The power to make and keep a commitment comes close to the mystery of being human, of being a person much as God is a person, a creature who creates a community and fashions her own identity out of a repeated choice to stick with what she is stuck with.

I do not think that the virtue of commitment is fostered by absolutizing it. I hope that I have been clear about this. We make our commitments in a broken world and we try to keep them as struggling, weak, and often terribly selfish people. Some commitments should never be made. Some commitments should not be kept. Perhaps some cannot be kept. We cannot hoist commitment abstractly to an inviolable absolute.

And I do not think that commitment in the lives of struggling people is best fostered by moralizing. There is indeed reason to wring our hands over a culture in which entitlement gets such better odds than commitment. There is indeed good reason to review the solemn proclamation of moral obligation to keep our commitments. But I do not think that our hope for a more committed society is best served by moral indictments and moral injunctions. I believe that most people really want to live committed lives. What they need is nurture, help, encouragement, and revival of hope more than the wallop of a moral judgment.

But—absolutism aside—in our time we need nothing more than this: that we help each other accept ourselves again as persons who, like God himself, can say to someone: I am the one who will be there with you, no matter what. And in so taking on his name, we may create communities of steadfast love and create ourselves as persons—persons who are what we are because of the commitments we have dared to make and cared to keep.