There is Life After Commitment

When someone breaks an important commitment to us, we die, part of us dies anyway, a large part sometimes.

The goodnews is that there is life after the death of a commitment.

I don't mean to be facile about it, though. Living through the letdown that follows when someone tears up our life's commitment is a horror.

To experience it is to die a minor death.

A minor death is the loss of of one precious segment of our life, one that went a long way to make us who and what we are in this life.

Sometimes when we die a minor death we feel as if we may as well be done with it, and die our major death too.

We experience our minor deaths as walk through dark passages in a dark night. Each is a stage of death and dying. Let's listen, just for a moment, to the voices of people who remember groping their way through the long nights and sunless places.

Anxiety.

"I felt that we trusted each other because we belonged to each other, and our trust gave me a stable footing. Now I am cut off, with nowhere to stand for sure. I have nothing to pin my life to, nothing to hook into, nothing to which I can secure myself. I feel as if I am floating unattached, unheld, unsupported-and the anxiety is killing me.

Loneliness.

"Nobody else can fill my emptiness. It is not the same as being alone; as long as I knew she was committed to me, I did not feel lonely even in solitude. Now my loneliness feels more like being lost, deserted, uncared for, unloved, unwanted. It is worse during those seasons we always celebrated with people we belonged to. Christmas is worst of all. Sometimes I have an urge to take every light and snuff it, every tree and burn it, every carol and silence it, so lonely is the time for me."

Unlovableness.

"I had love and I lost it. He knew me better that anyone on earth has ever known me, and he could not love me. Now I feel that if other people knew me as well as he did, they would all turn away from me. If he could not love me anymore, I must be unlovable."

Failure.

"I have failed at the one thing I needed most, wanted most, in all of life. Surely I could have done something to keep her. If only I had been a different person-better at love, more ready to praise, quicker to catch her moods-if only I had done more of this and less of that, I could have kept her. How bitter it is to be a failure at what matters most!"

Loss of Identity.

"I was the person in our kitchen getting dinner for him. I was the person making love with him. I was the person who gave birth to our children. I was the person who tugged them through the flat sides of our marriage with him. But who am I now? I cannot locate myself; he erased me when he left me. I am a missing person. And I would like to find myself before I die."

Dark passages, these are, all of them, leading through the minor death of lost commitment.

Is there hope for life after the death of commitment?

YES, there is hope. No guarantee. But honest hope. Realistic hope.

Maybe it is a hope that life can be fine without another lifetime commitment.

A woman name Phyllis. Recalled that after her divorce, she was floundering, lonely, and searching to find herself. She felt driven, she said, to find the perfect man for her. And then about a year ago, a light dawned inside her and she realised that no man could bring her the happiness she sought-that what she needed was to grow within herself, alone.

She learned that she had the capacity to enjoy anything and everything she wanted to, by herself, and that she did not need a man for this. Furthermore, she began to accept the fact that she was a worthy person and deserved a commitment from a man she trusted.

And waiting turned into a lively hope of being alive again, by herself, alone without loneliness.

Let me tell you about Irene story.

Irene came home one wretched day in May, found a note scribbled on a shopping memo stuck to the refrigerator door with a magnetic button. It was scrawled next to a reminder to pick up Clem's blue suit from the cleaner. The magnetic button had one of those mottoes meant to elevate Commons chores to the level of ministry: Divine Services Conducted Here Three Times Daily.

The note read,"I have left for Nevada with Hazel. I'll apply for a divorce there. Hazel and I are sure that this is God's will for us. I know that you will come to see it this way too. Will be in touch. Clem."

Irene plunked herself down on a kitchen chair, she had been Clem's devoted partner, dedicated to serving, though not to adoring, him, for twenty-two low church years.

In any case, Clem's commitment to Irene had wilted before the adoration which Hazel had become prone to offer him. He packed his bags, took off, and left Irene to walk her way alone through the dark passages of rejection.

She crawled through them with that homogenized blend of rage and shame we feel when someone we counted on lets us down. Rage at him for leaving her and shame that she did not have the stuff to make him stay. What hope was there for her now?

Hope? For a woman alone in the autumn shade of fifty? For a woman who had lived her life in the faith that a female's meaning was framed in service to a male? What hope?

Well there was hope. It didn't come by waiting for it, as an illumination, the way it did for Phyllis. Irene created her own opportunities of hope.

She made new commitments to friends, and new kinds of commitments to her children. She kept her commitment to the people of her church, and took strength when they upped the ante on their commitment to her. But mostly she made new commitments to herself. She created a life more true to her real self than she had ever permitted herself in her wifely days.

She traveled, venturing to new and strange places with friends. Became a music teacher people competed to engage. She played games she had never played. Took risks she had never dared to take. And before too long she laughed again. Those of us who knew her before Clem ran off see a far more interesting person now, more fun to be with, more honest than she used to be while she served the Lord at Clem's side.

Maybe, in one cordoned-off section of her mind, she is actually grateful that Clem took off and left her. But if you were to ask her whether she would risk making another commitment to another man, she would probably say something like this: "Yes, to another kind of man, I would risk it again."

There is hope for life after the death of a commitment. We cannot feel it at the beginning; we cannot feel it while we pass through the passages of our minor death. But we can gradually open for ourselves to it, be prepared to grasp it when it comes. And one way, one good way, to keep the door open to hope is by making and keeping commitments to other people, smaller, limited commitments to friends and neighbors and a larger commitment to ourselves.

Let's have a Coffee

Hari

Blessings...