Mutual Friendship as the key to radical involvement in changing society

Yesterday between church services we drove out to the old house so that Jonathan could have band practice. Living in Cokato for a month and a half has already given me a new lens on my old habitat, and my scales of familiarity have dropped from my eyes so I saw with stabbing clarity what our visitors from more affluent neighborhoods have no doubt always privately noted. It is a place struggling desperately to survive, even to bloom and bear fruit, in spite of the strangling weeds and gnawing pests that reveal how incompetent or indifferent its gardeners are. 

Back home in our nice new neighborhood I read these questions posed by Alice Walker. The context is her criticism of a wealthy white family’s sincere attempt to invite a black girl from a slum into their home for a few months. “What value," she asks, "has friendship that is content to see one comfortable part of the time? Indeed, is it friendship? What one yearns for (and must have if we are to share this earth as unashamed friends) is a Mallory family that is radically involved in changing society, not merely giving succor to its oppressed.”

And this: “One could share warmth with the Mallorys but one could really not depend on them in any radically meaningful way.”

That, I muse regretfully, is the culmination of all our efforts to share our own small wealth with our Bryant Ave neighbors. After fourteen years, we still can’t “share the earth as unashamed friends” with the Trizells and Mishas and Isises and Anns and Sabrinas. While I believe that the warmth and succor we offered are worth something--for certainly they are far better than nothing at all!--they did not result in the unashamed friendship between equals which would have been proof of a truly righteous arrangement.

Yet Walker's words perplex me, for what does “radical involvement in changing society” actually entail for a family like ours? 

We used to think we knew. We flung open our doors and pantries and bank accounts, and sincerely did not expect any recompense. Unfortunately, this radical availability that we strove to cultivate for several years did not appear to achieve any lasting goodness for the families we were seeking to befriend. They were still always only comfortable part of the time, still inevitably reaching the limits of the succor we were able to afford them. And it left us scarred and guarded, in the graceless position of needing, for the health of us all, to walk back permissions and conditions that we had previously extended.

As I turn this over in my mind, the realization dawns on me that Walker missed a variable. She didn't account for the role of the very people she represents in her critique of the Mallory family: those who are in need of the Mallory's radical involvement. 

A critical facet of our community involvement was that it was only a one-way street. This was a dynamic I never thought to question. We, with our abundance and security and wholeness, had not experienced the lack and insecurity and brokenness of needing to rely on strangers, or the rejection and humiliation that likely often attend that need. Were the tables turned, I imagine that I, too, would hold any strangers who offered me warmth or succor at a careful distance, would not even contemplate friendship as either possible or desirable under such imbalanced conditions.

Now, in light of my experience, I realize that to truly create radical community change, friendship--the sharing of lives, not just warmth and succor--needs to exist. And my question for Alice Walker might be, “What friendship is possible where, while one accepts what warmth and succor are shared, one will not share one’s self? What value is such friendship? Indeed, is it friendship?”

The questions that follow this for myself are not easy, either. “How can I, as someone in a position to help materially, signal my radical desire for true friendship with someone who is struggling? Am I really ready to offer that?” and “Would I be able to risk such vulnerability, if I found myself in need of material aid and community change, from a stranger?”

True friendship requires the rejection of partiality, either in its positive or its negative sense, on both sides, for only then is real trust possible. To depend on someone in any radically meaningful way requires wholeheartedly accepting both care and personal access from others (in the belief that we are all intrinsically deserving) while we extend the gift of access to our whole selves. Because of this mutual access, both parties should be able to be at ease in their shared humanity and love for one another, despite whatever material and cultural imbalances persist. 

I think that is how we can share the earth as unashamed friends. It takes both parties staying connected and available to one another long term. 

Where that is refused, on either side, no lasting radical community change will ever take place, and unashamed friendship will never be possible.