By Fr. Jerry Hardy

This is about commitment. It’s not all that commitment is nor necessarily the best of what it is. These are just some rambling reflections on being a committed person after a weekend of listening, talking, and praying about it with several laymen and women and sisters and 21 future priests for the archdiocese at our third annual seminarians’ retreat.

Commitment is a lot easier to live out than it is to explain. It’s not a “something” about your life it IS your life and the way you live it and die it and live it again.

Commitment is how we color everything else we do. It’s the quality that is alive deep down inside us and keeps rising up, raising us up, to meet the expectations others have to us.

Commitment is what we’re willing to pay for who we’re willing to be.

Commitment is understanding that we have promises to keep even when they seem stale or tired. It’s what enables us to say that something or someone counts enough to be worth investing in with the big bills and small change of our everyday living.

Commitment considers the cause not the cost; it doesn’t keep score. It’s what keeps us starting over–again and again and again.

To be committed is to be tied into life, not tied down by it. It is the freedom of a person who measures himself against the height and depth and breadth and richness of his responsibilities rather than against the smallness of his own self satisfaction.

Commitment is a denial of futility. It says that God is our Father and we are his growing children and life is a family affair and all of us count on each of us.

Commitment is a corporate reality–none of us does it alone and in fact, it probably cannot be supported in isolation from others.

The life of the Christian must be a committed one – a life in which others see qualities and values that sing out “Come on, Come on–we can do it!”

Leading people to that kind of living while trying to get there yourself is what the life of priests and sisters and other church ministers ought to be about. It isn’t that we’ve arrived; we’re on the way like everyone else. It’s just that we’d hope our lives would show you, in a radical way, that if the Lord can get good mileage over the long haul from our commitment, he can certainly do the same with yours. We’d hope our lives would encourage you to commitment as yours do us.