It is not so much our friends’ help that helps us as the confident knowledge that they will help us.
– Epicurus
=-=-=-=
That was one of the lessons I’ve learned over the last year. The things I faced, well, I had to face. My sister, my mother, my friends — they may have wanted to help, to be able to do Major Heroics to aid me, but it was a journey I had to take alone. But of course, they did do something — I had the perfect confidence of knowing that they had my back, at least in spirit. Sometimes, it’s not important whether someone does something. It’s just important to know that they would, if they could. The confident knowledge of friendship’s help can sustain you in the times when the friend can’t, technically, do much at all.
As an atheist, I’m pretty damn sure there is no God, no Super Friend out there. People putting their trust in something that isn’t there looks odd, even a bit sad, to me. But just like the generic confidence you can get from the support of friends, confidence that can sustain you even in those moments where there’s nothing much those people can do for you, there might well be confidence gained from “knowing” God has your back, even though there’s nothing there to do anything. Spinoza famously said, “I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them.” If I truly want to live by Spinoza’s example — and I do, though I freely admit to massive imperfection — I must, must remember that. I may disagree, I may worry about the negative consequences, but I do not have to scorn the human impulse.
At the end of the day, though, the confidence gained from true friends comes from many concrete and incontrovertible examples of their faithfulness. For me, that beats the God scenario hands down. The evidence people give me examples of, the things that prove to them that God is working in their lives and for their benefit, always seem to be hazy, insubstantial things; or, more troubling, the work of real people redefined as God’s. “God saved me!” the woman cried from the operating table…
