1月25日BBC聽力：由影子內閣重組所想到的忠實題目
Good morning. All the talk this week about theShadow Cabinet reshuffle has made me think a lotabout loyalty. We invoke loyalty frequently as avirtue and yet it’s complex and multi-layered. OnWednesday at a store checkout I was asked if I hada loyalty card. Our preference for a particularsupermarket hardly compares with our loyalty to family or friends. Some writers on the subjectargue that loyalty is only properly due to a person or group of people, and when we say we’reloyal to our principles or convictions we’re mistaking loyalty for commitment.
Perhaps, but language like life, isn’t always very tidy. Most of us live with multiple loyalties ofdifferent intensity – to marriage partners, colleagues, causes and ideals. Without such loyalties,life would seem empty of meaning. Some of our loyalties may go deep but the strength of themcan puzzle others. Think of sport and especially football. In my childhood in Cornwall I chose tosupport Crewe Alexandra, largely because they kept coming bottom of the Third Division Northand I thought they needed my juvenile help. In 1960 the whole team sent me their autographs.They probably didn’t get asked too often. My loyalty was tested when Crewe regularly playedNorwich City in my early years here. Now that Norwich are in the Premiership and Crewe bottomof League One no such conflicts arise.
We live reasonably easily with those sorts of divided loyalties. Others are much more testing. Iremember someone caught between his loyalty to his company and a job he loved, and hiswife. He’d been offered his dream post in America but his wife wouldn’t go. She asked him tochoose between that appointment and her. He chose his marriage but it didn’t last. How ourloyalty is demanded has a big impact on us. Loyalty doesn’t create love. But love, affection,gratitude: these breed our deepest loyalties.
It’s surprising in the gospels that the disciples are sometimes shown as disloyal to Jesus. It’snot just Judas. Think of Simon Peter. He denied he even knew Jesus. And he did so three times.At least he had the decency to burst into tears afterwards, ashamed of himself. Later, he’sforgiven when Jesus asks him, also three times, “Do you love me?” It’s this once disloyalcharacter who turns out to be the rock on whom the Church is built. We’re tempted to regardpersonal disloyalty as almost unforgiveable. Yet sometimes we learn most from our worsterrors of judgement. It’s called being human.
點擊下一頁差看譯文
市場價：HK$ 110
