What do I do when I make a commitment to someone?

I make an appointment with someone, for some unrestricted time, sometime in his tomorrows, and all the tomorrows that follow all his yesterdays, tomorrows that neither of us can predict.

I stretch myself into a future neither of us can see, and I plan a rendezvous there with him, and ask him to trust me to be there.

I reach into the unpredictable times ahead and make one thing predictable; I will be there with him.

I throw myself into the turbulent ocean of his uncertainties and create an island of certainty there for him, the certainty of my caring presence.

I create one small space for him to have when all his foundations shake, the space of my promised presence.

These are a few of the things I do when I make a commitment.

But let us stand back a bit and take a longer look.

We have a mystery on our hands, no doubt; Gabriel Marcel was right when he called it that,¹ the mystery of a will that in the face of a universe of contingencies makes one thing incontingent. But an even greater mystery is this: why should anyone do it? Why would anyone or why should anyone bond himself or herself so unconditionally to someone in the face of the unknown?

For one thing, after I commit myself, I shall change. I shall be another person one day, different from the person who makes the commitment today. Yet, when I become that other, that different person, I intend to be bound by the commitment that this present person is making today.

So, in one bold sense, I am expecting another person to keep the commitment I make today.

The same goes for you, when I commit myself to you. You will not be the same person in the future that you are today, either. But I am making a commitment to you as you are today that I will be there with you, whoever you turn out to be tomorrow.

It is the personal changes we pass through on our pilgrimage that make our willingness to make and our power to keep commitments such a mystery.

And a gamble, too. How can we promise ourselves for the future when we don’t know, cannot know, what sorts of persons we will be then? Or what life will be like in the time ahead, when the commitment we made once feels like choking smoke of regretted words after the fire of intention has died?

But, looking at it another way, the fact that we change is probably why commitment was invented. Commitments are the only way for free persons to batten down their lives a little, give them some permanence, some stability in the midst of change—to keep them from being blown away by shifts in the breezes of mood and the blustery blows of passion. Commitments are one way to put some muscle into our human relationships, give them some strength to tough out the hard times, ride out the stormy times. Commitment lifts life a niche beyond impulse, whim, desire, drive, lust, and all the other natural inclinations that make human relationships so rhapsodic and so painfully unstable.

Change and uncertainty create the problem. Commitment is our surprising solution.

When we make a commitment to another person, we surrender two things vital to autonomous individuals. We surrender our freedom and we surrender our individuality.

We surrender something of our freedom, and for an undefined time. We build invisible fences around ourselves. We decide that our lives will not flow free, unattached, uncoupled, from one personal association to another. We bind ourselves with the invisible fiber of a remembered promise, a word given and a word received, not just for now, but for an undefined time to come.

We limit our individuality, too. When I commit myself to you, I stretch myself beyond my individuality and place myself at your side, to walk with you, hand in hand, into the heather of the unknown hills before us. Once committed, I shall not be a mere I again; I shall thereafter always be an organic member of a we. The mirror of my private soul no longer shows the whole of me. Now I am who I am in my linkage to another.

All this we do, and more beside, when we make our commitments to other people.

Spoken this way, it all sounds so absolute, so unconditional, so categorical, so fixed. We shall have to dip the core of commitment into the solvent of ordinary persons living their ordinary lives amid many sorts of relationships calling for different sorts of commitments, and sometimes calling for reconsiderations of commitments already made.

But, before looking at the free commitments that human beings make to each other, we must look briefly at the divine model for all our making and keeping of commitments.

The Divine Model

What we experience in our making and keeping of commitments is a reflection of God’s style of creating and keeping his alliance with his human family. And what we see in God’s making and keeping of commitment has to be a model of ours.

The basic fact about God in his relationship to his creation is that commitment-keeping is the essence of who he is to us—his name, his character, his identity.

Recall just a few highlights in the story of God’s making and keeping commitments.

He had been on leave of absence for 400 years. Now it was time to get his program on track again. So he spotted a Semitic fugitive tending sheep in the desert, flagged him down with a clump of chaparral burning strangely long, and told him that he was to be God’s point man in a campaign to liberate his family and relaunch his campaign to win the world back again.

But Moses was worried, among other things, about credibility. Who would believe this story? He needed some identification from this invisible divine stranger whose only credential is that he talked through a piece of burning chaparral. A name would help.

So God told Moses his name. But as everyone knows, the later Jews hallowed it by not using it, and all we have is a set of four consonants which probably once was a form of the verb to be that English translators rendered with variations on the impressive “I am Who I Am.” In Philosophy 301, we learned that the name crystallized the truth that God possessed his essence and his existence in one indivisible act.

But Moses did not take Philosophy 301. Nor did the hod-carrying Semitic slaves. The question on their minds was not the question of essence and existence. It was the question of presence and absence. They asked the pragmatic question about God: Where is he when we need him? Why isn’t he here for us? And will he be here tomorrow?

And it is reasonable to suppose that God identified himself in terms appropriate to their question, and said: This is my name: The One Who Will Be There With You. That is the appropriate name for the commitment-making and keeping God. He subordinates his own entitlements to the needs of his people; he is no longer free to be a fluid individual deity; now he will always be a God of someone.

Yahweh is the sort who sticks with what he is stuck with. Resisting every divine impulse to call it quits when the relationship soured, he stays.

At a later time when Israel had reason to suppose that he had gone on extended leave again, he came, incognito, as the God whose name was Immanuel, the “One who was with them.” And in the shadows of that shining season, when it looked as if God were after all going on another leave of absence, Jesus said: I will be with you until the end of the world—the commitment of a God whose name is: The One Who Will Be With You.

And in John’s vivid vision, hope in the divine commitment is reaffirmed: “I heard a loud voice call from the throne, You see this city? Here God lives among men. He will make his home among them…His name is: The God who is with them” (Rev. 21:3).

From beginning to end, the Bible tells the story of a committed god…a God with character to stick with what he is stuck with, in the face of a thousand reasons to pack his bags and take off to greener pastures.

He is the model for human commitment-keeping. But our human commitments cannot be simply modeled after God’s commitment to us. We are not gods, only something like God, and our commitment-keeping can, at best, only be something like God’s commitment-keeping.

Let me point to a few likenesses and differences. First, the likenesses:

Now for some differences:

In sum, we can say that as God’s commitment-keeping character is the moral structure of his relationship to us it is a model for our commitment keeping, to a limited extent. But in order to know how much we ought, and how consistently we can, model our commitment-keeping after God’s, we shall have to poke around some in the human dynamics of human commitment-keeping.

Footnotes:
1. Gabriel Marcel, Creative Fidelity (New York: Crossroad, 1982), p. 152.

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