“We are all implicated when we allow other people to be mistreated.”
— Bryan Stevenson, civil rights attorney, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, and author of Just Mercy.
Some people have been part of our lives for so long that we can barely remember a time without them. We have celebrated birthdays and anniversaries together, watched one another’s children grow up, and shared meals, vacations, disappointments and the everyday pleasures of friendship. We have trusted them with our secrets and counted on their loyalty. After years of closeness, we assume we know who they are.
Then a conversation takes an unexpected turn. It might begin with an offhand remark about immigrants or a Facebook post we find disturbing. Perhaps a friend makes a joke at the expense of people who are already suffering, and we wait for some indication that they don’t really mean it. None comes. We ask a question, hoping we’ve misunderstood, only to hear something worse.
Political disagreements are nothing new among friends. We’ve argued about presidents, taxes, wars, and elections without questioning the affection that holds us together. Lately, however, some of those arguments have exposed differences we never suspected were there. A discussion that begins with government policy can end with one person dismissing the suffering of people the other believes deserve protection. We discover that we disagree about something much more personal than politics: how human beings ought to treat one another.
The discovery is especially troubling when a friend’s convictions seem to contradict the values they have professed for decades. Someone who speaks reverently of Christian love and mercy may express contempt for strangers seeking safety or indifference toward families torn apart. A person who has always treated us with generosity may show little sympathy for people outside their own community. A distinction emerges that we had never thought to make: We knew how this person treated us. We did not necessarily know how they regarded others.
That kind of loss can be disorienting. The friend is still with us, perhaps living just a few streets away. The years of affection remain part of our history, and we have no desire to erase them. Yet something has changed. We can no longer enjoy the friendship in the same way, and we are unsure what continuing it would ask of us.
Years of friendship create a familiarity that can conceal as much as it reveals. We know how a friend behaves when someone they love is in trouble. But we may never ask how they regard people whose lives will never intersect with their own. Perhaps the questions never came up, or we were too comfortable together to notice when they did.
What We Thought We Knew
Conversations from years earlier begin to look different. Was that remark we dismissed as a joke an indication of something more deeply held? Had we overlooked things because we liked the person saying them? We cannot reconstruct every conversation or know what another person was thinking. Still, the questions return.
For those who regard spirituality as an obligation to live by certain principles, this experience can be deeply unsettling. The question of how far our compassion extends lies at the heart of many religious traditions.
In the parable of the Good Samaritan, Jesus tells of a wounded traveler left beside the road. Two men pass without helping him. A Samaritan, someone many of Jesus’ listeners would have regarded as an outsider, stops and cares for the injured man. He tends his wounds and arranges for his continued care.
The story is so familiar that we may have lost some appreciation of its challenge. Jesus chose an unlikely figure to demonstrate what it meant to be a neighbor. The Samaritan interrupted his journey and became involved in a stranger’s suffering when others had found reasons to continue on their way.
The Hebrew prophet Micah made a similar demand in his call to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God. These were expectations about how people should conduct their lives. They reached beyond religious observance to focus on the treatment of others.
We may hear such teachings every week and sincerely believe we have taken them to heart. Then someone across the dinner table speaks dismissively about families separated from one another, or people fleeing violence, and the teachings acquire an urgency we hadn’t anticipated.
Imagine the awkwardness of that moment: we object to the remark, and our friend brushes us off. Another guest changes the subject, dessert arrives, and before long everyone is talking about grandchildren or an upcoming vacation. We join in, but only after the uneasy silence has passed and the evening returns to its familiar ways.
On the drive home, the remark returns. Why hadn’t we challenged it more forcefully? We had been concerned about spoiling an evening with friends. What consideration had we given to the people whose suffering was being dismissed?
When Belief Becomes an Obligation
There is a moral imperative in such moments, one that reaches beyond the immediate disagreement. If compassion is among the principles by which we claim to live, we must take seriously the suffering of people who cannot offer us anything in return. Their unfamiliarity does not lessen their humanity, and the inconvenience of defending them does not relieve us of the obligation to care.
Spiritual reflection asks us to consider what our convictions require of us. Have we spoken when silence would have been easier? Have we made room for people whose circumstances are unlike our own? Do our actions bear any resemblance to the ideals we profess?
We should be cautious about directing those questions exclusively toward the friend whose opinions have disturbed us. Our disapproval can become a source of satisfaction, especially when we feel certain that we occupy the moral high ground. Yet we have our own failures of attention and compassion. There are people whose needs we overlook and instead choose convenience over what we know to be right.
Perhaps the most demanding question is not whether we have been faithful to our beliefs, but whether we have mistaken our beliefs for faithfulness.
The moral imperative that challenges our friend must challenge us as well. Otherwise, conscience becomes a standard we apply to others and an exemption we grant ourselves.
What Friendship Can Endure
Recognizing our shortcomings doesn’t settle what to do about the friendship. Someone we care about is still expressing convictions we find deeply troubling. The question is whether the relationship can withstand such an honest disagreement.
A friendship that has endured for decades deserves consideration. People speak carelessly, repeat things they have heard, and sometimes hold opinions they have never examined closely. An old friend may be willing to listen to us when they would dismiss the same objection from someone they barely know. Such conversations are seldom easy. We may discover that our friend has misunderstood something important or that we have interpreted their words too harshly. They may begin to reconsider an assumption, and we might learn something about our own.
There are friendships in which these conversations are possible. The disagreement may persist without destroying the relationship. Both know where the other stands, and neither has to conceal what matters to them. But there are also conversations that leave little room for hope. We explain why a remark troubles us, and the friend repeats it more emphatically. We describe the suffering of the people being discussed, and their response suggests that the suffering is deserved. What we once thought was an unfortunate remark begins to look like a settled conviction.
It is tempting to say that people are entitled to their opinions, or that a friendship of fifty years is too precious to jeopardize. We remember how generously this person has treated us. Surely that deserves something in return. It does. The difficulty lies in deciding what.
We are not the strangers being humiliated or the families living in fear. We can leave the dinner table and return to lives largely untouched by what has been said. The people whose dignity was dismissed will probably never know about the conversation. We could preserve the friendship by deciding that their suffering is too remote to justify an uncomfortable evening.
That possibility deserves scrutiny. The Good Samaritan did not know the wounded traveler. His obligation arose from what he encountered, not from an existing relationship. We might reasonably disagree about what we can accomplish for people far away. Their distance from us, however, cannot be the reason we stop caring.
The Choice to Stay or Leave
There is no simple rule about whether to remain friends. Some relationships survive because the people involved are willing to challenge one another. Others gradually become exercises in avoiding the truth. Much depends on the particular friendship and what preserving it now asks of us.
There may be courage in continuing a difficult friendship. There may also come a point when staying requires so much silence that the relationship no longer resembles the one we valued.
A Witness to Our Lives
For older adults, such a loss carries a weight that may be difficult for younger people to appreciate. By our sixties, seventies, or eighties, the circle of people who remember our earlier lives has often grown smaller. Parents have died. Former colleagues have scattered. Those who remain possess memories that cannot easily be replaced.
An old friend remembers the person we were before the disappointments, the losses, and the accommodations of later life. A photograph may bring back an afternoon at the shore forty years ago, when the children were small and no one thought to worry about how quickly the years would pass. We remember who brought the sandwiches, which child refused to go into the water, and the laughter that continued all the way home. Losing that friend can feel like losing a witness to our own existence.
Yet the years were real, and so was the affection. We needn’t revise the past to justify our feelings about the present. Someone can have been a wonderful friend to us while holding convictions that eventually make the relationship difficult to sustain.
There is something especially lonely about mourning a person who is still alive. When something happens that they would have understood better than almost anyone else, the old impulse to call them returns. We might even pick up the telephone before remembering why we stopped calling. No one has died, and there is no funeral at which the loss can be acknowledged.
Questions may linger long after the invitations have stopped. Did we expect too much? Would another conversation have made a difference? Perhaps time will offer an opportunity to speak again. Or perhaps the years will pass without either person formally acknowledging the separation.
Whatever happens, the principles that brought us to this difficult place continue to make demands upon us. We cannot insist upon human dignity for strangers and then deny it to a friend whose convictions have disappointed us. Anger may be understandable, but contempt would diminish the compassion we claim to defend. We know there is more to this person than the words we cannot forget. We also know that those words matter.
The deeper spiritual question remains, regardless of what happens to the relationship. Have we lived by the moral convictions we profess, particularly when doing so asks something painful of us? And when another human being’s dignity was at stake, did we find a reason to look away?
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