What does family life reveal about the mystery of commitment-making and commitment-keeping?

I am talking about a real family—crazed, confused, and chaotic as many real families may be. I am not talking about the “family feeling” that executives try to stimulate in their company or their schools. At my school we talk about the Fuller family, mostly at Christmas time. And it may be true that a lot of people feel more closeness and confidentiality and appreciation at the office than they feel at home. But the office is not a family, any more than the corporation is a bride, even though some executives are said to be married to it.

The difference between the family feeling at my shop and the family reality at home lies in the commitments proper to each. You can get fired from the office family. And if you plead family, and say, “You can’t fire me, I’m family,” you may be told: “No, you just used to be family, now you are former family.” In a real family nobody gets fired, and that, for many families, is the bottom line.

Family is where we learn commitment because it is there where we learn to trust. A child learns what commitment is first of all by trusting her mother’s commitment to her. She learns it by learning trust from her mother’s willingness to surrender her own right to a night’s sleep in order to be with her in her needs, to touch her, nourish her, warm her, cuddle her, nurse her, protect her.

In effect, we can learn something about commitment from our families because it is commitment that creates a family, not the accident of blood kinship. I am not bound by a drop of blood to any of the four other members of my immediate family. Families are created not by living under one roof, but by the special sorts of commitment we make to each other. Loyalty commitments are like invisible fibers which hold together the complex network of love-hate relationships and create out of them the unique alliance of persons that we call a family.

But what are the sort of commitments that we make as families? I will talk here only of the commitment parents properly make to children:

1. Parental commitments are unilateral.

Like God, we commit ourselves to children who never had a chance to say “No thanks, I think I’ll pick some other parents.” When I committed myself to each of my children, I took charge of another human being’s destiny. In a sense I foisted an identity upon them; forever and ever I determined that they would know themselves as my children. They were not consulted, had no veto, no consent.

2. Parental commitments are controlling.

Parents surrender their desires to a child’s needs. But what control there is in this surrender! When Doris and I received a phone call from a young lady named Margaret at Bethany Home and were told that there was a girl child for us and when we took her in and committed ourselves to her, we took control of her. We decided what name she would bear, who her aunts and uncles would be, what religion she would be brought up in, what values she would be taught, the neighborhood where she would live, and thus the schools she would attend and the friends she would have, and how much money she would likely have at her disposal to make the lumps of life a little easier to swallow.

How wonderfully paradoxical: in giving ourselves to a child, we seize total control. Of course it did not last long, and there were many battles in store precisely about that control. The trick for parents is to accept the fact that this control is only for the time being, since when we take control we commit ourselves to preparing a child to take control of himself or herself.

3. Parental commitments are self-interested.

Commitments are born of desires for self-satisfaction through the child. Whether by birth or adoption, a parent is driven by a need to perpetuate himself beyond his mortal individuality, a need to nurture an infant, a need to have someone who can make parental dreams come true…and a bundle of other needs. But the sobering point is this: parental commitment to a child is balanced by self-interest without being any less a genuine commitment.

4. Parental commitments are unconditional.

Parents do not have freedom to unparent themselves; their commitment is forever, as long as life shall last. They put themselves at the disposal of a child no matter what. When a person commits herself as a parent, she has no escape clauses; she says, “Nothing you can ever do will make me be something other than a parent to you.”

We have seen enough to note that these most fundamental of human commitments are unilateral, controlling, self-interested, and unconditional—as much like God’s commitment as any human commitment gets.

Now I would like to ask: what sorts of things does a parent commit to a child? Not what might a particular parent legitimately commit, but what is the essential commitment appropriate to and expected of every parent?

We could agree, I suppose, that parents do not have to commit themselves to leave ninety percent of their estate to their children, to pay for their college education, or to go on backpacking trips with them.

But there are some commitments that family-making entails. Not all of us would agree on what they include. But let me mention a few that, for people with biblical roots, seem woven into parenting.

1. The parent is committed to giving the child a family memory.

A family is more than the sum of its parts: a family of five is more than five people. It is a chapter in a story. And a child in the family can know himself or herself as a person only by knowing the earlier chapters of the family story. Bellah speaks of a “community of memory”: the family is, I think, the primary community of memory.

I think that children feel this intensely. The best stories a parent can tell are stories of the olden times when he or she was a child. I remember how I hung on my mother’s odd stories about her childhood in Friesland. Why? I think it was because the stories told me who I was. I can recall visiting a cemetery near her home, along with Doris and my two young sons, and wondering at my son’s compulsive photographing of the tombstones with my mother’s maiden name on them. Why did he have this need to take pictures of old tombstones? I think it was his need, his human need, to have a family memory so that he could reassure himself that he was who he was. It is a need that belongs with the fact that children are not individuals who pop up in a particular time and occupy a particular space for a brief moment. They are characters in a family story. And to know their parts they need to know who came before them and what happened to them in the chapters that came before. Parents are committed to giving them their memories.

The enduring evil of child abuse is that it robs a child of memory. She blocks out significant passages of her story because they are too painful for her to bear. But she needs to know them if she is to come to genuine self-understanding. Paradoxically, it is the memory of the abuse that prevents her from accepting her identity as a character within the family story. Her only solution is that final, that unpredictable, that gracious act called forgiveness. But tragic indeed is the person who needs to be forgiven for robbing a child of her or his memory.

2. A parent is committed to giving the child a future connected to her past.

A child needs a future. I do not mean a future guaranteed by tuition at the right school. I do not mean a future assured by the promise of a well-stocked trust fund. I mean a future as a member of a family. Families are about seed, and about lines, and about chapters of the family story that still have to be written. And parents are committed to assuring their child a name and a role in that story. It is no small thing to give another human being a future.

The baseline commitment that a parent makes to a child is to the child’s name and place within the family. This is part of the unconditionality of parental commitment. In spite of conflicts of faith and morals, the child bears my name and is my child. When the child’s values are not my values and her God is not my God, her story is my story, the story she is writing with her life flows with the story that I wrote with mine. The future of my story is the future of her story. I may not unparent myself.

3. A parent is committed to be the child’s moral and religious authority. If you are a parent you are meant to tell your children what you believe is important and what is not important, what you believe is right and good about human existence, what is worth living for and what is worth dying for.

It does not matter whether a parent is correct or not. We cannot say that only parents with orthodox religious beliefs have the obligation to tell their children what they believe about God. Better to be wrong about what we believe to be of ultimate importance than to give the impression that nothing is of ultimate importance. To be a parent entails a commitment to teach a child about one’s ultimate commitment, to initiate a child into one’s religious community, to tell a child over and over again the stories that created one’s faith, to be one’s self a model of the sort of piety that embodies the practice of faith.

4. Another commitment a parent makes is to her child’s eventual freedom from the parents’ authority.

The parent of a child has time limits on commitment. Both of them are committed to preparing the child for the time when he is on his own—on his own to decide whether to live by other moral values or to worship other gods. In short, the parent commits himself to prepare a child to take responsibility for his own moral life and religious faith, even if his choice conflicts with what his parents taught him.

No commitment made by a human being is as clearly like the commitment God makes as a parent’s commitment to a child. It has practically no conditions, it is made unilaterally, as if by sovereign election, and it has as its object a child’s authentic freedom. But the analogy is limited, and any parent who does not sense the differences is in terrible trouble. We can commit ourselves to our children somewhat as God commits himself to us. But we are not God. And if we make a child fear or love us as he or she fears and loves God, we and our children are in for trouble.

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