Live Faithfully

“Love changes, and in change is true,” Wendell Berry writes in his lovely poem, “The Dance.” The line articulates what most recognize who have maintained long, loving relationships with spouses, friends, children. Faithfulness is a much more nuanced and lively virtue than simply sticking with or sticking to or sticking it out. It is much more like what John Ciardi describes in his poem, “Men Marry What They Need: I Marry You”:

. . .   I marry you,

morning by morning, day by day, night by night,

and every marriage makes this marriage new.

That kind of faithful living is more “again and again” than “on and on”—saying an intentional yes that is new every morning.

In his collection of stories entitled Fidelity Berry explores a rich variety of ways in which people are faithful to one another. A daughter visits her father in prison when he has, in a fit of rage, killed a much beloved friend. A man notices his wife’s unspoken need and quietly finds ways to meet it, surprising her into recognizing that what she needed was there all along. A soldier returns home, traumatized, but prepared to find the healing he needs among people he trusts. A young man, against hospital regulations, steals a beloved older man who has been a father to him and the community from the hospital where he doesn’t want to die, and takes him to a familiar rural spot where dying can really be a going home. A couple of men save neighbors from a flood. In each story the main characters are faithful not simply to an abstract notion of moral obligation, but to what they know by long experience to be needful in the moment. Faithfulness like that is a kind of knowledge.

Most of us, if we’ve lived long enough, have been unfaithful in small things, if not in big ones. Living faithfully, more than a matter of good record, is a matter of grateful and trusting return through a door that is never locked against us when we have “erred and strayed”—accepting God’s great faithfulness, repenting, and beginning again. Faithfulness is also a matter of growing in clarity about what we hope to be faithful to—a vocation, a way of seeing, an agreement, a relationship, and choosing it against all competing distractions. And choosing again: when life changes the terms, reframing those choices and returning to yes.