Reborn to Friendship (Philía) Love
In which Teófilo narrates his arrival to affective maturity in his fraternal love for another.
Then the Greek language talks about philía, and that’s another type of love that’s also beautiful. It is a sort of intimate affection between personal friends. And this is the type of love that you have for those persons that you’re friendly with, your intimate friends, or people that you call on the telephone and you go by to have dinner with, and your roommate in college and that type of thing. It’s a sort of reciprocal love. On this level, you like a person because that person likes you. You love on this level, because you are loved. You love on this level, because there’s something about the person you love that is likeable to you. This too is a beautiful love. You can communicate with a person; you have certain things in common; you like to do things together. This is philía.
~ Martin Luther King, Love Your Enemies, 1957 (Emphasis mine).
The year 1979 was important in other respects for me. Pope John Paul II had ascended the papal throne the previous fall and his ministry was taking shape. The Information Revolution was in its infancy, and I'd begun experimenting with computers. I remember sneaking next door to the Catholic University's computer lab. There, I would play on Radio Shack PC systems and learned the rudiments of computer coding. The Viking lander had broadcasted pictures from Mars' surface not long before. Auspicious, heady winds were blowing, and I let these winds carry me away.
This was the year that my friendship with "Z" blossomed. This friendship became one of those central convergences adorning my life.
Z was older than me, an adult in every respect. Complicating matters a bit she was on staff at a certain local school. She was coming out of a 5-year relationship that had come to an abrupt end. Misunderstanding and miscommunications had brought about a rupture she hadn't sought. With her heart broken she was unsure where to go or what to do next. Thus, she buried herself into her work.
Extra-curricular school pursuits first brought me into contact with Z. Formalities soon dropped away. She spoke, and I listened. She opened her heart to me and lo, I corresponded. Something then happened, as a new dimension of fraternal love opened up to me. I loved her, yes, but always within the framework of fraternal, philía-love.
This love was transformative for me. It went beyond the ordinary friendship I had with my other friends. The friendship I had with my other friends was more like camaraderie. This was different, distinct, unique, a song sung in another key.
In this experience I learned two things: first, that I indeed was lovable. The Baptism in the Holy Spirit had shown this truth to me before, as I've said. But, in this philía- love, the truth became objective to me. The other thing I learned was that I was able to love without reference to myself. I discovered I was capable of unselfish love.
Erotic love between us was always out of the question. We never crossed any lines in this regard. We were not a couple. We knew it. But this singular love prepared me for the definitive one that would come soon afterwards and really transform my life.
Crisis
When Mom caught wind of our friendship, she at first was skeptical. But Mom moved to destroy my friendship with Z as soon as she realized I was drawing solace from it. Mom went far beyond maternal concern. She turned vicious.
First, she would overwhelm with me chores during weekends. It was Mom's attempt to curtail my time with Z. I responded by awaking early on weekend mornings and accomplishing all the chores. The rest of the day was mine to do with it as I pleased. My resourcefulness and purpose infuriated Mom.
Mom then moved to destroy Z’s reputation by reporting her to her superiors. But Z's superiors knew her character well and took no punitive action against her. They did ask Z to be careful. Pression mounted upon Z and me to return our relationship to a more conventional ground.
When Mom saw that her denunciations had no effect, she changed tactics. She became even more brutal towards me. Mom began to distort and transmogrify our friendship through obscene depictions. She had "analyzed" what was going on "in reality" she said, and then had forged her own immovable "facts." In her imaginary, hateful world, Mom declared my friendship with Z as erotic without a doubt. Then she tried to gaslight me by telling me that she knew it was, and that I, too, “knew it.”
In fits of ire, Mom took to describe my friendship with Z in the most vile, low, and loathsome terms of lewd fornication. Every time she went into a tirade, I felt I needed a purification, a deep mitzvah. Her intent was for me to see my relationship with Z in the same light. Once I'd accepted Mom's view as mine, I would cut off the friendship out of disgust. Or so she thought.
Except that I refused to play Mom's game. My resistance infuriated her even more.
Nothing Mom was saying about us was true. Her gaslighting effort had no effect upon me. "Why should I accept as true something I know isn't?" I asked myself. "How is that fair? How is that concordant with the demands of justice? How can I remain true to myself, fair, and just in this situation?" I thus remained unmoved from my decision to cultivate this friendship.
Here’s also the moment when my senses of justice, fairness, and equity reached adult maturity. Little did I know then that these realizations would come to inform future career choices.
These were the days when I started to escape to Father Francis. My mother, sensitive to external appearances, would lower her profile after Father Francis would intercede for me.
Her gaslighting would return later on the day she splintered me, two to three years hence, when she attempted to wrap Mercie and I under the same disgusting cloak. That day was starting to come into my horizon, the day the warmth of love toward my mother would fizzle.
Mom never let up her verbal and psychological torment against me from that moment on. Her attitude would only harden and grow worse with time. She was jealous of Z, as she would be of my Mercie. A sense of dread came over me, a knowing that things would get worse for me before they got better. These events prepared me for what was to come.
Resolution
Things were about to find their natural resolution. In August 1980 my Mercie would enter my life. Z would fall in love again with a boyfriend she had before her late doomed relationship. He, in turn, had been waiting for her with great patience. Falling in real love with Mercie, and Z rekindling her love for her old boyfriend, would lead us to a reset. Z soon returned to being the distant school official, and I, a student again. We remained conventional friends. The previous stage of philía-love had been burned off for both of us. I like to think we both came off the more mature for it.
Z would marry her beloved groom in the early 1980s. I attended the wedding with my Mercie. Soon she would give birth to two wonderful children. Sadly, Z would die of cancer all too young in the late 1990s, never seeing the new millennium. Her husband couldn’t wait to go to Z. He went to her once he was sure their children were both grown and settled down. God blessed him by giving him time to see his and Z's first grandchild. He died a year ago of natural causes.
Lessons Learned
I did learn a sad thing about Mom's nature from the whole travail. I reached the conclusion that Mom had never, ever experienced a friendship like the one I had with Z. Her tirades denoted a sickly attitude toward sex. I'm no psychologist, but I already knew about "projection" and thought I was witnessing it in her. Which made me sad.
Even worse, though my brother and I may have come in the world in the usual manner, Mom had never experienced unitive sex. She never gave herself over to the other. Not that I was able to describe her defect in those terms, much less through my own personal experience, for Pope St. John Paul hadn’t written his theology of the body yet. His would be the vocabulary I would adopt to explain sex as the realization of the law of the gift.
My conclusion derived from a proof akin to “proofs by contradiction” like those found in geometry. Mom expressed herself in this foul manner in her references to sex because this is how she’s experienced sex and from then on, conceived it. I knew her attitude was sickly, unhealthy, bent, evil, and internalized into the core of her being. She was very broken inside.
I know this is a harsh conclusion for a son to reach about his mother, but there it is. Make of it what you will. This bent attitude on friendship and sex would come to play again, as we'll see later, and cause me even greater pain.
Mater Ter Admirabilis
There's one more thing I owe to my friendship with Z was her introducing me to an adult, mature Marian piety. I was looking for that kind of piety as I considered the one surrounding me as too old and stultified. Years later I would realize I was wrong, of course. Even so, Z introduced me to the Schoenstatt Apostolic Movement and to a new kind of Marian veneration. That's the subject of the next entry.
A sign of maturity and healing for an adult 'child' is the recognition that a parent (or parents) have their own brokenness and own issues. Loving them from a distance may be the one loving thing we can do for them (and us). My own mother lives 15 minutes from us and there is no relationship there as she can only be described as 'poison', wrapping any who get close to her in a very real chaos. But it was a liberating day when I realized her issues were not my own and that I could define my own happy for me. Thank you for sharing. N.n.