Promises
What do promises have to do with community? They’re central!
What do promises have to do with community? They’re central! Another word for a promise is “commitment.” We can think together about what inspires commitment in ourselves, our children, and whatever community we are part of.
One thing I really enjoyed, in active community work, was picking themes for each month, in cooperation with many other liberal religious and humanist congregations. Why? Because it challenged me to explore some themes that might not otherwise occur to me, and at the same time relate that theme to what I already value in our philosophical, educational, and religious movement.
One month’s theme was “promises.” What do promises have to do with community? They’re central! A community is a network of relationships. And all relationships involve promises to each other.
Explicit or agreed-on promises are the most important. Implicit or unspoken promises can be understood differently, or even not noticed, and are hard to question if they are not working well. Expectations about what’s promised, if not made explicit, can lead to different understandings, and a sense of betrayal if your expectations were mistaken. Explicit promises are the most important ones in relationships or in a community.
When I work with people on a customized marriage ceremony, I tell them that it’s my perspective that the vows are the center of the ceremony. What people promise to each other is what creates the marriage; sustaining the marriage is about keeping those promises. Marriage also includes renegotiating, as the partners need to make new promises in changing circumstances.
Such ceremonies also usually include a recognition that, in addition to taking care of the other, it’s important to take care of self, and the relationship itself. That’s true of all relationships; it’s true of community: promises to take care of each other, to take care of yourself, and to take care for the relationship or community.
Another word for a promise is “commitment.” In that perspective on this theme, I’ve been inspired by a book, The Power of Ideals: The Real Story of Moral Choice (2015). (Authors are William Damon, a Professor of Education at Stanford University and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace; and Anne Colby, a Consulting Professor at Stanford.) The authors take issue with the idea that moral choices can be completely explained by biological impulses, economic self-interest, cultural conditioning, and situational pressure. They also look to individual “agency” as the basis for making compassionate, rational choices about how to live, how to treat each other, and how to impact the larger world.
The authors investigated the lives of such 20th-century moral exemplars as Jane Addams and Nelson Mandela, asking what makes people commit themselves consistently to moral causes and not just occasionally do good things. Moral causes can include raising a child well, doing our professional job with integrity, giving energy and time for social service, or taking risks for social justice. Other examples studied in the book were Dag Hammarskjöld, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Eleanor Roosevelt (especially as mother of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights).
The authors, concerned with education, wanted to identify what can be cultivated to make it more likely that people will be consistently ethical. They concluded that there are three major factors that produce lasting moral commitment:
A kind of deep truthfulness, which includes being honest with ourselves, getting clear about what our deepest values really are, and living up to our values.
A kind of humility, the kind that de-centers our individual self (while not disrespecting ourselves), focuses on goals that transcend the self, connects to other people, cultivates awareness of our limitations, and is open-minded. Combining humility and a commitment to truthfulness, we recognize that we are committed to seeking the truth, knowing that our limits keep us from ever being able to assume we already know everything about that truth.
A kind of faith, which in their usage of the word, is not about any particular religious belief, but is instead the opposite of nihilism. Faith, whether humanistic or traditionally religious, is the conviction that something matters deeply and that what we do makes a difference.
In a community, what we do together inspires and nurtures in each other these characteristics: truthfulness, humility, and faith. That makes it more likely we can count on the promises and commitments we make to ourselves, each other, and the world.
Reflection:
What implicit promises are functioning in your relationships, in your community? What expectations do you have, or do you sense others have, that haven’t been made explicit? And what explicit commitments have been made deliberately and checked periodically to see that they’re still working? What commitments do you make to your relationships and community? What commitments do others make that help you feel a sense of trust?