugh so hard you get tears in your eyes, or when you need someone and they hug and hold you? What can compare to those times when you get an unexpected card, letter, or phone call from an old and cherished friend?
There are “friends” and then there are friends. We all have work friends, people who occupy the same work environment until they quit and leave. Once they leave they usually do not enter our thoughts again. Our lives prepare us for work friends with friends from school. Most of our school friends disappear from our lives once the situation changes. A few work friends or school friendships may last a while but most fade away as college or work or families take two parties along a different path.
Even if you live in the same city your entire life, over time your friends have probably ebbed and flowed from your circle of interaction. Life brings change. Life is change. As people change, they grow, and the circumstances of their personal relationships and their interests change and grow. Single people find other single people, they become couples, couples become spouses and then maybe larger families. People get married and start careers; sometimes people leave those marriages and careers. Couples with children find new circles of friends as their children progress in school and they become involved in school activities. They grow interests in new activities or let their interest in old pleasures wane. Some people find themselves caught in the trap of drugs and/or alcohol; their circle of friends can change drastically. People shift in their political views and religious practices or orientations.
Each of these life changes, the choices we make in our lives, can result in a slow or sudden change in our circle of friends. Over the last 40 years, I have lived in 6 states, 8 geographically different cities and on two different continents. Earlier in my life, the move from one state to another was just another adventure. The opportunity to see part of the United States not yet explored. New major cities, Kansas City, Little Rock and Milwaukee brought new experiences and different people in my life. An opportunity for an urban lifestyle for a kid from a small rural community was intoxicating. Time was filled with friends at bars, restaurants, theaters, dinner parties and other urban diversions.
Other places where I spent time were smaller university towns such as Bloomington, Indiana, Columbia, Missouri and Lawrence, Kansas. These brought me into contact with new ideas and the opportunity to meet academicians, other students, poets and writers of major cultural influence (Ginsberg, Burrows and others of the beat movement). The people I met, the friends I made, fed a part of me that thrived and grew and they fed a creativeness I have never been able to recapture.
I cherish these memories. The people I have worked with, lived around, fished with and studied with has a special and warm place in my thoughts of the past. I smile when I think of my best friend in 6th and 7th and 8th grade who was also the best man at my wedding. The time I spent hitch-hiking from Northern Indiana to Florida with another dear friend and the adventures we shared along the Atlantic coast still makes me laugh. All the people with whom I have shared office stories and bitches about the management, they bring a rich tapestry to my life today. Yet over these 50 years, from the dozens to maybe a hundred-different people I met, how many would I consider as a friend, someone with whom I have routine and frequent contact? Just a handful.
All relationships encounter periods of stress and disagreement because we are all different people with complex personal histories, multitudes of experiences, viewpoints and understanding. Even when we all speak the same language, we attribute different meanings and interpretations to words and phrases. I have come to think that the Tower of Babel was not so much a story of how different languages were born, but how even when we use the same language, there is the persistent seed of misunderstanding, miscommunication and confusion.
There will be broken hearts and hurt feelings because our communications are flawed. There will be broken hearts and bruised feelings because many of us place parameters on our love. We love someone because of how they make us feel, because they are sexy or funny or smart or they provide comfort and security. We put expectations and boundaries on our love with approvals or disapproval's and our attempts to shape and mold behavior.
Many do not see how they hand out love and acceptance like candy treats. A loved one’s actions cause pain because they are doing things that are beyond our control. Yet how many examine the expectations they had as the root of their own pain. We are hurt most by those we love because their actions and the resulting disappointment because those are the ones acting or doing things beyond our control that we care the most about.
But to cast off those parameters – the expectations of tit-for-tat, to love someone for the shear act of loving someone – would be unfathomable to many. It is something that defies most of our ideas and perceptions of love.
Years ago, I joined Facebook. There were people I had not seen or talked to for over 40 years. We became “Facebook friends” but I don’t know what that meant. I also cannot say what that meant to them either. I think that, for them. I was their “friend” from High School, a concept of me that was buried in a time capsule of a memory and 40 years later pulled from the memory box like an old object or news clipping.
One of my favorite Muhammad Ali quotes is, “A man who views the world the same at fifty as he did at twenty has wasted thirty years of his life.” I contend they did not really know me, they know an idea of me. I know that who I AM today is not what I WAS. Is anyone? In many ways I am nothing like I was at 18; in many ways, the way I am today, is not the same as I was several months ago.
So, who is this “friend” they have rediscovered? Just a construct of various memories, an idea, some stories from the past, a figment of their imagination. This I can promise you, even 40 years ago they didn’t know me.
I can’t say if anybody did. They knew the guy who showed up in school or the party. They knew who they think I was, the public persona, not what was within me kept hidden away from them. A lot of me was even hidden away from me. It was waiting to unfold like a blossom in the warmth of sun and rain, life experiences and love and loss.
How can they “know” me now? They can’t. They can only relate to me as that idea of who I was. I am a memory to them. The fact is I am in many ways different from what can be fathomed by most.
Tennessee Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie” opens with the following: "The scene is memory and is therefore nonrealistic. Memory takes a lot of poetic license. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart.”
Memories do not exist in the manner most people want to believe: ironclad and firmly rooted in the truth of the past. They are a hodge-podge of impressions, fleeting thoughts and snips of conversation. As a memory, I do not exist outside of that frozen snippet of time. The truth of that moment cannot be taken at face value. They do not know me as I have become.
In the English book of Moses, when Moses ascends the mountain and faces God he asks what is your name and God replies, “I am who I am”. But some translate the Hebrew Ehyeh asher ehyeh ( אהיה אשר אהיה) as "I Will Be What I Will Be".
I prefer this over the King James “I AM that I AM” because this is how I see people. This is how I see myself. We are all in the process of becoming what we will be. Who we are isn’t who we were, not who we are today, nor what we will eventually be either.
I have moved and lived around the country and across the sea. I have studied and learned. The Glass Menagerie closes with the narrator as walking away from his mother and crippled sister and stating, “I didn't go to the moon, I went much further—for time is the longest distance between two places”.
I have experienced aspects of life beyond the imagination of those from long, long ago. I have looked within myself to see who this person is and who I want to become and I have examined my relationship to that greatness that is beyond all comprehension.
To those friends from years ago, I must inform you that the distance I traveled from the small town in Indiana across the US and Europe comes nowhere close to the distance I have in travelled in time from that person you thought you knew, to who I am today.
Those few individuals who have allowed me the privilege of extended, shared time in their lives have accepted me as the person I was as well as the person I have become. They are all special in my life, a blessing where time and distance has no impact. Even with months between calls, a telephone rings and a dormant connection of the hearts awaken. We knew each other; we know each other. We have been friends during the halcyon days of the past and when life was both hard and uncertain.
From ee cummings, i carry your heart:
here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart
i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)
Friends are carried in our hearts. My friends, regardless of the circumstances surrounding our lives today, I carry them with me in my heart. I know how these friends, their laughter and support and counsel, shaped and guided me to who I am today. I would have to say that I love them in the memories I have of them. And these few and wonderful, deep friends to whom I have opened my heart, with whom I have shared laughter and tears, trials and glorious victories, with whom I have traveled through the land of youth toward that final horizon, I have and always will hold them in my heart – with deep and abiding love and devotion that will be carried with me on my final adventure.
This is the heart of love: to allow a person to grow in the ways and manner that fills their heart and in ways that help them find acceptance and peace with themselves and in your company and companionship; to allow them to live in a state of unconditional love where grace and forgiveness springs forth without the need to ask.
Yet that is how God loves us and that is what God would like each of us to do – to open our hearts to others and love even those with whom we have parted ways. God has asked us not to judge because within all judgment lies the razor of disagreement and division of hearts. And God has always asked us to forgive because in when we forgive, we heal them and ourselves.
