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Faithful
Faithful husband
Faithful wife
Faithful friend
Faithful servant
Faithful dog
Faithful follower
I’ve been thinking about faith, and the above list came to mind. What does it mean to be full of faith? How is that different from a stereotypically or archetypally faithful relationship or role, such as the ones I’ve mentioned? (I think that each item in the list operates both as stereotype and archetype.)
A faithful husband and faithful wife practice marital fidelity, sexual intimacy only with the spouse, although faithfulness in a marriage (or a committed relationship) needs also to include an emotional intimacy to which the partners are true.
A faithful friend is a loyal friend.
A faithful servant obediently tends to the master. (A servant may also love his master, and sometimes love and obedience might conflict in order for the servant to best serve the master’s interests, in which case disobedience and love work together.)
A faithful dog is figuratively, if not literally, at the feet of the person with whom it shares a household or the person’s wanderings. (Are faithful spouses at the feet–romantically speaking–of the beloved? In Renaissance paintings, a dog can symbolize the fidelity of a husband and wife to one another or of a wife to her husband. Fido, which means faithful, has been a generic name for “man’s best friend.”)
A faithful follower lets himself be guided by someone else’s beliefs and principles, so he can be led as easily into darkness as into light.
Faithfulness and fidelity function as synonyms, yet they are not the same. They both do mean true, and they both indicate an ideal or idealism. Both derive from the Latin fides, faith, confidence.
I would rather have faith in the man I love, in a committed relationship, than bow to a rule about fidelity, and I want his faith in me. Faith in such a relationship comes from each partner’s faith in oneself before it can radiate into a relaxed compact of trust.
Any relationship that is full of faith is ideal. And such a relationship is possible. Ideal and real can be identical. An ideal relationship, desired or actual, does not exist in a snootily proclaimed or belabored or saccharine moral high ground, such as the paradoxically lofty lowlands inhabited by hypocritical politicians. Often the ideal and the real appear to battle one another: peace for a nation (the ideal), but war (the real) to create the peace–Orwellian insanity.
In the early days of my teaching and at different schools, a couple students brought up my own doubt about my direction in life. Out of the blue! Obviously those comments made an impression, because I still remember them, and not as criticisms, but rather as keen perceptions.
Since then, my faith has grown immeasurably.
Duty, dutiful. Comply, compliant. Those do not appeal. Compliance and duty can be extracted.
Devotee, devoted. That’s better. They come from the heart.
Faith is such an important part of our lives. It offers us the opportunities to become, truly become better. It seems that faith is an augmentation to love that makes it more powerful, more enchanting.