When What We Need Most Is Hope

Every commitment we make is an act of hope. We make commitments because we hope that can keep them. We keep them as long as we have hope that keeping them will bring good to both the persons we are committed to and to ourselves.

Hope is to commitment what gasoline is to the piston engine, and we can run out of both too soon. We can turn our solvable problems into incurable catastrophes before their time.

Every counselor I know tells me that people struggling with their commitments tends too soon to see their problems as catastrophes and their commitments as dead or dying. They give up hope before its time.

In fact, the deepest reason behind what some critics see as our culture's copouy from commitment is a loss of hope. Sociologist Christopher Lasch sees the symptom all around us, and speaks of it in his Haven in a Heartless World:"The ideology of [the uncommitted life]...radiates pessimism: the world view of the resigned."It makes sense. If we have given up hope for the future, why should we make serious, long-term commitments?

The critical question, then, is whether the future we can look forward to makes serious commitment a reasonable choice.

Let's admit that there are more than enough reasons to be pessimistic, for being afraid to make long-term commitments, for not wanting to take the risk. So before we talk about hope for keeping commitments a scary proportion.

Why People Fear Commitments

People are edgy about commitments for a lot of reasons.

Some people have given up hope for the globe. They doubt that there is a future for life on earth. This is especially true of young people, and the more sensitive and aware they ate, the harder it might be for them to keep hope alive.

Listen to Sam. "I would really like to make a permanent commitment to somebody, and live the kind of life with her that my parents have lived together. But my world isn't their world. They believe in the future. I don't. I think that some idiot in Washington or Moscow or some other place is going to push the button before too long. And there we go, the whole shooting match. So what's the point of making a permanent commitment to anyone?"

Sam isn't alone. If some polls are right, 75 percent of people under thirty expect the world to be destroyed before they can die a natural death.

And they think that even if nobody is crazy enough to start a nuclear war, we will find other ways to make the earth uninhabitable. We will make the air unfit to breathe, the water unfit to drink, the food unfit to eat, and in general turn globe into a glob of cosmic garbage.

With pessimism like this, commitment is going to need a powerful injection of hope if it is going to make a comeback.

But fear of commitment is also very private.

Some of us fear being abandoned.

Listen to Sarah."I needed my father terribly, and he went out one night and took his life. He couldn't help it, I suppose, but he left me alone with nothing to hang on to, and I felt as if it were my fault that he did it. I'm not going to risk being left alone that way again.

Or to Frank."My mother and father got into such awful fights, I was sure they were going to kill each other, and then my mother finally left and never came back again. It felt as if we kids didn't count at all, we felt like trash that could be thrown out with the garbage. So much for my parents' commitment. I am never going to put myself in that situation; I can't risk it. No commitment for me, thanks.

Fear of being abandoned! Reason enough to be skittish about long-term commitments.

And it's a reason more and more of us know personally. Polls show that 60 percent of the children born this year will spend at least part of their growing up with a single parent. Most of them will feel abandoned by somebody. By 1990, we are told, 70 percent of us will be part of a broken home-either out parents or our own.

We are creating a cycle of commitment failure: the more commitments fail, the less courage we have to make them.

Some people are afraid to make commitments because they cannot trust themselves.

Listen to Linda: "I never stuck with anything. How could I stick with another person for the rest of my life?" Or to Steve: "The minute somebody starts getting thick with me, I have an urge to split. Whenever people start expecting me to be close, I begin to panic. Maybe commitments are just not my thing."

Fear of ourselves! How do we know we have what it takes to keep a commitment?

The answer is, we don't. Not for sure.

The question is, do we have enough hope to make the commitment anyway?

Commitments are a chancy thing in the best of times. But right now, in our kind of world, the only hope, is hope itself.

Let's explore the ins and outs of hope, then, as the deepest secret of commitment making in a scary time.

The answer for many of us grows out of the soil of our faith.

Do we believe that God is committed to us? Is he committed to keeping our world a place where making commitments to each other works? If God is really committed to us, and to our important personal relationships, we have reason for hope, and a reason for making commitments to them.

So in my own experience, because I believe in God, I have to ask whether my faith really does give me hope that keeping commitments is still the only way to keep our deepest human relationships alive and creative.

Let's have a Coffee

Hari

Blessings...