We
loving having many choices; we really
love being able to decide.
Walk
into any supermarket to pick out cereal and you see clearly what I am talking
about. Endless racks of oats and honey
and bran and raisins and wheat and nuts and flakes—they’re generic and popular,
boxed and bagged, healthy and heavy, sweetened and salty. We love having many
choices; we really love being able to decide.
And
the same thing goes with our phones: some flip and some flop, some slip and
some slide, some with screens to be touched and some with buttons to be pushed
and some with both; some are 4G and some 3G and some are, sorry to say,
still 2G. Some are pay as you go and
some are to be paid off forever. Some
come with family plans and business plans and single payer plans and weekend
plans and night plans and plans by the minute.
And this does not even begin to touch on the apps. We love our choices; we really love being
able to decide.
Adam
and Eve had a lot of choices too, there in that primordial garden of paradise. And God let them choose---God let them decide:
choose to name those things around them, choose to have dominion as they will,
choose to frolic where they wanted, choose to love and be fruitful and multiply
as they felt. To choose to walk with God,
hand in hand, all through that bountiful land.
Then there was the choice of the tree, too. That tree.
The fruit. A constant reminder
that not everything was a choice. That
not everything was theirs to decide. But
why should God choose what is good and evil?
We are special. We are
capable. We are intelligent. We can decide those things for ourselves;
can’t we? For we really love being able to decide.
And
so it was when the fruit was decided upon and the freedom of choice—real
choice, came to an end. In one choice
all other choices became clouded. Adam
and Eve couldn’t see things the way they once were and so they hid in shame:
shame of the decisions they had made, shame of the choices they had lost, shame
of what God would think.
On
through time that greatest choice, that perfect use of freedom was lost. Lost to humanity was the ability to say yes
to God, the ability to choose the greater good above all other goods. The ability to use freedom as freedom is
supposed to be used: Freedom for virtue,
freedom for love, freedom for God. But it
was all lost.
Until
one day the New Eve from Nazareth in Galilee who was barely a woman was
startled in her rest. The words Hail,
full of Grace, a grace that had been lost in the ancient sands of time came to
rest on her ears. Mary, so young and so
innocent had her entire life ahead of her.
She had marriage and children and happiness and love and joy and
freedom. She had her choices. She could decide. But for her, she really only had one
choice. For she was truly free—free from
that stain which her son was soon to set free.
And so it was never a question in her mind. And with her choice, with her decision, she
empowered us all to be able to choose once again. To be able to decide once again. To be able to live once again.
In
her FIAT—her proclamation—in her complete and utter choice of God and God alone
she set in motion the clock ticking towards our salvation. In her FIAT she gave us all the chance to say
yes. Not yes to the millions upon
billions of banal, insignificant, insubstantial, inconsequential and damnable
choices we toil with so often in life.
But yes to the One Choice that matters.
Yes to the One Choice that ever did matter. Yes to the One Choice that ever will matter.
The
angel of the Lord has declared unto us all:
what will our choice be? What
will we decide?
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