Make Your Choice

or else someone else will do it for you

The Garden of Eden by Thomas Cole

In the beginning, when God created Eden he created a sacred place. It’s an enclosed garden that draws out the boundaries within which he will walk with his children. The enclosed garden is fulfilled in Our Lady and in the Church, so we see how the Church is written into the very fabric of the cosmos. The world has been created for the Church, the temple of the New Covenant, and the Church is the destiny of all things, which is why St. Paul says that creation is groaning in anticipation. We are meant to live out our lives within a sacred enclosure. All things that are good lead to God, all things are bright and beautiful, all is being redeemed.

Because humans have free will, we have a choice. Will we take up our priestly role within the temple in which we have been placed, or will we rebel and misuse that which has been given to us?

Ever since sin entered the world and we in our various ways have indulged it, we find ourselves conflicted. We sometimes choose evil even when we know better. Our motives are mixed. Our sacrifices, being imperfect, cannot merit Heaven. This being the case, it is all too easy to fall into doubt and anxiety about our status. How many times have I asked myself just exactly who I think I am, not only being here as a participant in Holy Mass but even having the gall to step up to the altar as a priest. You and I know our flaws. We know that we are not worthy to be here.

That is precisely why we are here.

The Mass Oration recognizes our helplessness and begs for assistance; “Bestow upon us, we beseech You, O Lord, the spirit of thinking and doing what is right, so that we, who cannot exist without You, may have the strength to live in accordance with Your law.” We cannot even exist without God, let alone follow his law and remain in his temple.

And yet, here we are.

The Psalmist is full of gratitude for this fact, and we hear in the Introit, “O God, we ponder Your mercy within Your temple.” He hardly knows how he arrived within the sacred precinct, or by what mercy he is allowed to remain.

It is nothing less than divine kindness. God has condescended to allow us to be here, not because you and I are better than anyone else or have somehow earned it, but for the simple reason that he will accept all who humble themselves to accept his mercy.

Having arrived in this place, we cannot take it for granted. The Oration makes a request – O God, give us your spirit of thinking and doing what is right. Purify our minds and hearts. If we are to linger in this temple, then we must take on a priestly character by co-operating with grace, subsumed into the identity of Christ and joined to his priesthood, to his sacrifice, and made into an offering. One of the marks by which we know Eden was a sacred temple was because from its center flowed four rivers. Two real and two mythical, indicating a meeting of the mind and heart which are meant to be marked by the Cross. The Church is marked by the Cross. Paradise is the crucified and risen Lord. Without the Lamb we are nothing. Without the sacrifice of love, we will never receive and shine with the glory of the sacred place, that fire of love that invests the holy of holies, and walk streets of gold under that luminous noonday sun of the tabernacle.

So we make our sacrifice, knowing that even if it is not enough and cannot earn our place here, that if we join it to the perfect sacrifice of the Cross, it is enough because Our Lord takes our small gifts and makes them perfect within his grace. Christ is sufficient for us. Christ alone is our salvation.

It is always our choice. Will we leave or will we remain to contend with our sin, with ourselves, with the challenge of faith in order to linger in the presence of God?

Only you can decide. And to be clear, a decision must be made. What kind of a person do you want to be? What is your identity? If you don’t decide someone else will decide for you. If you don’t actively seek Christ, you will eventually be propagandized by Satan. We’re either actively returning to Christ or falling away. There is no neutral ground. There is no lukewarm faith. Think of those rivers pouring down from Eden, or like Ezekiel saw in a vision, water pouring out in a great strong river from the side of the temple. A person who is alive is willing swim against the current in order to get to the source. This is the position of a Catholic in this life; we are always going against the current. The world is always arrayed against us. So we jump in and swim. The only other option is to give up and be carried downstream. It isn’t much of an achievement to float with the current, to follow the crowd. Capitulating to propaganda and secularism and consumerism is the easy way. It might feel like a sort of movement, but it’s a false comfort because even a dead thing can float downstream.

But St. Peter sees Christ and he jumps into the water and he swims. Big decisions are important but also, every day, small ones. Every single choice adds up and creates habits. Consider carefully what direction they’re carrying you – who you become in making that choice.

When we sin, it shapes us into people we don’t want to become. We have to be honest, here, and not measure by our ideal of who we think we are but who we are actually are. By this I mean, what do I actually do and say, what kinds of choices do I consistently make? That’s who I am, not some idealized version of myself that I pretend to be.

Most people think identity is something they discover like a buried artifact waiting to be excavated. If they just do enough therapy or read enough self-help books they’ll figure it out. We’ve built an entire industry around this idea that there’s a “real you” hiding underneath that just needs to be set free and, if you can just peel back enough layers, you’ll finally find yourself. But the longer I live, the more I suspect this is a comforting fiction we tell ourselves to avoid confronting a much more uncomfortable truth, which is that identity doesn’t work like archaeology at all, rather it works like architecture. You are what you choose. You are the person you build up over years of decisions. This is to say, in order to find ourselves, we must make a choice not to look perpetually inward with narcissistic introspection so much as we need to make a consistent choice to live for God, embody virtue, pursue his purposes, his identity, his kingdom. The paradox really is that, the less we obsess over ourselves and seek to please God and love those around us, the less we justify our mistakes and flaws by insisting that they don’t represent the “real me”, the more of ourselves we give away, the more we become ourselves. We remain in the temple through sacrifice.

Making a choice for the good isn’t a perpetual analysis – it’s the pursuit of God. All our choices should lead us closer to him. There’s a lot of risk in those choices. We only remain in the temple by participating in the Cross. These choices we make, these good choices, are dangerous in a way because they collapse possibilities into one path, causing us to abandon all the other versions of ourselves that we pretend could have existed so as to commit to Christ, following his law, conforming minds to his mind. I wonder if part of our hesitation is that we’d rather stay in the fantasy we’ve created of infinite potential rather than step into the reality of the Cross. We’re afraid to know ourselves, afraid it will be disappointing. I want to be clear, here, though, that whoever you are, you are a child of God. You are loved. You do not have to be afraid.

So accept the risk of faith. I’ll let St. Paul summarize, because I’ve really talking about the epistle this whole time;

We are debtors, not to the flesh, that we should live according to the flesh, for if you live according to the flesh you will die; but if by the spirit you put to death the deeds of the flesh, you will live. For whoever are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God. Now you have not received a spirit of bondage so as to be again in fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption as sons, by virtue of which we cry, Abba! Father! The Spirit Himself gives testimony to our spirit that we are sons of God. But if we are sons, we are heirs also: heirs indeed of God and joint heirs with Christ.

You are meant to be here. You are created for the temple. You are made for glory.