Throwing Choice Away

The truly brave man is not the man who chooses to stay in the battle, but the one who sees that he has been chosen to fight and who has given up any choice to run away. The faithful husband is precisely he for whom infidelity has ceased to be a choice. The vagabond monks of Benedict’s day were caught in the trap of their ceaseless choosing; only with that wise vow of stability, which is a wise and brave tossing of choice to the winds, could a monk begin to climb the mountain of God.

The adventure of the family is that it has not been planned, engineered. Insofar as one plans a family, one plans not a family but a narcissistic extension of oneself, a sort of dreary cloning, or at best a selfish concession of some, but only some, of one’s time and love. Everything ought to be reasonable, we insist, meaning that everything ought reasonably to come to its senses and conform safely to the pleasures of our wills.

But, says Chesterton, “Aunt Elizabeth is unreasonable, like mankind. Papa is excitable, like mankind. Our youngest brother is mischievous, like mankind. Grandpa is stupid, like the world; he is old, like the world.” We plan parenthood, because we wish to shut out that world, too alive and too muscular for our weak nerves.

If you plan to be surprised, you will not be surprised. If you choose joy, it is not joy. If you plot out the turns of an adventure, you are on no adventure. Worse, you make it difficult for yourself to wake from your sleep and see that adventures are crouching out there to get you. A merchant does not buy a costly pearl and bury it in a field so that he may discover it. Not one of the prophets applied for the position. If you are going to be God’s delegate—and in some fashion we are all so called to be—then by definition the choice is not yours, nor will be the time and the manner and the means.

What Chesterton says about orthodoxy is true about the wisdom of tossing choice away: As the real excitement is not in the chosen heresy but in riding the unchosen and unutterable truth, so the most glorious life awaits beyond the reserve of decision.

To see and to live is better than to choose; to ride the adventure of faith and hope and love is better than to plot your course to the Fortunate Isles, those illusions. Only an ingrate will not accept a gift, and if I decide what you are to give me, I am just such an ingrate. Heaven itself is God’s choice and not mine, and for that I am grateful. Quite a fit place for myself in the hereafter could I design, with features all of my own choosing. A tight and fit little place would it be, but it would have that unmistakable tang of char breathed out from a reptilian belly.

Read the entire article at: TouchStone Magazine.