Holy Friendship

My wife is seven months pregnant with a baby we didn’t intend. My 15-year-old son has cerebral palsy. I am an extremely overqualified high school chemistry teacher. When I can work, I make $43,700 per year. I have watched all my colleagues and friends surpass me in every way imaginable, and within 18 months I will be dead. And you ask why I ran?

~Walter White, Breaking Bad, “Bit by a Dead Bee”

I married a political scientist, which means I don’t have to pay attention to what’s happening in the world because I know Tom is paying attention. Occasionally, though, I will hear a snippet of something that interests me. The recent thing was apparently some offense taken by some people at a jeans commercial. The commentator Tom was listening to posited that mostly it was unattractive women hating on a beautiful woman. My caveat here is that I have no idea what the content of the commercial was or whether the gentleman is correct about the critics. In charity, I choose to believe better of people, but one cannot deny that envy has become the backdrop of much of our social order. 

Tweens, adolescents, and young adults can often confuse what they see with what it makes them feel. If a young woman is insecure about her appearance, she might say, “that girl is a jerk”, because the girl is perceived as more attractive. She does not actually believe that the other girl is a jerk. She is trying to contain her fear that she will never be found attractive. But this situation where young women compete for attention with those who are deliberately made up to be alluring is healthy neither for male/female relationships nor female friendships. No one in any commercial, television program, or movie really looks the way they look on screen. That does not change the fact that some people come closer to the golden mean of beauty than others. It should remind us to have the humility to know that beauty is never the same as virtue and value accordingly.

When I was in high school one of the most popular young men in my class was a football player; let’s call him Greg. He was tall, square jawed, and friendly with an unruly shock of blonde hair. He was friends with people from every social clique, and well mannered even to those of us completely without a clique. He encouraged the other football players to come to band concerts because that was fair since we played for them every fall. We were in English class together most years. One day he turned around and asked me a grammar question. I answered, giving a full, long-winded explanation as to why it worked that way that he hadn’t asked for. He started smiling at me about halfway through the explanation.

“Why did you ask me and not someone else?” I asked, embarrassed and blushing that he was smiling at me.

“Everybody knows to ask you grammar questions,” he shrugged, still smiling, and turned back around.

Where I grew up in Southern Illinois was still family farm country in the 1980s. My school housed the county vocational school as well, so we had a good number of young men and women going into the trades and farming. We had an honors program, too, but I never took those classes because I disliked the way the honor students talked about those outside the program. They were the only people I heard bad mouthing Greg and others in the school other than the honors program teachers. Almost a decade after my graduation, I would dedicate Randy Travis’ “Better Class of Losers” to them in my head.

The melting pot of my high school and college years made me joyful for friendships. I like people without understanding them particularly well. I did not grow up with a lot of friends, nor did I aspire to a large friend group. The mystery of each individual person was always interesting, so even one friend at a time could keep me occupied quite easily. The years when there wasn’t even one were challenging. Once I became Catholic and became aware of the role of holy friendship in the faith life of a Christian, I began to value my friends even more.

One reason I have seen that some people are difficult to have as friends is that idea about competition in friendship. Greg seemed completely calm with himself, therefore he could be generous with others. We are supposed to love one another as we love ourselves. But what if we do not love ourselves? I have had a certain percentage of self-loathing throughout my life, yet I truly have loved other people. So, this is not a perfect temporal framework. Yet I have noticed that the areas of my life where I am most confident and comfortable with myself are the places where I feel least competitive with others. When I had a person in my life who loved my brother more than me, I did not wish for her to love him less; I just wanted her to love me, too. When I was a gawky tween, I envied Veronica Hamel. But the truth was that I envied what I perceived as her confidence in herself as much as her beauty. I would practice walking like her in my bedroom but would shrink and slump again when I left my room.

As a soccer player and triathlete, I have never been fast. I do not aspire to be on the winner’s podium. Soccer was a pastime with my children, and I hope soon with my grandchildren – never a competitive program. As a triathlete I am only trying to be the best me — the most fit, the healthiest, the most mortified – that I can be. But since I know who I am as an athlete, I do not mind the trash talk and blustering that many athletes do. I hope that makes them feel confident for their race and their friend group joins in the fun. While I prefer to work out alone, I love that Saint Louis has two triathlon groups for those who prefer camaraderie in their training.  

It is possible to have healthy friendships in which we compete with others. I liked the other singers, bassoonists, and French horn players with whom I competed, but I always wanted to win the contest. Healthy competition, though, is not what is happening when we envy the success of others. Walter White does not really have friends. The anger that overwhelms his life does not allow for true, holy friendship. Watching his story one can empathize with those feelings, though they show a lack of virtue. He was not well treated by his former partners. His wife is domineering and unloving. His son seems to love him but does not really respect him. If Walt’s character had been trying to live as a Catholic, the story would have been very different. He would have sought out spiritual direction, worked on the sin of anger, and accepted the cross of his cancer. Instead, he became an object lesson about how not to live. His life is essentially a complete waste, possibly except for his admission in the final episode as to why he really began cooking meth. Anger and envy do not allow for healthy, holy friendships or marriages.  

Most of my friends at this point in my life qualify as holy friends. We have easy camaraderie, talk about our faith often, and challenge one another to be our best selves. I wonder sometimes about the unhappy people I’ve known in the past. Have the honor students grown up? Do they have quality friendships now that they do not compare to those more popular than themselves? I hope so.

And I hope for the young ladies who are worried about a jeans ad that makes them feel insecure, that they have families and friends to reassure them that regardless of their appearances they are worthy of love. The first and second great commandments are in that order for a reason. I wish for them people who remind them that we are all loved with a spectacular love we cannot even fathom by our Father. Every other interaction can flow from that.