Is fidelity possible?

Not only is it possible. Fidelity and its ally, the sense of commitment, are also very practicable. First of all, it's because that's the will of God. Second, because he has endowed us with the power to be faithful and committed.

God wired us for them. We have been given the spiritual faculties of intelligence and will that allow us to love and to enter into commitments in spite of changing situations and the vagaries and imponderables of life. Not only that. God always gives us the grace that converts our power to be faithful and committed into reality.

We should quit asking that question, for it really has no basis, unless we ourselves give it basis.

There's the rub. Fidelity and the sense of commitment are not so much of our own making as they are first of all a gift from God that we ought to receive with gratitude and protect and develop.

As such, we need to earnestly and constantly ask, even beg God, so that these gifts be given to us abundantly and that they stay with us and grow to full maturity. God is always faithful. He cannot go against his will and word, unlike us who can violate our own will and word many times.

Psalm 145 says something pertinent: “The Lord is faithful in all his words / and loving in all his deeds.” We should not forget these words of Scripture.

Our usual problem in this regard is that we think we can be faithful and committed simply by our own selves, by our own strength, or by some collective human means and power. We need to correct this basic misconception.

Especially these days when we enjoy our new technologies and the new frontiers in the sciences and arts with their consequences of growth in power and wealth, we can easily be deluded into thinking that our fidelity can depend simply on our own making. We can forget God, or we go to him only when we find ourselves helpless.

Everyday, we need to ask God for the strength to live our life and all its challenges as we should. While God has endowed us with the power to be faithful and committed, that power cannot be actualized unless it is stirred by God's grace.

We need to go to him. And for sure, we are bound to experience what St. Paul once said: “I know both how to be brought low and I know how to abound, both to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and to suffer need. I can do all these things in him who strengthens me.” (Phil 4,12-13)

God is never sparing in sharing with us what he has. He even sent his only Son to us, the Son assuming our human nature as well as the consequences of our sin without committing any sin, just so we can be back with him, in whose image and likeness we are.

Might be good to reflect on these words of St. Paul: “He that spared not even his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how has he not also, with him given us all things?” This argument should debunk any suspicion that our belief in God's sharing with us what he has is gratuitous.

So we need to balance our personal experiences of frailty, mistakes, falls, sin and their usual companions of guilt feelings, helplessness, discouragement and even despair with this beautiful and undeniable truth that God lends us what he has. We have to learn to choose the options properly, since we can choose to fall into despair with our own selves, or to rise above the mess by adhering to God.

Yes, we can truly be faithful and committed, even if our fidelity and commitment would have their ups and downs. God will never fail us unless we choose to fail him. So in the face of many trials and challenges in one's marriage or other commitments, we should be with God always-from beginning to end.

We have to enrich our fidelity and sense of commitment by putting God in the midst of them. There is no other way to attain the goal. We are bound to stray and fail into infidelity if God is not made the prime mover of our commitments.

Thus, we have to overcome the secularized or paganized attitude that seems to spread in our society. Recourse to God should be a living part of our culture insofar as fidelity and commitment are concerned.