Reciprocated Love, Revisted

For some reason, I have lost a friend again, but this time, not as serious. My friend posted up a political post on her Facebook account, I politely questioned the wisdom of said post, and she promptly deleted me. And you know what, I took that pretty hard. This person was a reader of my blog, a supporter of my decision to leave the ICOC, and my sister in the Catholic Faith. Last time something like this happened, I wondered what a relationship would look like if one continued to love the other, even if that love is not reciprocated. I want to revisit that here.

While I questioned whether love is still real even if not reciprocated, I wonder whether friendship can still exist even if it is not reciprocated. I think the general conclusion I drew was that yes, you could still love this person, even if it had to go through some type of transformation, but I don't know that the same could as easily be said about friendship. If we say that these people are friends, we generally understand that to mean that they are mutually agreeing to this relationship. If one person told the other, "No, we are not friends" then it seems like I want to say there is no friendship. For example, if I befriended Tony because I saw some good in it, but Tony used me as some mere means to an end, we were not friends, and we were not friends because that good we saw in the other is not mutual. 

But I think friendship requires love (even if not romantic love). And since love endures even through death, then something similar should be said about friendship, but what exactly? I don't know that I have the idea well formed enough to put it down in writing, but I know that this is how I acted. I told my friend that while I was upset at her decision to remove me from her circle of friends, that I would nonetheless accept her friendship enthusiastically if she requested it. So, I have this love for my friend, and it is not reciprocated, and I am most willing to be her friend again, which is some kind of friendship. Or if it is not, its some close to it, but I don't know that there is a word to describe it. 

Perhaps a model of Christ can help. Even as sinners, Jesus still loved us, and he no longer calls us servants, but friends. I think we can also say that if we say a friend fall into sin, and was so addicted to their sin they burned, or tried to burn all bridges, and we tried to rescue them and pull them out of their sin, that we would be acting in love as their friend. So, there is no reciprocation, but there is still friendship. There is still love. 

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