In Fealty, Freedom

• Fealty is more than a commitment to a subservient relationship to a superior.
• Fealty is the acceptance of a position as steward.
• As Steward, everything we own, everything we are exists in the condition of being held for another.
• Fealty is not a common form of relationship today, yet we find it preserved — as much else is — in the nature of our subservience to God in the Christian faith.
• Observing from that basis, some of the out-workings of fealty are evident.
• Fealty reduces materiality; it transforms greed into responsibility.
• Fealty extends the time horizon; seed is sown that another may harvest.
• Fealty expands our resource base; we serve a Lord who ‘owns the cattle on a thousand hills’, who looks to His own interests and the interests of His people.
• Fealty strengthens the community between those with common fealty. We each are serving the same Lord; contribution to the work of another remains in service to the One.
• Fealty transforms the nature of personal loss, for loss is never solely personal.
• Fealty undertakes a personification of the community in order that the community becomes more personal.
• These things are mere out-workings of fealty — not what it is directly, but what it brings about by its presence within the individual and within the wider community.
• Finally, fealty brings its own freedom. But it is a freedom that is rightly constrained by relationship, rather than the corrosive ‘freedom’ that is imposed today by edict.

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