Friendship and Mercy

I have a friend who is mentally disabled. She is functional, socially at least, but is not one to securely hold a job. She has, in the past, made me very uncomfortable. Not for any inappropriate reason. So for example, we were at a mutual friends birthday party, doing karaoke, and I sat next to her after doing an awesome rendition of Johnny Cash's "Boy Named Sue" and she goes, "You're really cool." And I mean, I guess she didn't mind the silence in the room that followed that. I gave an awkward smile, said thank you, and avoided eye contact. On the ride home friends commented on my being uncomfortable . And I was like, yeah that's weird, she's weird, but she's slow, so I mean, I guess we have to put up with it. And she would contact me and my friends, asking when the next time we were all going to hang out, and we were always kind of evasive. Was it mean? If you had asked me at the time, I may have been evasive on that as well.

I think I am much more sensitive to the meanness to it. Specifically, there is a virtue of mercy which may have improved that makes me more sensitive to it. So, first, we begin with pity. As Aristotle states, pity is sorrow for a visible evil. What here is evil? Well, two things. She sent me a message earlier today inviting me to her birthday party. And because I know people try to evade her, I have a hunch that no one will really show up. So I pity her for that. But then I suppose even deeper than that, I pity her for her disability. I didn't before, but I do now.

Now we ask, why do I see this now and not before? Well, the prospect of loneliness and the proximate reality that this become for me as of late may have triggered it. We are told that Jesus had compassion for people "because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd." But wait, there is a difference here. Jesus had compassion on others because he recognized their situation which He presumably had not experienced yet. But I am only having compassion after I myself have experienced it. Isn't that too convenient?

St. Thomas, however, states that "Since pity is grief for another's distress, as stated above, from the very fact that a person takes pity on anyone, it follows that another's distress grieves him. And since sorrow or grief is about one's own ills, one grieves or sorrows for another's distress, in so far as one looks upon another's distress as one's own." Precisely because I have experienced loneliness I was able to more easily see the distress in her situation, and I am more easily to look to her distress as my distress. This is literally what compassion means: to suffer with. God has put through these trying episodes perhaps so that I may become compassionate towards other people. I have been cruel and callous towards people. I am not to the same degree, I think. I hope.

I really have no desire to avoid her now, and the cruel avoidance evaporates. I look forward to my friends birthday party.