Shared lives: The challenges of friendship

Friendships are possible only if we are willing to make space for another person in our lives. But this is risky and sometimes gets messy, because the very people we are initially delighted to make room for in our lives can hurt and disappoint us as the friendships unfold. Then our inclination is not to create space but to close it off and protect ourselves by writing our friends out of our story.

That's how it was with my friendship with Jim. Jim was one of my dearest lifelong friends, but it's surprising that our friendship ever began—much less continued—because Jim and I were startlingly different from one another. Aristotle said that too much dissimilarity between persons makes friendship impossible. Jim and I proved him wrong—though not right away. I met Jim on August 28, 1965, our first day at a high school seminary in rural Missouri. I remember it vividly because I immediately knew that no one could ever confuse one of us for the other. Jim was an outgoing, charismatic, energetic Italian-American from the south side of St. Louis who loved adventure, was never afraid to take chances and was pretty good at getting into trouble. Growing up in the suburbs of Louisville, I was much more reserved than Jim (well, everybody was), liked routines more than adventures and thought "playing it safe" was not a bad way to live. Still, I had a hunch that if I made room for Jim in my life, it would be good for me.

But little did I know how much this friendship would challenge me. Of course, no one enters a friendship thinking of ways it might go wrong; friendships are based in attraction and carry a sense of possibility. We are drawn to some persons more than others because of something we see in them. It can be their personality and temperament, their outlook on life, their goodness, their sense of humor or, as with Jim, it can be because they clearly are not who we are. But we also open our lives to them because we believe there is something promising in the friendship. We don't know what the friends will ask of us—or where the friendship will take us—but we risk investing in it because we believe that sharing life with these persons will bless us.