Who Do You Trust?

Faith, hope, love, these three, but the greatest of these is love. Paul’s eloquent posit as found in 1 Corinthians 13 comes about as close to the perfect explanation of what it’s all about as any I know of. There has been a growing realization on my part, however, of the integral role that faith maintains in the dynamic. When replaced with the synonym trust, it becomes apparent—at least to me—that it’s hard to imagine love existing without it. Love entails making oneself vulnerable, and it seems unlikely to take that position in an environment of mistrust. I have always found merit in the centrality of sex to the Freudian paradigm, and now I’m beginning to understand why. Where the colloquial expression may have been that you should only engage in intercourse with a person you love, it makes just as much sense to contend that consensual sex can occur only in the context of mutual trust. If one of the partners does not or cannot trust the other, then by its very definition the engagement is not consensual. This generalizes to nearly every aspect of being human that I can think of. Can you trust your parents, siblings, spouses, children, friends, coworkers? If not, any notion of loving these others becomes moot, as does the attempt to love one’s self if trust of self is lacking. Believers are called upon to have faith in God, a virtually impossible challenge if genuine trust does not exist. I agree with Paul that love is supreme, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t critically dependent upon trust.