Are friendship and betrayal two sides of the same coin?

We are told that one of the Christian ethos is to love our neighbour, to see in the other God’s image and appreciate that the other is as much a manifestation of God as we are. We are told that in spite of everything, there is always some inherent good in the other and that for our own peace of mind, we should strive as much as possible to see the godliness of the other.

But when bad things happen, when people one thought were good do bad things to others this teaching is severely challenged.

GOOD VS EVIL

In all my years on earth, I am greatly persuaded that there is more evil in human beings than good, that human beings are more predisposed to being evil than to being good. Evil, author Nathaniel Hawthorne apocalyptically claims, is the nature of mankind and probably all the good that sometimes we see surrounding some people or oozing out of others is just a by-product of the main predisposition.

In the period of Lent that has just ended, I have been forced to severely confront the themes of suffering, evil and vindication. Never in my life have I had the Lenten theme of suffering so telescoped; never have I been so jerked out of my flippant treatment of the Lenten period as just another event in the Church’s calendar than now. When contextualised in the framework of what is happening in the world, at a political and social level, lent acquires a more direct meaning.

Everyone goes through their own kind of Passion. Ours, however, is not really similar to the one Jesus Christ underwent. He was a man without sin. We are people who are not so perfect. Still, just as the Passion brought out the worst in human beings; just as it brought out the theme of betrayal and callousness among those who had regarded Christ as their messiah and God, ours, on many occasions, viscerally tests our faith in humanity.

SUFFERING

When Jesus was healing the sick and the lame, he was hailed as the answer to all mankind’s problems. When he was feeding the hungry and raising the dead, he was hailed as the true son of God. His own disciples pledged to follow him wherever he went, with Peter proclaiming that where Christ would go, he too would follow. But Peter was the first to deny Jesus. He was the first to pledge ignorance of any knowledge of Christ. Yet, Peter did not have malice in himself. He was probably only fearful because that was a terrible hour of darkness. When your leader has been captured, fear becomes the prevalent factor in the camp.

It was not only Peter who was tested by Christ’s suffering. The other apostles deserted Jesus, preferring to stay away and watch from afar rather than be dragged into that sordid affair. None could help him carry that cross. The crowd preferred a murderer to a man whose faults they could not pinpoint. Yet when he was healing and feeding them, they wanted to crown him their king by force.

The thing about suffering is that it brings much more pain than the one inflicted by the blows of one’s torturers. It brings quite poignantly the pain of desertion and betrayal when those you thought were your friends turn against you, when those you have helped along the way are the first to say unkind words about you, are the first to cast the first stone. It must have hurt terribly when Jesus saw those soldiers jeering at him; they whose relatives, friends and countrymen he had fed, raised from the dead and healed.

It hurts immeasurably when one realises that even those that one wanted to count on as friends are only with you conveniently, had never been with you in the first place and that they would be the first to scoop the first drops of your spilt blood.

Suffering is brought upon people by others. When it emanates from strangers, one might seek consolation in the possibility that those strangers are just criminals and that you just happened to be in their way, that perhaps if they had known you they would have treated you much more kindly, or that they were exploiting your naivety or stupidity. But when it emanates from people one knows, one is forced to re-evaluate the standards of dealing with one’s fellow human beings.

FRIENDSHIP AND BETRAYAL

How does one live with the knowledge that friendship is a thin veneer beneath which lies enormous capacity of evil? How does one live with the knowledge that he who one calls a friend would, in no time, turn against him at the slightest opportunity?

How, when that kind of betrayal happens, is one supposed to live again with that person, whether as an enemy or a friend? The thing about this kind of situation is that it is very difficult to live with. Even when you have friends, you keep wondering when it will be that they will betray you. When you know they are outright enemies, you keep wondering when they will plunge in the dagger.

In all dealings with human beings, it becomes a waiting game. You wait for that moment that you know will surely come. You wait for the moment when the perceived permanency of friendship would run its course, you wait for the moment when the default nature of human beings clicks into gear. You wait for the other to apotheosise into Brutus.

Yet, every time this moment arrives, we are caught flat-footed, shocked that it should have happened to us because we always take for granted that that which is best in us must be necessarily replicated in the other. But as Marcel Proust aptly observes in his lapidary book, Swann’s Way, In search of Lost Time, “identical emotions do not spring up simultaneously in the hearts of all men in accordance with a pre-established order.”

When people say that they have a network of friends or relations, they hide in that curtain beyond which they do not expect those they call friends to be traitors. Yet they fail to recognise that there probably never has been something called “friendship”, only an innate, primeval apparatus that exists in every one of us to draw closer to those we can use and discard whenever we can no longer use them.

For as Joseph Conrad observes in Nostromo, friendship should be “the frank unreserved, as before another human being, of thoughts and sensations: of all the objectless and necessary sincerity of one’s innermost life trying to react upon the profound sympathies of another existence”. Is there that kind remaining again?

Waihenya is a journalist and author of, most recently, Dancing in The Twilight: Essays on Mortality, Love and Self. [email protected]