Loyalty in Rotary

What it is to be loyal?

Loyal is someone that does not betray someone, one who is loyal to a reference.

To be loyal to an organization involves questions of feeling, of respect, of fidelity, essential factors to a permanent relationship.

Loyalty requires some sacrifice and in Rotary the sacrifices are of time, resources or priorities without future regrets. Who do not understand this should rethink their condition of members.

Loyalty causes a feeling of confidence, accomplishment and of belonging.

Confidence (cum fidere = with faith), connected to constancy and perseverance, are factors tied to loyalty in a biunivocal form. Being generated in Rotary by a healthy fellowship it turns out in time in loyalty. This fellowship is the one produced by a sincere relationship that after many weeks of mutual acquaintance, we start to deposit in our fellows. Fellowship is then a fundamental factor to develop mutual trust, by which we will serve together.

Loyalty in Rotary is very similar to the loyalty in the family that is expressed by enduring compromise and common objectives.

Wish to be loyal is a noble aspiration that enobles.

Having conscience and strengthen the value of loyalty is a need. It is necessary that in the many possible opportunities presented to give the just value to the loyalty to the Object of Rotary.

It is an intimate compromise that we assume of cultivating, protectting and enriching the relationship with whom helps to preserve it, paying respect to his dignity and integrity. It is exactly what we do when we pay homage to a fellow Rotarian that demonstrated his or her loyalty to Rotary for so many decades.

As strange as it may seems, loyalty precedes the relationship. So, the relationship of a Rotarian with Rotary and its Object - that should never be forgotten - is destined to fail if when starting it the person searches only to satisfy his vanity, pleasure or even worse an economical interest. Little future will have this relationship and will not be faithful if there is not a disposition to share, understand and collaborate to the enrichment of the group to which we decided to participate and by which we were welcome.

Loyalty is also linked to a process of choosing a plan of life.

This choice should not be a bandage, gag or arm sling. On the contrary, it is the free expression of our aspirations. To be loyal must fill us with joy and lighten us daily. We can see it on the shining eyes of those fellows that are fairly recognized by what they have done.

Loyalty is giving less importance to the mistakes done by our fellows, doing our best to help them to overcome them, with understanding and tenderness.

Be loyal is to share victories, sorrows, joys, failures, plans ... everything.

Loyalty is expressed also in the service rendered trough our area of influence, which we develop in our profession or activity and was one of the reasons of why we were chosen to participate in Rotary.

Be faithful and loyal is also to find opportunities for us to be better every day and live a life of happiness.

What is to live the loyalty to Rotary?

Rotarians learn during some time of active participation to share with joy their lives with fellows, derived from the mutual understanding, with stability and endured reliability and as result a sincere friendship. This is conquered by many times working together on projects, generating the sensation of accomplished duty.

The exercise of principles coherent with personal beliefs, also help the development of a faithful bond with Rotary.

These principles of life put in practice and for which we believe that worth’s the effort fighting for them, preserve and transmit for future generations, give us through loyalty a sense of utility and maintain lighted an ideal.

It is known but is useful to repeat that we are not born young in Rotary, but we acquire youth through an ideal.

The Rotarian, a moral idealist, is kept young while maintaining this ideal alive. That is maybe why we have a lot of long lived Rotarians in our clubs.

We hope that during our existence in Rotary, we can state, paraphrasing the great Brazilian poet, Vinicius de Moraes, that: “The

loyalty that we have should not be immortal because it is fire, but be infinite while it last”.

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