Our Decisions Matter
Our decisions matter. They are not arbitrary happenings, nor are they irrelevant to the rest of the world. As Pope Benedict XVI wrote in Introduction to Christianity, our end “is based on decisions…the final stage of the world is not the result of a natural current but the result of responsibility that is grounded in freedom.…[this] shows our life to be a serious business and precisely by doing so gives it its dignity” (pages 323 and 325). In sensing this importance of our lives and choices, though, we tend to fall victim to a few traps.
A certain anxiety haunts us and convinces us that we must make every decision correctly. So some of us obsessively seek God’s will for each decision with the conviction that he must be indicating one choice over the other to us, and it is our duty to decipher his preference. Some of us disregard extraneous emotions that make the situation too complicated and only give credence to the bare bones of the logical arguments. Still others of us forget dry logic and favor the emotional considerations, choosing to “follow our hearts.” Unfortunately, all of these approaches fail.
Our ultimate goal is to abound in love. This should be the decisive factor in our lives, superseding all other motivations in decision-making. With regards to discerning God’s will for every decision, Father Jacques Philippe points out in Searching for and Maintaining Peace, “We will not always have a response!...Frequently, the will of the Lord is that we do decide for ourselves, even if we are not absolutely sure that this decision would be the best….He asks of us goodwill, the right intentions, but in no way does He demand that we would be infallible and that all of our decisions would be perfect” (pages 72, 74-75).
There is a lot of pressure to be objectively perfect, though, which leads to the seeming validity of our purely logical arguments sucked dry of emotion. Even Jesus tells us to be perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect! Thankfully, Father Jacques Philippe also clarifies that “…according to the Bible, the one who is most perfect is not the one who behaves in an irreproachable manner, but the one who loves most” (page 79). And in following our hearts and valuing only the emotional factors, we can easily confuse our definitions of love and be misled. We are not called to any of the cheap shadows of love portrayed in our culture but to true love, the love of the Cross.
St. Frances de Sales once wrote, “You should not be too particular in the exercise of virtues, rather…you should pursue them briskly, openly, naively, in an old-fashioned way, with liberty, sincerity and grosso modo. It is because I fear the spirit of constraint and melancholy. It is my wish that you should have a large and open heart on the way to our Lord.” We sure like to linger in “the spirit of constraint.” We prefer confirmation that we are on the right track before we take a step, but sometimes the track is not necessarily what matters; what matters is that we take a step. God will always accompany us, and if we make our way with love, it is impossible to stray too far. If we are to err in any way, it is certainly best to err in an effort to love.
As we face this (relatively) new year full of decisions, authentic love must be our rule of life. Let us proceed with confidence in God and reckless love in imitation of him.
