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Being a friend and being a servant are the names I have for how I take part in the world. They overlap like patio windows. When the window is wide open, the two panes fully overlap and the view through them is clear.
My friend or servant song comes from the discourses in John’s Gospel. The discourses are about love, but also about the practical action of daily life. ‘What a friend we have in Jesus’ sings Aretha Franklin or ‘Your own personal Jesus’ sings Depeche Mode, ‘Reach out and touch faith.’
‘I shall no longer call you servants, because the servant does not know what the master is doing. I call you friends, because I have made known to you everything I have heard from my Father.’ John 15.15
In the Old Testament, we are commanded to care for widows and orphans. Widows and orphans are the only ones it is permitted to lend money to. In the Gospel, we are taught that in serving the poor, the sick, the hungry and homeless, we’ll be serving Jesus. In London, from Lincoln’s Inn to Edmonton, people of all faiths, religious or not, take part in food handouts, homeless shelters, community meals. Anarchist groups practise radical hospitality and mutual aid. An individual lets a friend stay the night, then strips and remakes the bed ready for the next guest. A spectrum from humanitarianism to mutuality, collectivism and communism. A spectrum from servant to friendship.
‘Houses of Hospitality
to give to the rich
the opportunity
to serve the poor.
Farming Communes where the scholars
may become workers
so the workers
may be scholars’
Peter Maurin, Easy Essays
Peter Maurin, the Catholic Worker poet and co-founder, says scholars and workers will learn from doing such work.
And yes, Peter Maurin, I do learn a lot, mostly about myself. But will I journey through service and learning to find friendship? In an English class for women asylum seekers, some of my students disrupt the confusing power dynamic, (Is she a teacher or a servant?) making me a cup of tea, saving me a packet of crisps. Others are content to sit back and watch me move the chairs and tables around in preparation for the class. They ask me to teach them pronunciation using my accent as a model. At first, feeling embarassed, I resist; surely it’s society that needs to change. But then I understand they are being practical. They tell me they struggle to make themselves understood. On YouTube, Tom Hiddleston, Helena Bonham Carter and the weather forecasters lend us their superpower.
There’s certainly friend-li-ness if not friendship, especially as I get visibly older. In volunteering, that is in making oneself useful, it’s important to be reliable and therefore healthy, which shoves any mutuality slightly off balance. One is in a position to give more than the other, one is able to receive more than the other. The question becomes: how to resist the injustice already present in such an unequal world.
My enduring experience of this dynamic, friend or servant, servant or friend, comes from my life as one half of a committed relationship. David Graeber writes, in Debt, that mutuality, that is communism, is familiar to all of us in our relationships with family and neighbours. I lend you my bike when yours has a puncture and you’re in a hurry. You take the car to the garage and I pick it up later.
I would like to say this mutuality is a path to the deep friendship, that says I would be able to lay down my life for my friend. John 15:13 . But what dangerous talk! ‘That a woman lays down her life for her friends’ doesn’t sound the same at all.
A couple take it in turns to bring each other a cup of tea in the morning. If one partner hurts their leg, then mutuality gets a bit out of kilter. The more able one, who starts out feeling generous, then feels more weary and starts to feel resentment. They would like to be paid for this work. A debt is being accrued. Many cups of tea will need to be made in the future.
For a couple with a young family, the first falling in love bit quickly turns into taking things in turns. There are two pairs of hands, so it is sensible to share out the tasks: looking after children, earning money, having a career break. One is a janitor, the other a housekeeper. There’s a disconnect between the chores and their life-giving results and intimacy is lost.
A long relationship is particular to the individuals involved, but, especially if heterosexual, there is still a power dynamic built in, historically. As we were painfully made aware during the pandemic, care essentialism means that women do the bulk of the paid and unpaid caring work, which goes unrecognised. The labour of a stay-at-home mum would, according to Forbes last year, cost four to five thousand dollars a month if outsourced.
‘No man has greater love than to lay down his life for his friends’ John 15.13
Women I have met who have had caring jobs, describe the compassion they feel for the elderly people they are paid to care for, and how they couldn’t do the job without compassion. But equally there is the terrible vulnerability to cruel abuse. The humanitarian food handouts that are so welcome and benign on the streets of London, in Gaza have turned murderous and violent, have turned into necropolitics and weaponised starvation.
There are many parables in the Gospel about servants, faithful ones, lazy ones, cunning ones, clever ones and about the choice of whether to be one.
The Gospel says the servant doesn’t know his master’s business. The servant is blind (Simeon) or struck dumb (Zechariah). In those days, a servant was often someone who was in bond slavery, lent to a rich master to pay off a family’s debts. However good at serving, we too are blind and enslaved, tied to wage slavery or housework. People even talk of ‘giving back to the community’ or ‘repaying their debt to society’.
It’s as if Jesus is saying, I’m the cheat code! In this ‘farewell’ discourse he says: You can bypass all the work of caring and serving. No need to slog your guts out. No need to be in debt, no need to pay anything back. Your debts have been cancelled.
In our lives and relationships, we wander cautiously between the desire to help and be helped, and the freedom of friendship, between notions of duty and true compassion. From singing this friend and servant song, I learn, there is a playful swing between friend and servant, a charmed lens through which to see even the closest and most intimate relationships: family, children, parents, partners, mates and friends. This puzzling dance is what sustains us. Jesus is teaching us to hold these contradictions in our heart.
Bad Apple Magazine 