The Christian Vanguard

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...

St. Francis de Sales, in his Introduction to the Devout Life has some advice on how to remedy evil friendships. It is this, "Cut it short, break it off—do not play with it, or pretend to untie the knot; cut it through, tear it asunder." So, I decided to give it a try. I reached out to a past romance, a brief one, and one I was still acquainted with, but with whom things were still tense. So I apologized to her, for being cruel and unfeeling towards her, and told her that there will be no more communication. She thanked me for the apology, and that was that.  It was difficult, but it has been liberating. Now, to do this with my ex, though I still hold on to her gifts and to her letters, may prove to be more difficult. Baby steps. God help me. 

2016 is in the books now. I look back on my life this last year, and if it had a theme, the theme would be "Woman". Women have played a significant role in my life this year. Here are some ways that is.  It should be noted that the absence of male friends was a thing. A lot of this had to do with the fact that many of them got married and moved away, or got married and had become preoccupied with marital life. Their friends ended up being other married friends. As I'm single, I became distant to a lot of them. That's okay. That's life.  The biggest presence, numerically anyways, of women in my life happened early in the year when I got promoted and had to supervise about 50 women at my job. Many of them were old enough to be my grandmother, and I'm sure that had some kind of effect on me. Some of them called me their second son, and I was really nice to a lot of them. As I was running the warehouse, I couldn't really have a sick day. If I didn...

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 und...

Today, I had a friend casually refer to me as her best friend. It was the first time in our relatively short time having known each other (a little under a year) that she had called me that, and I didn't think she realized she did it. I grinned, and waited for her to complete her thought, and I said, "Awwww, I'm your best friend?" After a pause, she got defensive, and tried to play it down with, "Well, it's not like I have a lot of friends anyways, and my other best friend is my little cousin, who is like nine years old, so..." Sure.  It's a great honor really. But it can also be somewhat awkward if it isn't reciprocated. Say Devin is Adrian's best friend. This statement says something about the position of Devin in Adrian's life. It does not follow, however, that Adrian has the same status in Devin's life. Perhaps Lucas is Devin's best friend. Lucas is such that Lucas is the best friend in the set of friends Devin has. I th...

There is a sense in which we wanted to share experiences with friends. It isn't so much that we want conformity, but unity. Conformity may be something like watching a TV show while you are at your house and he is at his, and then you text about it. You two are conforming to the same habits and same tasks. However, when there is unity, you are sharing a screen, you are sitting next to each other, and perhaps even sharing a meal. Unity is a perfected form of conformity. How strange would it be if I invited you over to watch a program and I told you to watch in the living room while I watched in my bedroom? You would think there was a serious disconnect there, and you would question why I invited you over in the first place.  So it is with friends in general. Friends do not desire just conformity, but unity. It makes me wonder about the quality of my friendships, or I guess the quality of friend that I am to them. While I do have this general desire to do things with friends, I ...

In my previous post, I mentioned I lost my friend as a friend. We are no longer friends.  Friends seek the good for one another, and goods and truth are the same things. You cannot have something based on an untruth as a good. The most perfect friendship is united in all the Truth. My friendship with the character we are calling Uriah ended for precisely that reason. I can pinpoint that moment. I remember it well. 

A " frienemy " is he who pretends to be your friend, but is really not. It's a slang compound of "friend" and "enemy". I think some people tend to think of me as such.