Should We Say Forever
Should Anyone Say Forever? Page 70
Chapter VI The Mystery of Fidelity
The problem with commitments is not so much making them, but keeping them. Judging by human behavior, at least, that must be the harder part. So our subject matter for this chapter moves from commitment to the question of fidelity. First we will inquire into how fidelity and commitment are related, then we will analyze the components of fidelity, and finally we will attempt to situate human fidelity in its religious and theological frame of reference. In comparison to fidelity, commitment seems to be a brittle category. In comparison to fidelity, furthermore, commitment plays a relatively small part in a person’s conscious life, it seems to me. On the other hand, I believe most of us expend a good deal of psychic energy trying to figure out what is entailed in order to be faithful to the reality we find ourselves in. For those who have already made their commitments, commitments might no longer be a significant category. Commitment is like a door to be gone through, but once [page 151] through it, fidelity or infidelity is the moral shape of the land entered. In other words, for one who has gone through the narrow gate, commitment is likely to be a nonproblem. Once inside the reality of a committed life, the problem of commitment passes over into the interaction between the primordial direction of one’s life and the ways one chooses to express this by word and action and relationship. In other words, I think there comes a time when commitment recedes as an operational aspect of one’s life. We might call it a self-consuming artifact. It can re-emerge at any point, for a number of reasons, as a vital question. But the sooner one gets beyond it, so to speak, the greater the likelihood that one is living a committed life.
Human Fidelity
One aspect of fidelity has to do with the past. One does not live as if each moment of his life begins from zero. No, he comes from somewhere, and fidelity
Chapter VI The Mystery of Fidelity
The problem with commitments is not so much making them, but keeping them. Judging by human behavior, at least, that must be the harder part. So our subject matter for this chapter moves from commitment to the question of fidelity. First we will inquire into how fidelity and commitment are related, then we will analyze the components of fidelity, and finally we will attempt to situate human fidelity in its religious and theological frame of reference. In comparison to fidelity, commitment seems to be a brittle category. In comparison to fidelity, furthermore, commitment plays a relatively small part in a person’s conscious life, it seems to me. On the other hand, I believe most of us expend a good deal of psychic energy trying to figure out what is entailed in order to be faithful to the reality we find ourselves in. For those who have already made their commitments, commitments might no longer be a significant category. Commitment is like a door to be gone through, but once [page 151] through it, fidelity or infidelity is the moral shape of the land entered. In other words, for one who has gone through the narrow gate, commitment is likely to be a nonproblem. Once inside the reality of a committed life, the problem of commitment passes over into the interaction between the primordial direction of one’s life and the ways one chooses to express this by word and action and relationship. In other words, I think there comes a time when commitment recedes as an operational aspect of one’s life. We might call it a self-consuming artifact. It can re-emerge at any point, for a number of reasons, as a vital question. But the sooner one gets beyond it, so to speak, the greater the likelihood that one is living a committed life.
Human Fidelity
One aspect of fidelity has to do with the past. One does not live as if each moment of his life begins from zero. No, he comes from somewhere, and fidelity