Interreligious Friendship, Trauma, and Joy as Invitation to Resistance

This article responds to the constructive attempt proposed by Septemmy E. Lakawa, who argues that trauma as “suffering that remains” must be experienced in the light of “friendship that remains,” particularly within interreligious friendship. This article furthers the discussion by suggesting the need for “joy that remains” as another essential dimension of friendship despite ongoing suffering. While joy emerges as a surprising gift within the wounds of shared life, this article explicitly affirms that joy is never a justification for violence, trauma, or suffering in any form. Instead, joy functions as a counter-testimony that refuses to let injury have the final word. By affirming friendship as a site for intermingled experiences of joy and suffering, the author proposes three chief dimensions of interreligious friendship: covenantal compassion, re-authoring the shared future, and the dialectics of drawing in and drawing out.