Resistance. Spirituality

Creative Fidelity, Personal & National. We Cannot Go Back.

Luke Timothy Johnson lists seven required moral qualities for interpersonal relationships.* Number seven, “Creative Fidelity,” may be especially needed toward the USA sometimes.

WHAT IS ‘CREATIVE FIDELITY’?

Fidelity to persons, and to our nation.In discussing the how-to of inter-personal relationships, Johnson insists there are “moral as well as intellectual capacities” required, and lists them: Trust, Respect, Attentiveness, Meditation on the other in silence, Patience, Suffering, and Creative Fidelity.

“Creative Fidelity” is the solution Gabriel Marcel (French Catholic existentialist philosopher) provided for the crucial problem of time and change in human relationships. **

For example, the man who made my wedding vows is not the man I am today.  I am more experienced, more knowledgeable, perhaps more mature, perhaps wiser, have different interests and occupations. My spouse also has changed significantly. Why should these older and wiser persons be bound by promises made by younger and more foolish people who in so many ways no longer exist?  I think they should; that’s what ‘vow’ means. But how can that work?

Johnson, writing of Marcel’s “creative fidelity”, says this:

  • … fidelity … is the attitude of trust [loyalty] extended through time … to be truly faithful, one must be creative. This is because the other, as free subject, always changes.
  • Loyalty to what a person used to be is not creative fidelity.
  • Loyalty to one’s ideal image of the other is not creative fidelity.
  • Not even loyalty to one’s own first commitment of loyalty is creative fidelity.
  • Creative fidelity is the willingness to trust, be attentive to, and suffer with the other even as the other changes.
  • It is a living process.

A conscious attention to those facts and that ideal can profoundly affect a marriage, and no doubt many other committed relationships. We should spread the meme around.

CAN WE PRACTICE ‘CREATIVE FIDELITY’ TOWARD THE USA?

Is America worth being faithful to? Would that be appropriate? The idea does not seem to translate directly to my (our) personal relationship with the USA; but there is enough parallel to make it worth thinking about.

Should I – can I – continue, even under the rapidly deteriorating circumstances of these last four years, to love and invest my heart in this people, their institutions, their experiences, traumas, needs and future? Well, I think I can. But it’s going to take some creativity, some patience, some suffering, and some guts.

The people running the government now – and much of the media – have made clear that they have no respect for our Constitution and the values implicit or explicit in it, nor for our historic patterns of government and of international relations. True, those historic patterns have things in them to make a Christian feel revulsion or anger, or even shed tears. But those patterns were much better than the roads we are being led down now. And hundreds of thousands of our ancestors and contemporaries have fought and died to preserve and develop them.

Times have changed. Those values and the institutions that give them expression are under deliberate, sustained, and very powerful attack. We have to adapt. I don’t know all the “how-to’s” of that, to say the least. But I do know it starts in the heart. Fidelity is a matter of the heart, and that’s what will enable the creativity and commitment.

OUR CASE IS NEW

Lincoln told Congress in 1863,

As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves [from our memories of a more manageable, more comfortable America], and then we shall save our country.

I find I have to work on adjusting my expectations of how things will be in this land. I have to disenthrall myself from my expectations for ’06, ’08, or later. I don’t know what America is becoming.

The Bush radicals have vigorously shoved us into a new era, and there is no way back. It’s no longer politics as usual or life as usual – and we can not see clearly the nature or the magnitude of the changes that are already well on the way. Profound changes are already under way even if our government soon recovers integrity and a sense of responsibility. If this corrupt regime becomes relatively powerless or is completely replaced in the near future, still, far more than in Bob Dylan’s heyday, “the times, they are a changin”. In order to be faithful to America, and to ourselves, we will have to keep adjusting our reactions, our expectations and our methods.

OUR COMMITMENTS ARE NOT SO NEW

We are being called in these frightening days to creative faithfulness to our highest ideals – to faithfulness to our moral and ideological commitments to America.

  • to our Constitution
  • to government by law as against government by small self-selected groups in D.C. and state capitals
  • to just tax and economic systems
  • to good schools for all the children being left behind
  • to accessible health care
  • to living wages
  • to “liberty and justice for all”
  • to decency and integrity in international affairs
  • to respect for the planet we live on.

We may have made those commitments without thinking a lot about it, more or less by default as a product of the way we were brought up. Or we may have made them very deliberately and repeatedly. Either way they represent a serious moral obligation. They deserve from us both fidelity and creativity, a deliberate on-going choice to adapt, so we can continue to keep honoring our fundamental commitments.

NUTS!

Of course, there is an opposite possibility. What if the other party to the relationship – in this case the US of A – truly ditches you, even turns against you? Writing of “Trust” Johnson says, “Perhaps the evidence will challenge or even subvert the premise established by trust.” Then “the learner must take up the stance of the scientist who learns only from surface appearances.” Or as the saying goes, “When they show you what they are, believe them.” They do not WANT you to know them. You have become an outsider.

Nuts. I guess we’re already well into that pattern. They don’t want us to know them or have any influence. We have been forced into the status of outsiders in relation to our USA and our own government.

But don’t you think we can and should practice a form of “creative fidelity” toward the nation itself?

And to those good principles and values that have helped shape it over the years? Then maybe we can bring even our government back into a more open and responsible relationship to ‘we the people of these United States’ and to the rest of the world.

We can practice 'creative fidelity' toward the nation itself - the good values that have helped shape us over the years - bring even government back into a more open and responsible relationship to 'we the people.Click To Tweet

[*] Living Jesus: Learning the Heart of the Gospel, Luke Timothy Johnson, Harper San Francisco, 1999, p59-62.

[**] Creative Fidelity, Gabriel Marcel, tr Robert Rosthal, Noonday Press, 1964, p147 ff.

Johnson is easier to read than Marcel.  🙂

See another post here: “Christians Should Respect the US Constitution – Our Mutual Agreement.

 

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Leave a Reply to Ely X

4 Comments

  • I am making a thesis entitled, ” A critique on Divorce in the Philippines in the light of Gabriel Marcel’s creative fidelity.” whoever knows something about this, kindly please share your insights to me so that I may be able to weigh my thesis up! My questions are these:

    1.Why is it that Gabriel MArcel directs fidelity on being and not on feelings? becAuse feelingd do change, that is right but is it not that being also changes?

    2. In our country, we do not legalize divorce here in the Philippines but it is still on the process whether they would legalize it or not. If we answer this philosophically and not legally, why can not we separate couples that become one already?

    3.Can you also explain mor about MArcel’s creative fidelity so that I may have recapitulation of what his philosophy is.

    Thanks! Kindly email me : chibi_ely@yahoo.com

    • hi, ely, I’d like to congratulate u for choosing gabriel marcel’s creative fidelity to critique the ongoing issue of divorce.I’d like to tell u that Iam also making my thesis now and the title is “Strengthening the Catholic Filipino Family Using the Creative Fidelity of Gabriel Marcel.” I have already the bird’s eye view of his philosophy but I’m not yet so sure about it. So, if I have already a clear understanding about the creative fidelity of Marcel, I,m very willing to share it with you. I hope that you are also willing to share with me your understanding about his philosophy so that we can help one another in making our research a successful one..thank you!!! Jonry Jakosalem

  • I still believe in “those good principles and values”, and I still love my country, but I will no longer trust in its ability to uphold “those good principles and values”. dubya happened too easily.

    It’s not the government that I’ve lost faith in. Of course I don’t believe in this current regime at all, but governments change, and a new government that does uphold “those good principles and values” may form next.

    I’ve lost faith in the people of the United States. Too many people that I thought I knew have been changed by this arrogance. Too many were willing to forgive dubya’s abuse of power, just to get protection from an enemy created by the same policies. The elections showed me that we no longer deserve this country. Maybe as a people, we deserve what it’s turning in to.

    I reserve my “creative fidelity” for those of you who still believe in “those good principles and values”, but feel that, as a nation, we are not deserving of freedom any longer. I welcome a collapse, and hope that we learn the shame felt by the Germans when they learned what was done in their name after WWII. Then maybe we will lose this new “Gott mit uns” arrogance, and return to being the country I can believe in.

 
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