Trust in any circumstances is a paradox. On the one hand, trust requires intimacy. We grow in trust by sharing things with a trusted friend that we would not with others. Trust demands that protective veil be drawn between those allowed “inside” and those kept “outside.” Yet trust requires also recognition of the other’s independence. A father who cannot let a teenaged daughter out of her sight does not trust; but if a father never speaks to his daughter, there is no trust there either. Trust is constantly plagued by the possibility of indifference on one end of the spectrum and obsessive control on the other. Trust is possible only on Trinitarian ground: the recognition that we are mutually conditioning and interpenetrating, yet at the same time recognizing that each has a distinct integrity of his own.
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