Should what is expected of a friend be the friend's death?

This is a very strange question, I am aware. With this I mean: how can a form of relationship in which what is expected of the friend, what we expect of the friend, truly requires his death be called friendship? Really, who wants his friend to die? Who desires that someone he knows as a friend die as part of this or that expectation? Moreover, who does not feel a great fire in his heart at the death of his friend? On the contrary, in the face of the possibility of a friend's death, is it not what another friend must do to defend him to the death, to protect him, to watch over him?

Nevertheless, we are talking about a form of relationship that kills its friends, and, strangely, supposes that by killing them it reaches the true friend. Of course what we are talking about is not the physical death of the friend; we need to draw attention to a mentality and a relationship of disloyalty that we might point to as the death of friendship.

In what situation do we kill the friend, and in what situation do we keep him alive? The secret of the matter lies in "our expectation of the friend." We have a list of expectations of the person we call a friend. For many people this list is highly detailed. Those who express a disappointment about that friend when they do not find what they expect from him, what kind of dream have they dreamed, and how have they loaded this dream onto another person? How much can the dreams we nurture about our friend belong to our friend's humanity, to his existence, and when we want to see them, is what we see our own friend or our own dreams themselves?

There is no doubt that these dreams are most often ours, and one of the things we do most frequently is to squander those we regard as friends because they do not fit these dreams, to close ourselves to them.

When our friend is not in a stance that fits our dreams, up to what levels can we tolerate him?

Without doubt, calling someone a friend has a minimum level of harmony, and it is with this that people can decide on and enter a friendship relationship. There are people who have seen what betrayals from those they knew as friends. Anyone can say that a relationship endured in spite of everything, in spite of betrayal, in spite of every kind of bad behavior, has nothing to do with friendship.

Deciding on someone's friendship is, after all, a decision, a choice. There are minimum data that lead to this decision and choice.

Choices are related to a person's values, to his outlook on life,

on people, on society, on being, on God. A person chooses his friend together with these values, in harmony with these values, anyway. He who tells you his friend has also told you who he is. For a person exists with his friends, regardless of how much he gives the friendship its due. Regardless of whether he gives it its due or not, a person is also subject to the religion, the character, the path, the politics of his friends. Even politics in itself takes place as a friend-enemy relationship.

Believers are friends of one another, and the wali, that is, the absolute friend, of all of them is God. Those who build their friendship in accordance with the quality and value of being a believer have already placed God at the center of the matter.

Since the reference, the support and the measure of friendship is God in His most absolute Otherness, the horizon of expectation too becomes so clear as to leave no room for any ambiguity. As servants created by God, we have no knowledge other than what He taught, no horizon and no power other than what He gave. Since we ourselves are not immune from error, the friend too, even if a believer, is not immune from error, and of course is not a source of mystery in whose every utterance a miracle is to be sought and a secret discovered.

We will not put those we have taken as friends for God's sake in the place of God. But neither will we be disappointed when we do not see in a friend, whom we surely know to be a human being, the things we would expect from a god.

At precisely this point, the more we set down in advance the list of our expectations of the friend and the more we detail this list, the more we kill the friend. For the friend whom we define in detail and restrict with our expectations is no longer someone with his own existence, his own personality and his own word.

To the extent that our expectations take the place of the person we call a friend, when we decide what he will tell us in this or that situation, what attitude and action he will take, we are no longer after a friend but have aspired to a lack of personality that we have appropriated, made ourselves, dissolved in our own being. In this case what we wish to hear from the friend is our own inner voice. Since what is ascribed to the friend can of course never be unconditional flawlessness, how open will one be to the friend? How will distances with the friend be set?

If not all, then many of our sentences "A friend wouldn't do that," "That's not expected of a friend," "That doesn't fit in this friendship" are attitudes aimed at making the friend ourselves, at destroying the friend's selfhood.

With the saying "A friend speaks bitterly," a broad space of existence is in fact granted to the friend. There may of course also be those who seep out of this space and exploit the tolerance space of friendship for painful attacks. One who gives friendship its due does not find it hard to distinguish whether a bitter word comes from a friend or from an exploiter trying to slip in through the door. Just as he does not fall into the error of killing the friend by making him like himself, he also knows that not every bitter word comes from friendship.

But neither piece of knowledge closes him to a friend's advice. Advice is the truest nourishment a person needs in this world, and it is the heart of religion, and its essence is sincerity.