Am I my brother’s keeper?

I’ve been thinking a lot about friendship lately, because it keeps coming up in conversation. In the first instance, a friend of mine said to me, “I just got a text from an old friend whom I deliberately distanced myself from a while back. I didn’t reply at first because I don’t want to resume the friendship, but she texted again asking if I had received her first message, and so I eventually replied in as non-committal a way as possible to her suggestion that we meet up for coffee or something.”

She might have been looking for advice on how to gently “defriend” this person again, or maybe she was debating the wisdom of letting this person back into her life. The conversation quickly moved on, so I never heard any details about the original friendship or why it died, and am unable to comment on her particular dilemma. But my mind instinctively thought of the Church’s ministering program, where we are assigned to watch over specific individuals in our congregation, and how this assignment often requires us to make time in our lives for people we might have a hard time connecting with - maybe they’re a little irritating, or hard to reach, or just different. And it’s not just the ministering program, really - simply being an active member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints means that you’re often sitting next to, or serving with, or serving under, or trying to befriend someone who, at least initially, doesn’t “bring you joy.” This encourages a general feeling of stewardship for anyone within your sphere of influence, and it also promotes a broader view of friendship, one that encompasses words like perseverance, patience, responsibility - not words that instinctively come to mind when you think of friendship.

The second instance involves another familiar dilemma. My son’s cohort recently entered middle school, and predictably, there has been some shuffling of friend groups as the kids meet other kids, change, try on new identities, etc —all of which is normal and healthy. The incident that has me thinking is one I’ve heard about from various sources, where a child was told by his former friends, “We don’t want to be friends with you anymore. You need to find a new group.” This statement was then backed up a few times by the group deliberately moving away when this particular child approached. To my knowledge, there was no one incident that precipitated this announcement; it was apparently a sentiment that had been building for a while within the friend group and had possibly been communicated earlier and more subtly, but to no effect.

This sort of thing probably happens all time time at school, and a common response is to say something like, “It’s unfortunate, but you can’t force people to be friends,” or “It’s better for him to be with friends who actually enjoy his company and appreciate him for who he is”—all of which is simultaneously true and also, somehow, wrong. Some things are worth enduring a degree of discomfort and irritation for, and kindness to an old friend seems like it should be one of them. It is possible that the desired break might happen naturally, if a little more slowly; and I suppose it is also possible that months or even years of patience and generosity might be necessary. As in the first instance, one could argue that this sort of friendship is inefficient, or that it asks too much—after all, we are all really busy and there are lots of legitimate, worthy activities for us to engage in, and we shouldn’t be expected to expend time and energy indefinitely propping up friendships that aren’t even genuine. These are all pretty sensible statements, and in fact they sound a lot like the rhetoric that is currently being used to justify America’s withdrawal from various international alliances. I don’t have a similarly logical reply; if you think of friendship solely as a mutually beneficial relationship, it probably makes sense to exit the relationship when the costs exceed the benefits. One could suggest that applying a longer time horizon might change the calculus, but ultimately any counter-argument would have to involve some degree of faith and wrestling with questions like, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” and “What did Christ really mean when He asked us to ‘love thy neighbor as thyself?’”

In yet another instance, I’ve been hearing a number of stories lately about conflict between longtime adult friends who are volunteering together on a school project. Differences of opinion have been expressed, sometimes too strongly; contrasting priorities and preferences have been revealed; feelings have been hurt, and friendships have been strained, some perhaps beyond repair. I’ve heard phrases like, “The hard thing is that all this negative feedback has come from people I’m friends with, whom I respect and admire,” and, “I feel like maybe this friendship has run its course.” This feels like such a pity, and yet it is probably the inevitable outcome of friendships that are predicated on both parties feeling that the benefits of the relationship are worth the costs.

These different friendship dilemmas made me think of the term “chosen family,” which is typically used to describe relationships between people who are not biologically related, but who deliberately choose each other as primary sources of mutual support and love. “Chosen families” have become more common in the last few years, with some coexisting with and others supplanting biological families. While I applaud any effort to build networks of love and support, I nevertheless feel like there is a good reason that God chose to send us to earth in families. The culture of the family should be the primary lens through which we view and try to shape our other relationships, as opposed to the lens of friendship being the one that shapes our idea of family. The point is not for us to choose own own “family” from among the friends who meet our needs and share our goals and viewpoints, but to learn to treat our friends like family - which means that we don’t let disappointments and differences and imperfections end the relationship. It’s not true that all you need is love. When building relationships that matter, that last, you also need covenants, patience, and the whole list of virtues referenced in the Family Proclamation—faith, prayer, repentance, forgiveness, respect, compassion, work etc.

It is not a simple thing to identify, much less to quantify, the benefits that might come from this more exacting view of friendship. Ideas like joy, peace, camaraderie, and trust are nebulous and hard to measure. Yet in a world where so many are getting blown off course by waves of anxiety and loneliness, perhaps the weight of a friend is not such a bad thing. A seeming burden of friendship may yet prove to be a blessing.