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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
March 23, 2003
On friendship
"I come not to send peace but a sword; I come to set a man at variance with his own father and daughter against mother Christ said, echoing the Prophets, in one of the harder of the hard" passages in the Gospels. Christ -- who represents himself as the Truth -- not as just true but as the whole truth the Truth behind all truths -- is however not saying something that is difficult to understand. It is merely hard for us to assimilate. He is saying that we must love him even more than we love our own blood relations -- the kind of statement that could only be made by a man in the grips of a serious pathology. Unless -- he were truly the incarnation of the very God. This is not going to be a Christian sermon for I'm only going to write about the wisdom of the world though as ever by my own lights diffracted from faith. I have started with this quote not only for its shock value. (And it was meant to give shock even in the original.) My point will rather be a "secular" one that the principle in play here is applicable in secular life and even in questions of less significance than the central religious one. With war upon the world we are reminded of or more exactly re-exposed to the many great issues that divide son from father and daughter from mother and friend from friend. I write from first hand experience. In the time since 9/11 I have shed several friends of long standing; or they shed me. They think me a "war-monger" I think them spineless gutless frivolous men and each considers the other irrational. Like war itself it is a painful process a kind of moulting to shed old friends; but sometimes necessary. The question that inevitably first comes to mind after the words one has used or had used against one to effect the breach is some version of Was he always like that? Did I just discover now? And the answer is almost as invariably Yes. We discover things about each other in "moments of stress" to put it in the "pop" or as I prefer to call it the pap-psychological way. A more accurate expression would be that we discover things in "moments of truth" -- in moments when something is happening of so great significance that the truth gets exposed; and the character of our soon-to-be-former friend is exposed within it. This happens among nations not only among individuals. The relations between such previously allied countries as France Germany and Canada I daresay and other countries such as Britain Australia and the United States falls into the model. It is almost like a lover's tiff to an outside view. But inside the relationship there has been a betrayal. The betraying party -- the French German or Canadian governments in this analogy -- typically think it is much less serious than it really is. They think a few kind words when the conflict is over will smooth things out and everything will go back to normal. But it won't for the parties that have been betrayed will never again trust. States are of course different from individuals their governments come and go and the reality is that a time will come when the governments of Messrs. Chirac Schroeder and Chretien are only unpleasant memories. We can never expect nations to act even as consistently as human beings for unlike humans they live a long time and are subject to occasional brain transplants. Among people the case is opened-and-closed. We will not be around here for centuries we are also more numerous and when one has discovered the bad character of a person one must move on. We cannot even afford to appease in the limited ways that nations appease each other's unreasonable behaviour. For us there is both less and more at stake less violence to fear but more demoralization. There are times when the only way to keep a friend is to keep your mouth shut; and there are times when this is the right thing to do. One is not one 's brother's keeper except in very special circumstances one is neither his judge nor jury. And a person who cannot restrain a desire to argue every minor point of difference is merely captious. But. I am a man of many mottoes and one of my very favourite of the many in William Blake is Always be willing to speak your mind, and a base man will avoid you. Or in a variation that my late hero the Canadian George Grant once gave me: "The place to discuss abortion is at a polite academic sherry party." It is an attitude to life which I believe goes beyond mere captiousness and enters into candour. And your friends are only those you can be candid with. No need to run when you can induce the most irritating people to run from you. Some of them alas will not go away. I think of one particular whited sepulchre who insists that as Christians, we must never give up on people . Christ in the Bible never proposed anything so tedious and if you read the thing you will find repeated instructions to flee temptation. We are told not to cultivate but rather to avoid the company of those who would drag us down. It is for God never to give up on anyone living not even on Hitler or Stalin or Saddam. For from the moment one realizes one has lost one's respect for a person it is time to part. (The contractual case of marriage is more vexed.) Nothing good can come of trying to appease or humour what one can't respect -- whether among persons or nations but the results within the individual human soul are actually more consequential. Some measure of civility is always required in public -- I am no enemy of the outward forms. But they do not supplant the inward judgement. I might say that one could continue to pray as all Christians are instructed to pray even for their enemies. But even to state such a thing aloud is to be a whited sepulchre. What one does before God one does mostly in private. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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