(The Nationalist, 28 April 2000)
Nowadays young people commonly prefer to live together than to marry. If they do marry, it’s often after a number of years of living together. We also see an increase in the number of married people separating or divorcing. People are reluctant to enter the priesthood or a religious order, and some of those who are in them are leaving.
I think that there is something in common between these apparently different situations and that is the fear of a life-long commitment. In a world which is changing so quickly, it often seems to people that it’s just too big a risk to undertake anything for life, to make a commitment that it so far-reaching that is closes off other choices. It seems like common sense to keep your options open. ‘You never know what the future holds…’
And yet, is that all there is to it? It is true, of course, that a commitment excludes other choices. If you commit yourself to marrying A, that means you don’t marry anyone from B to Z. You limit your options to one. But, without commitment, can there ever be a sense of belonging? Without commitment, are we not living in the land of eternal postponement, where life is reduced to a series of experiments? We become like ice-skaters, skimming fast over the surface. Does that not result in never getting down into the depth of things, really living life rather than just passing through it?
Never to commit oneself means living always within the boundaries of the self, never truly reaching out to another. Since we humans were made to live for one another, that means never truly living, never taking the risk involved in becoming human. To live within one’s own world is to condemn oneself to a narrow, constricted life while those who live for others and pay the price which that entails are the ones that truly live.
I think a good working description of hell has nothing to do with flames or the devil pitch-forking people into boiling sulphur but means living for ever in oneself and for oneself when we were meant, shaped and designed for others. Hell is a narrow cramped little world. To know that you were made for God but have instead chosen the ego, the arrogant self, with all its limitations and pettiness must be a hell indeed. To know that you were made to experience the good, the true and the beautiful in their perfection but have opted instead for the tunnel vision of a solitary must be a real punishment.
The truth is that we have to commit ourselves to something; it’s inescapable. The basic choice is whether we commit ourselves to others or to ourselves. If we choose ourselves, that is what we get: the self alone – and it’s just too small and narrow. If we choose another, we begin to live, to grow and to become human. All those who care about something or someone other than themselves are in God’s kingdom.
Those who live for others in this life will live with God in the next.