THE UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES OF MAKING THE WRONG CHOICE ABOUT WHAT IS GOOD.

This Lectio Divina is about making choices and their consequences. Free will is one of the hallmarks of being human, something that animals don’t have. Animals must obey the laws of their nature as animals. Humans have reason and freedom to choose even what will make them sick in terms of their fulfillment as human beings.

Like the first creation or subsequent movement from animality to rationality, that which is lower in nature cannot evolve into something higher without additional help. My thoughts are that God imprinted what was authentic about being divine in nature on all reality (made in the image and likeness of God). Every hair of my head bears the sign of the one who raised me up (saved me) from being just an animal with reason. Every atom that ever was is marked with this sign, the fingerprints of the creator, the DNA that automatically compels all that is to become what its nature intended. Natures, as I use them based on the Teilhard Map, are automatically tagged with the movement (intelligent progression) and complexity to become more than the sum of their present existence, with one exception. At each step in our intelligent progression, we evolve only so far as matter and then bump up against the step to that next level of progression and complexity (see Teilhard’s Map). To lift up reality to tat next level of fulfillment, it needs help, outside of normal evolutional progression because that next step is beyond the energy of nature to move it. Teilhard’s map shows creation, life, human, Christ, and spirit as these steps. It makes sense to me, although I can’t prove it empirically, I can say that it makes sense conceptually as a cognitive option.

The significance of these milestones or paradigm shifts is that there is new life where there was none before, but containing all the elements that went before. These milestone progressions are as if matter must die to itself to become something more, yet training all the properties of a former existence. All life, all physical energy is connected together and moves as one, waxing and waning with the ebbs and flows of natural events. It is in this sense that I see all reality as if I were looking in a mirror. When I look in a mirror, I only see a snapshot of me at that moment in time. I use my reason and my ability to choose what I reason to form a set of assumptions about what reality is and my place in it. I can read about what other people say reality is and try to make sense of the Tower of Babel that I encounter each day.

THE DUALITY OF ONE

There seems to be a pattern in some of the reality that I observe. Scripture says that we can’t serve two masters. Good and evil are choices facing Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Although free to make that choice of one or the other, there are indeed consequences for a choice, especially if I make the wrong choice, one that has implications that I had not imagined before choosing it.

Throughout the whole of the Old, and New Testament writings and pronouncements by the Church Universal, these stories, parable, psalms, proverbs, and wisdom literature has but one purpose. How to choose what is good because God told us it was. That we have consistently failed to follow that advice is also written as a history of the unintended consequences of our choosing evil.

I have some thoughts about this duality and the one answer that is correct. The dynamic of God (divine nature) telling humans what will make them more human is present throughout our history and even challenges me each day. When I convert or abandon my will to say to the Father, “Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” I am Adam and Eve confronting the archetypal dual choice that leads to life or death of movement in my capacitas dei, and I am Moses who made the wrong choice and had to suffer the unintended consequences of wandering in the desert for forty years. I have my own desert in which I wander when I desert Christ in favor of my will. Ironically, when I abandon my will and accept the will of the Father, I then have to choose the correct way, based on the Scriptures and the teachings of the Church throughout the ages.

The insidious, unintended consequences of making choices that God has forewarned us will hurt us are not new, but unfortunately, we keep reaching into that cookie jar to get what we think is good for us. We choose what is easy for our appetites and wants but not what we need because it is difficult. With all due respect to B.F. Skinner and operant conditioning, to be humans more often means we must choose what is right rather than what makes us happy. Taking up one’s cross daily is not the first priority of any human unless we choose to put it there, which is what we do when we listen to God’s word instead of our animal instincts (which, although good sometimes, don’t give our humanity what it needs to move to the next level of our evolution).

LIFE’S CHOICES ARE LIKE A MEAL, WHERE WE CHOOSE WHAT WE THINK WILL BE GOOD FOR US.

Sincerity is not an excuse for sinning, nor is ignorance of what is good. Adam and Eve knew what the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was in the middle of the Garden, a place of utmost importance, but the snake, the great spin-maestro, planted an alternative idea, one that pitted God’s will against their own. They ate the fruit (not apples), thinking that they would be like God. This archetypal story portrays in the deepest human dimensions of our nature how much there is duality there is in free choice and how the consequences of choice are hidden, but ever-present. What God warns us about, as loving Father, are those consequences, such as a mom or day telling you to stay out of the Sun or you will get sunburned, but you want to look good to others with a Hollywood tan (which are probably artificially induced).

At the core of my Lay Cistercian spirituality or any other movements of laity (Dominicans, Franciscans, Carmelites, Benedictines, and many other lay institutes) is conversion daily (conversatio morae) and approaching a mindset of penance and humility in the presence of God through contemplative practices and charisms. This is a simple act of the will on my part that says, “I am me; I am not you; God is not us; and, we, most certainly are not God. Be it done to me, according to your word.”

What follows are some choices of good or evil. When I sit down at the table of my life, I am served two possibilities. I must choose one of them knowing that one is correct and one leads to a healthy life (or food poisoning). I assume that there a Scriptures on the table and others seated there who can tell me what is good or bad for me (the Church). Read the Rule of Benedict (RB) Chapter 4 to know what is good.

FIRST COURSE: Cold vengeance or forgiveness of others despite them wronging you. RB 4: 9-33

SECOND COURSE: Pride, speaking ill of others, or humility and unconditional love RB 4:34

THIRD COURSE: Hatred of others or jealousy, or, patience with the faults of others GALATIANS 5

FOURTH COURSE: Do what makes you happy, or renounce yourself in order to follow Christ. RB 4:10

• One choice makes you free; one choice enslaves you to your own opinions of good or evil.
• Sinner are assumed to be sincere about their own motives.
• Those who choose to hate others might not realize what they are doing. “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
• If I don’t immerse myself in daily conversion and growing in Christ, I may not even be aware that I am unaware.
• My choices are either good or bad ones.
• “No one can serve two masters.”
• What I place at my center is my principle, my template for resolving the way, the truth, and leading an authentic life.
• My life is the canvas on which I paint my version of what is real. My paints are those good things that God says will help me with a view of reality that is not false. The painting I paint hangs in the upper room of my heart and is renewable each day.
• When I use paints that come from the Grand Artist, my painting will be good. If I choose paints that come from my own imperfections or unauthentic love, my picture will be gross. Hell means I must live forever with my portraiture that is ugly and disfigured about what humanity means. Purgatory means I got some of it correct, but I can change my portraiture if I use God’s pants instead of my own. Heaven means my portraiture hangs in the Museum of Forever, to be admired and enjoyed by all who view it.

The Christ Principle is my choice for the one center against which all my ideas must be vetted. That Christ Principle is strengthed daily by Eucharist, Forgiveness of Sins, Liturgy of the Hours, Lectio Divina, and private prayer of waiting in the upper room of my heart. I pray as I can. I realize that mastery is impossible but the passion for Christ to increase and me to decrease is always intensified.

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