A few weeks ago I received a dismaying Star Word at church: "loyalty." If you missed the back story to this nightmare, Pastor M.P. asked us to randomly pick a word on the front of a paper star that would be our source for meditation in 2022. The words were ideas or values that should inspire us to consider how our lives reflected or rejected this word. With my choice of the word "loyalty" I was wondering if God had a mischievous sense of humor to lay this cargo on me.
I am not disloyal by nature, but writing about the importance of loyalty seemed like I would be rewriting the Boy Scout Pledge for the rest of 2022. I am one who reconsiders loyalty at the first disappointment with my country, my school, my church, and maybe myself, if you can be loyal or disloyal to yourself.
My discomfort with loyalty found some rationale in Richard Rohr's book Falling Upward. In Chapter Three, "The First Half of Life," Rohr described the awkward, often painful, transition from the first half of life, where we develop unquestioning loyalty to our nation, our culture, our church and discover a more mature and perplexing stage of life, where loyalty is re-evaluated. He referred to this transition as "discharging our loyal soldier."
After World War II the Japanese recognized that their soldiers needed an exit and re-entrance strategy, which would acknowledge past service, yet welcome the soldier's re-entrance into society under different terms. The soldier would be publicly thanked for his/ her service after which an authority would stand and welcome the soldier to post-war service in language like this:
The war is now over! The community needs you to let go of what has served you and served us well up to now. The community needs you to return as a man, a citizen, and something beyond a soldier.
Rohr defines this process as "discharging your loyal soldier." This is beyond our society's initiation rites, says Rohr, because our rites are for loyalty to country, community and church. The process in some ways renounces that loyalty for a new loyalty to God, because God is not contained by our inflexible, fallible institutions. God represents the unsolved paradoxes and mysteries of our lives that are not explained by pledges of loyalty and creeds. To grow into relationship with this God, we have to "discharge our loyal soldier."
Rohr learned about this transition working for three decades with prison inmates. In spite of their transgressions, prisoners were among the most rigidly transfixed on society's constraints. Some of them developed highly rigid views of God, which they had to overcome, if they were to rely on their conscience to lead them into wholeness. They needed more than rehabilitation into the law, they needed a freedom from the rigidity that had contributed to their rebellion in the first place.
Rohr says the transition from the first to the second half of life usually occurs between thirty-five and fifty years old and is usually precipitated by a crisis that forces you to question the inner voice that has led you over the first half of life. "If this inner and critical voice has kept you safe for many years as your inner voice of authority, you may end up not being able to hear the real voice of God. . . . The loyal soldier is the voice of all your early authority figures" (46).
At some point our attempts to be loyal become a war against God, because God does not rule a black and white world, but a complex one. To reach a mature relationship with God we have to offload this demand for certainty, rigid rules and unbending conscience. A bogus conscience is a poor substitute for authentic morality, says Rohr. "What reveals its bogus character is its major resistance to change and growth, and its substitution of small low-cost moral issues for the real ones that ask us to change, instead of always trying to change other people. Jesus called it 'straining out gnats while swallowing camels' "(Matthew 23:24).
I can recognize this conflict in my life when I start thinking that the world would be better if others would change, not me. When I believed I had the answers, I had loyalty to the right cause. Why couldn't everyone else see that? In the Gospels we can see Jesus constantly defending those who had broken the Commandments and critiquing those who rigidly upheld them, because they lived in a world of rigidity. The Prodigal Son was the hero, because he gave up trying to fulfill the law, the Elder Brother was the confused loyal soldier. Rohr points out that we never learn if the Elder Brother ever joined the party. He was the tragic loyal soldier.
So has loyalty lost its value in the second half of life? Perhaps not, if I can imagine loyalty to the mysterious God of Sinai, instead of to the tangible idols created by Aaron to satisfy the people. It may require a second death, suggests Rohr, to find this God, but loyalty to this God would be a valued change. Perhaps after the "discharge of the loyal soldier" I might find a new meaning to loyalty, even be able to write about it with happy inspiration
Bill
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