Loyalty, pt. 1

What do you look for in a friend? What qualities make a person attractive to you? Of course, we’re all going to have slightly different answers based on our life experiences, strengths, and weaknesses. Few of us would actually want to be friends with ourselves because relationships are, ultimately, about mutual edification and growth- it’s really hard to do that if you’re exactly the same as the person you’re in a relationship with.

Regardless of other qualities that you look for in a friend, I’d be willing to bet that somewhere lurking at the top of your list is loyalty. Many, if not most, of us have experienced a betrayal or abandonment of some kind. Whether it was the petty treachery of the middle school girls’ bathroom or the far more serious neglect of a parent, we’ve all been hurt by someone who was supposed to care for us or be our friend. 

Deep down, we want our friends to be trustworthy, honest, authentic, and to stand by us no matter what. In a word, loyal. But before we can leave this conversation and move onto something different, I think we need to do the really important work of asking ourselves what we mean and don’t mean by “loyal”. What are the pitfalls? Where do our unrealistic expectations hide? And, are we even loyal ourselves? Can we, rationally, even expect this of others? What do we really want when we say we want a loyal friend?

I’ll start with a less-than-obvious question, given the nature of our discussion so far: Can loyalty be bad? Can one fully commit themselves to something in a way that is corrosive and deadly? I think so, and I don’t just mean that we can commit ourselves to bad causes. Everybody has done and/or will do that. It’s not the causes that I’m concerned with, specifically, it’s the priority that we give them in our lives. 

Let’s take something that I hope we can all agree is good: giving food to people in need. Regardless of how they got there or how long they remain in need, I hope we can all agree that it’s a good thing to feed someone who is hungry. How could loyalty to this cause be bad? Glad you asked. 

Imagine that you’ve been volunteering at a local soup kitchen for a few months. You started volunteering there because you were once hungry and some kind people gave you food to eat. You want to give back and you believe that this is one of the most meaningful ways you can directly impact your community. So far, so good.

But what if another soup kitchen were to open up near yours? What if it were a clothing bank? What if another group of people in your town were to open some establishment meant to help people in desperate situations, but you responded with corrosive loyalty to the one you were a part of? Rather than celebrating more help for more people, you chose bitterness. You chose to ask questions and make statements like: Aren’t we doing enough? How dare they think that they can do this better! Clothes? People don’t need clothing, they need food! They’re from a (insert type of organization you don’t agree with here), so you know that they’re sending the wrong message to the people that they help.

You get the picture.

What’s happened here? Your loyalty to your good and honorable thing has become twisted and warped. If you let it go on too long, it will poison the thoughts and experiences of those that you work with and serve. If you don’t check yourself, your loyalty will become tribalistic and territorial. Your commitment to a good thing, rather than staying in its proper place, has outgrown itself and become a monster eating up all the goodness that it once promised you and those you served.

To be clear, you could remain loyal to your specific soup kitchen AND celebrate the efforts of others in your community to serve a needy population. You don’t have to go volunteer at the other soup kitchen or organization. You don’t have to support it financially. You can be loyal, right where you’re at, and provide a tremendous amount of support to your specific cause without having to bash or undermine that of others. The problem comes when we make our specific cause (or person/people, at times) a central piece of our identity. When you have built much of your identity on a specific thing/cause/person, then you get defensive when you perceive that thing/cause/person being threatened. You might even say, “jealous”. I say “perceive” because it’s rarely a real threat.

Now, this is an incredibly simplistic scenario. I don’t know too many people who would actually respond with the kind of bitterness and mistrust described in the specific situation above, but we don’t live in a simple world, do we?

Our world is full of twists and turns. There’s so much information available to us and so many voices to weed through- it’s really easy to get lost or deceived. Our loyalties can be divided and misplaced without our ever even noticing.

Since we’re on this journey through our beliefs and how we live, I think it’s a good time to evaluate our loyalties. Who and what are you loyal to? Why? What would happen if that loyalty was threatened? 

This is part one. We’ll spend a few weeks talking about loyalty and how it can be a good thing and a bad thing. Can’t wait to dive in!