Choice was not only existentially at the heart of what I chose to be the center of my life, that is, Jesus; choice was also what I now understand as making up the substance of my entire life. Choice is involved in how we treat others virtually every moment of our lives. For example, my wife was just presented with a small choice, one hardly worth thinking about. She was standing in front of the microwave preparing some lunch, slicing an onion for spaghetti sauce. I was preparing my second cup of coffee: cold coffee, tablespoon of sugar, large portion of 2% milk. I asked her if I could, excuse me, get to the microwave to heat the cold coffee. She said, impatiently, “You always wait till I am doing something in the kitchen to come in and make me interrupt what I am doing!” Having been thus scolded yet again for what seems a minor infraction, I took the cold coffee into the front room, sulked a bit, and drank it cold. My thought was, surely it would not have taken much effort on her part to move aside so that I could briefly use the machine and thus enjoy my coffee. She had a choice; actually, we both had choices. In her case, rather than help me, by stepping aside for a moment, she chose to scold, claim, essentially, that I always made her life more difficult by behaving in such a manner. What? My choice, of course, was either to deny the accusation at the top of my voice and claim that I did no such thing. I could indulge in anger that I should be so unjustly accused, and then I could hold on to that anger for an hour or two, making both our lives more miserable than they sometimes really are. I chose to sulk and grumble for a bit. Choices! Seemingly small, but I see now that they are really what define us. When I continue to look back at the life path I have swiftly stumbled along in my 80 years , I realize that my life is filled with such moments, regarding persons close to me and regarding those persons I hardly knew. In fact, the story of my life involves all those situations where I chose to behave badly to another, in essence to make the wrong choice and to hurt another by my selfish choice, though not always. The majority of those choices, I realize, involved people close to me, people whom I loved deeply, whom I had every reason to respect, and people whose burdens I should eagerly have been happy to shoulder. Alas, too often that was not the case, and I made the small, bad choice, fully aware that I had chosen badly.
While mulling these ideas over for the last few days, it finally occurred to me that what Jesus said about turning the other cheek did not just apply to the enemy that attacked. It applied in all situations all the time and can be seen as a metaphor for how to respond in any situation. Stop striking back with the tongue, so to speak. That can hurt more than an actual slap with the hand, I have discovered! Finally, I seemed to have a real insight into my own behavior; I seem to have learned something important and valuable.
It also occurred to me that there was another issue that ought to have been dealt with, regarding the conversion experience. How do I know that my transforming experience meant what I thought it meant. I remember reflecting on that very thought about three weeks after the kitchen table moment. The resolution then was that I knew the experience and my transformation were real at the time, and while I might doubt it later, nevertheless, the memory of the quality of the moment testified to its truth. I met God at my kitchen table, a meeting more intense and real than any meeting I have had since. Therefore, some 55 to 60 years later, I am still a Christian, though what I have mostly experienced in those long years is the absence of God. Becoming Catholic in the 1980’s, I think, helped with that, for the Mass with the Eucharist at its center and the understanding of “real presence” provide a real focus, though I can manage to experience absence there as well as presence.
Recently, I read an excellent book, (another secondary cause from the center, so to speak, since the book was a birthday gift), that described the consequence for another person of his conversion, sparked by a symphony by Mahler. The book is The Shattering of Loneliness: On Christian Remembrance by Eric Varden; the account is in his Introduction: “The repeated insistence, ‘not in vain, not in vain’, was irresistible. It was not just that I wanted to believe it. I knew it was true. It sounds trite, but at that moment, my consciousness changed….I was aware of not being alone. There was no special warmth, no ecstatic inner movement. There were no tears. But I could no more doubt the truth of what I had found than I could doubt that I existed. The sense of it has never left me. That this should be so amazes me still” (6, italics mine). I share his amazement at my own situation, that the sense of my own experience and the truth of that moment have never left me, and the memory is as real as if it had happened yesterday.
Jesus the Lord: walking on water and saving Peter whose faith failed.