Mission and Friendships

Natural to our humanity is an appetite for warmth connected with a sense of identity. Something in us knows without any possible explanation that we must belong to something. If we do not, then a major element in our sense of being is missing.

No one should have to explain how that instinctive hunger for fellowship can go very, horribly wrong. The world is filled with communities marked by the intent to destroy outsiders for the sake of being outside the group. As with so many things in human nature, it is not that the instinct is wrong, but that it has been perverted through abuse.

Western mythology has made a hash of most of God’s gifts. His Laws were meant to attenuate the Fall and offer the best possible moral recovery, but the West is largely inimical to God’s revelation. Thus, we should expect most of the world to misunderstand the good that can come from this instinct for tribal association.

Part of our fallen nature, along with the inability to escape the bonds of time and space, is the burning sense of separation. We are born constrained by the Fall, having first and foremost lost our instinctive connection with our Creator. We were designed for that communion, but our fallen nature prevents that. We are thus also disconnected from His Creation, and from each other. From where we stand each as individuals, there is no single path back to communion because we are each broken and damaged in unique ways. However, there are common elements because we are all under the same Fall.

While the core intensity of our search for relief expresses itself through romance, that is hardly enough. It’s the very intensity of that yearning that makes us ruin romance, but it also ruins all the other forms of kinship possible. Children are desperate for the whole of their mother’s attention, and later for that of one special friend, and then later still comes romance. It’s not that real lasting love is missing, but that it can so easily be mixed with something far weaker, far more tentative. The clinical term is cathexis. This is a well-known emotional complex typically associated with infatuation, not in itself a bad thing, but typically ill-considered. While we understand it well enough in clinical terms, our Western social structure badly cripples all the good things possible

Most of us recognize instinctively that we cannot be friends with everyone we meet. Our damaged sense of need can see us struggle to reshape others in ways that reduce them to less than human, less than able to meet the real need for totally free and voluntary communion. What we can do won’t work and what works we cannot do. The hardest lesson to learn is that we cannot achieve perfection in this direction. Then again, we could certainly do a whole lot better than what we typically see.

We sense that need so strongly that we fail to notice that our central need is God and communion with His reality. We seek a thousand substitutes, confusing the provision with the Provider. Because of this we waste vast resources and time chasing what cannot be. The only reason it seems to work at all is that everyone else is doing the same thing, and our shared social structure insists that it has to work. We tell ourselves that it does work in the face of a burning spiritual awareness that it does not. Placing a priority on communion at the spiritual level tends to crack the whip over the wild nature of cathexis.

As regular readers will note, our primary problem here is confusing cerebral things with spiritual. As Westerners we are generally steered away from an understanding that something spiritual is above the intellectual and, often enough, counter to reason. Our civilization insists that what isn’t reasonable is inescapably sentimental, that there can be nothing above reason. We exclude vast centuries of tradition from other civilizations where there were other kinds and levels of reason not tied directly to mere sensory data and silly rules of concrete and analytical logic.

A prime example is how we handle friendships. We insist on valuing friendship above any possible spiritual requirements. We make a petty deity of the natural warmth of shared interests, which sharing may well be tied to a single context which itself passes. A reservoir of warmth from the sharing becomes somehow the single compelling reason to make people feel guilty for a very good spiritual drive to move on. The broad sense of warmth should belong with our basic approach to humanity in the first place, not as some special gift for which we owe a lifelong debt of gratitude to a friend.

If we assert that each of us will eventually betray ourselves, how can we somehow declare friendship with others sacred? We need not withdraw our sense of warmth from anyone who shares any part of our existence on this earth. However, the central reason for our very existence is the mission to please God, and anything in our lives that hinder the mission of giving Him glory needs to be pushed aside. If you don’t recognize how a sense of devotion to someone can get in the way, then you understand nothing of the Spirit. There is no higher moral priority.

So should there come a time when some old friend takes a path you cannot walk, it becomes necessary to shield yourself. It need not be a question of right or wrong in their choice against your sense of spiritual pull. Nothing requires withdrawing warmth, but the mission may well require withdrawing investments of time and resources. By the same token, you can maintain that candle of warmth for anyone who may not have sufficient resources to respond to your yearning for communion in time and space. You would wisely keep the door open for when their mission calls them back to you for whatever resource you hold that blesses their mission.

You can still give a hug to someone who feels drawn to a mission that conflicts with yours. You need not make it possible for them to interfere. It’s not a question of warmth if you restrict contact with someone to prevent unnecessary challenges to your mission.