[Unusually, I will not copy out the questions to this concatenated answer that I've broken down into several parts. It has too many sad and sometimes tragic personal details to edit comfortably… But the questions themselves got me thinking about the topic of friendship.]
A. And believe it or not, there is one other special type of friendship we could squeeze into the analogy: friendship to one's country. Loyalty here takes the form of allegiance or patriotism.
Cicero was Roman. I've always had a high regard for another ancient character; Greek this time: Hector, Prince of Troy. Hector would order these aforementioned types of friendships into a rather manly cocktail: "honour the gods, love your woman, defend your country". I would dare say if you held them in any other order of priority, things would begin to crumble pretty soon. Religion, marriage, citizenship. Faith, fidelity, patriotism. Each is based on the one before it. Yes, even for an atheist, since as I have argued here before, to my mind atheism too is a religion with its own curious creed, code and cult (creed: something to believe and know; code: something to do or not do; cult: a certain way of offering reverence. These are the hallmarks of any religion).
(Yes. We can discuss that in more detail some other time.)
But back to loyalty and friendship, one disturbing quote I have read about friendship states: a friendship that can end never really begun. No escape clauses. My initial reaction to this was to disagree vehemently. Of course you can end a friendship! And for very justifiable reasons! But after thinking about it for several months, I'm beginning to agree with it more and more. Faith, fidelity and patriotism have no escape clauses. If they do, they were not really a religion, marriage or allegiance in the first place. They were convenient acquaintances or accomplices, like business contracts: I'm in this relationship as long as there's something I stand to benefit.
And isn't it true that we deal with God, with our so-called friends and even with our mother-country as if the relationship was a business investment? With God we deal with Him as if He were a spiritual ATM: a place I can draw success, happiness, salvation from financial disaster, "success" even in our love-life or social life, success in our exams and academic endeavours, etc when I'm running low on those. But the moment God begins to treat us the same way He treated His only begotten Son: misunderstanding, betrayal of close friends, difficulty in just getting sustenance or shelter, and in a special way that whole drama with the Cross, a drama that made that God-man cry out "My God! My God! Why have you forsaken me!?"... The moment any of these pop up in our own lives we are ready to terminate the relationship.
So too with our "friends". We are friends for as long as I have something to gain. But the moment I feel betrayed or let down or offended by something they said or did whether purposefully or mistakenly or just plain foolishly, then we break up the "friendship". "He stole my girlfriend!", "He messed my bike", "He lost my money" and so on and so forth.
Or with our motherland: the debatable point of brain drain is just one example. To go or to stick it out?
And why can't friendship be taken back? Why is it that a friendship that can end never really begun?
Best answer I could figure? Because friendship is a gift. And all real gifts are never asked for back. They are not loans. They are given and given for good.
28thJuly 2016