Why is it a moral good to make commitments to people? Why is it a virtue to be a person who can be counted on to keep her commitments? Or why is it good to be a self-surrendering commitment-keeper?

There is something to be said for commitment-keeping simply as a virtue, a solid building block in the edifice of character. It is a good thing to be a person of fealty: loyal, stanch, devoted. Commitment-keeping is the mark of a good character.

But I doubt that we are called to be commitment-keepers as a way of polishing our virtue, of being jaw-jutting persons who preen themselves on their moral lustre. We don’t need to work at commitment-keeping simply because it makes for moral virtuosity, for its own sake, the way some people work hard to keep fit so that they can endure the exercises that keep them fit.

Commitment-keeping is not an end. It is a means. Commitments are good because life would be less good without them. Commitments are good because they create islands of security for people in their oceans of insecurity, enclaves of permanence in the jungles of change. Commitments are good because they serve human community better than does free-floating, unfettered, self-enhancing individualism.

Commitments are for Community

Can you imagine any community where the best we could ever get from anyone was: “I’ll try to be there if I can, but don’t count on it?” Commitment is the moral fibre that binds a collection of individuals into a community. Everything depends on it, as Chesterton said, from a family reunion to a political revolution, from the calling of a committee to the founding of a nation, from the building of a city to the coming of the Kingdom. There is no community without commitment. And community is what commitment is for.

Maybe you can have a regime, or a gang, or a crowd, or a prison full of inmates, without commitment, but you cannot have a human community.

In sum, keeping commitments is good because keeping them generally makes life better for people who live together.

On the same basis, therefore, when keeping a commitment does not make for community, the value of that commitment is in question.

I know of a man who makes a moral show of his own commitment-keeping. He reminds his wife regularly of his devotion to their marriage, of how he has been a good and faithful husband, and all of his reminders have the mucky smell of self-justification. Worse, his claim to the virtue of commitment-keeping is a thinly disguised put-down for her. He is letter her know that he sticks around, not because she is worth sticking to, but in spite of the fact that she is not worth sticking around.

So his commitment claims are a form of psychic cruelty. In fact, his commitment-keeping is a cover for all sorts of other banal brutalities.

The man’s son has told me more than once that his father’s righteous commitment-keeping was the cruelest cross his family had to bear. Better for everyone had he packed his bags and moved early on.

Something is wrong when the virtue of commitment becomes a burden to the person we are committed to. I recall an epitaph by C. S. Lewis:

Gabriel Marcel makes a nice distinction between constancy and presence. Constancy is a kind of predictability, or dependability, or sticking-with-it-ness. Constancy is the skeleton of fidelity.

Presence turns constancy into creative commitment. When I am, with my very self, wholly involved in the dialogue of life with the other, I am committed.

When a person lets me know that he forces himself to stick, that sticking is a noble duty he does, he is being constant. When a person is with me and for me in the midst of adverse circumstances, at inconvenience to himself, but always engaged with me as if he really wanted to be, he is present.

If he lets me know that he is near me simply out of duty, I will tell him I admire his conscience, but that his constancy is of no joy to me, and we would both be served by his taking off.

Constancy plus presence: this is the equation that makes for the kind of commitment that sustains human fellowship.

Commitments Create Identity

A moral value of commitment-keeping lies in its possibilities for keeping life better for people to whom commitments are made.

But commitment-keeping also offers a crucial payoff to the commitment keeper: it creates a lasting identity for a transient individual.

I mentioned earlier that, on the surface of it, it seems hard to make commitments for an indefinite future when we will not be the same person in the future as we were when we made the commitment. And the odd answer is: the making and keeping of commitments is a way of holding on to you identity so that, in one deep sense, you are the same in the future as you were when you made the commitment.

In a way, we are our commitments. As Paul Tournier has said: To live is to commit. And to make and keep significant commitments is to live as the particular, identifiable person one is.

One of the existence-shaping questions for each of us is: how do we manage to stay the same person while we pass through life’s several stages? How can I, for instance, be the same person as the toothpick with pants on that I see in my childhood photographs?

And how do we shape an identity in the midst of the ambiguities and conflicts of our secret souls? We are all a little like that Gadarene demoniac: we are not single, we are a legion of characters struggling for control.

I, for one, have not found in myself some immutable ghost sheltered serenely in the sub-cellars of my being, the ghost I was taught to call my soul. Nor can I find my enduring identity in the feelings people are always telling me to get with, nor in the feelings I am so anxious to have other people feel about me.

How, then, do we create ourselves?

I need to create my identity in the story I am writing with the raw materials of my life. I need to create an identity by writing a continued story and not just a collection of unconnected episodes. I have got to have a thread, a story line, that ties the story into a plot.

The story line is created out of the commitments I make and keep. I cannot write a story by beginning with a new plot whenever the mood is on me. I have to accept what I have already written in my commitments as the grist for what I write today. And this is a way of saying that if I want to create a continued, single story, a real story with a beginning, a middle, and a genuine end, a story in which I can be recognized all the way through, in short if I want to have an identity, I have to find it and reveal it by a pattern of keeping commitments to people.

Alasdair MacIntyre, speaking of personal continuity, writes: “I am forever whatever I have been at any time for others…no matter how changed I may be now.”¹ We are who we are within the narrative we are creating through our sustained relationships with people.

I was struck a long time ago by a sentence in Hannah Arendt: “Without being bound to the fulfillment of our promises, we would never be able to keep our identities; we would be condemned to wander helplessly and without direction in the darkness of each individual’s lonely heart, caught in its contradictions and equivocalities.”²

And here is Thomas More’s elegant line in A Man for All Seasons. He is talking to his daughter, Margaret, trying to explain his suicidal bullheadedness. “When a person makes a promise, Meg, he puts himself in his hands like water. And if he opens his fingers to let it go, he need not hope to find himself again.”

The other side of creating identity through commitments is that we also are created through other people’s commitments to us, as we trust people to keep their commitments, and as we accept them for what they were in their commitments to us.

Who am I? I am Rena Smedes’s boy. I have an identity because a certain woman committed herself to me, to me mewling and puking in her arms, committed herself without thinking about it or taking pride in it, and keeping her commitment during the times I was a very acute pain in the neck to her.

And I have an identity to the extent that I accept her as the person who gave me the basic raw materials for the story I have had to write for myself. Persons who can accept their parents, along with whatever genetic and psychological blessing or curse they laid on them, as the early grist for the story they are writing with their lives, are persons who find peace in who and what they are.

So we create our identities out of commitments in two ways: first, in accepting the commitment of others to us, and second, in committing ourselves to others.

And this is another reason why God invented commitment as a way of life for creatures that live by his grace.

Footnotes:
1. After Virtue (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), p. 202.

2. The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 237.

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