By Barry Casey … Whoever is loyal, whatever be his cause, is devoted, is active, surrenders his private self-will, controls himself, is in love with his cause, and believes in it.1

Sometimes the most consequential moments of life arrive when we’re looking in another direction. I was nineteen when I realized that what I enjoyed doing could become what I did for a living. In high school, studying under an admired teacher, I thought I wanted to teach religion and history to high school students. I had read Neil Postman’s Teaching as a Subversive Activity, and Jonathan Kozol’s Death at an Early Age, and I saw myself blazing new paths in education. In college, with a sharper focus and a new awareness of my strengths and limitations, I realized how much I loved learning. I also recognized that I needed to leave high- school teaching to others and aim for college and university classrooms.

Sometimes we need an image, a token, something to write out and recite to ourselves, a liminal window through which we can imagine a sacred place for ourselves. I found this:

The Lord God has given me
The tongue of a teacher
And skill to console the weary
With a word in the morning;
He sharpened my hearing
That I might listen like one who is taught.

And I found this:

He will not break a bruised reed, Or snuff out a smoldering wick . . . 3

These texts brought up the ideal teacher, one who teaches in humility because he or she is still learning, and who hopes to encourage the broken and dispirited. Ten more years of second-guessing myself, a lot of hard work, and several degrees later, I finally entered the classroom. I had found a cause which would hold my loyalty for decades. I also had a standard before me to which I could aspire.

***

As children, we begin in loyalty almost by default. We are loyal without realizing it, without knowing why, only that it is right to be so. We discover it first when something or someone we love is at risk. Later, conscious of the power and imperative of choice, we commit to a cause.

The complexity of loyalty as a virtue begins with the warning flag, “blind loyalty.” The blindly loyal, we imagine, follow someone or some cause without question. We, of course, don’t think ourselves that stupid. We’ve carefully considered the cause, weighed the cost, and only then made a choice.

We don’t want to think we’ve given our total support to someone who is deeply flawed. Even more, we don’t want to think we weren’t aware of those flaws. But since all of us are flawed, how can loyalty be something that is truly given? Does anyone deserve our full loyalty? And is a conditional loyalty even real loyalty?

When we pledge loyalty to some cause—or someone— we place ourselves in an active field of moral choice. The conventional political idea of loyalty is one of total allegiance. It is the loyalist, after all, who provides the spirit and power to overcome setbacks and endure to victory. It is the loyalist who shows up at the rallies, rings the doorbells, wears the T-shirt and the funny hat, and sacrifices time, money, and energy to the cause. The loyalist does not begrudge the cost, however, for the cause and its success is the reward. The question is whether that can be achieved without moral compromise.

Our loyalties conflict. Sometimes they cut us up and spread us out in little pieces between family, friends, neighborhood, city, state, country, religion, sports teams, schools. How do we choose? Do we pick the one with the least personal consequences and/or the greatest reward? There are many causes which we are implored to support, and every time we do, we give away a piece of ourselves. The tendency is to recoil and withdraw, if only to preserve some sense of autonomy in our choice-making.

Nevertheless, we are drawn to causes, said Josiah Royce, in his The Philosophy of Loyalty, one of the few philosophical examinations of loyalty. “A man is loyal when, first, he has some cause to which he is loyal; when, secondly, he willingly and thoroughly devotes himself to this cause; and when, thirdly, he expresses his devotion in some sustained and practical way, by acting steadily in the service of his cause.”4

Royce said we live in a paradox that defines our loyalties. The causes we commit to and the standards we try to uphold come from outside ourselves. But the will to commit and the assurance that we are committing to a worthy cause, can only come from within. We might be wrong about the depth of our commitment, and the cause to which we commit might not be all that we think it is. Yet, we make those choices and stand by our loyalty because it is what draws the many strands of our life together. It gives us purpose and meaning, and it reveals to us what we love. It is the risk through which we find ourselves. The principle that guides, said Royce, reflects the triad of a marriage: there are the two lovers and there is their loyalty to the marriage itself. Loyalty to loyalty. In the words of Gabriel Marcel, another philosopher who wrote about loyalty, “I hope in thee for us.”

Given the fact that our moral view is formed from the outside in, how do we know if a cause is right? What reason can we give for why this duty should be our duty? “My duty,” says Royce, “is simply my own will brought to my clear self-consciousness. That which I can rightly view as good for me is simply the object of my own deepest desire set plainly before my insight.”5

I read this as clarifying and revealing what my own heart longs for, but my head has not yet understood. This is where the Holy Spirit impresses us to move ahead or hold back. In the parable of the sower and the seed—that wildly improbable but liberating analogy—we become the good soil. What we find to give ourselves to is proven right by the effects it has in our life—and the lives of those we touch.

“Loyalty is for the loyal man . . . chief amongst all the moral goods of his life,” comments Royce, “because it furnishes to him a personal solution of the hardest of human practical problems, the problem: ‘For what do I live? Why am I here? For what am I good? Why am I needed?’”6

Recently, a friend sent me an article about Bobby Kennedy’s last days. My friend had dropped out of college in his freshman year to work on Kennedy’s presidential campaign because he was inspired by his ideals. Even now, over fifty years later, he recalls what a pivotal decision that was in his life. “It was the year I learned the meaning of grace from a candidate for president,” he wrote.

Reading his remarks and the words of Kennedy as he consoled and inspired a crowd of mostly Black Americans hours after Martin Luther King, Jr., had been murdered, my eyes filled with tears. Not just for the experience of my friend, and not only for the depth of compassion in Bobby Kennedy’s spontaneous speech, but also because it reminded me of my own admiration for him as a man whose ideals were aimed at the healing of the nation, ideals to which I was loyal as a 16-year-old and still find worthy today.

Our loyalty to Christ, rendered real through experience, allows for both commitment and doubt. It is not blind nor is it unthinking. It rises from gratitude and grace, not from fear or greed. It is conditional in the sense that we are fallible; it is firm because we find our true home within it.

–Barry Casey taught religion, philosophy, and communication for 37 years in Maryland and Washington, D.C. He is now retired and writing in Burtonsville, Maryland. More of the author’s writing can be found on his blog, Dante’s Woods. His first collection of essays, “Wandering, Not Lost,” was recently published by Wipf and Stock. Email him at: [email protected]

References

1Royce, Josiah. The Philosophy of Loyalty. With a new introduction by John J. McDermott. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University, 1908, p. 12.
2Isa. 50:4, NEB.
3Isa. 42:3, NEB.
4Royce, p. 9.
5Royce, p. 13.
6Royce, p. 28.