We often hear people involved with religion saying that one must “choose Jesus or choose the world.” Today’s reflection verse suggests that this is exactly what Jesus is saying. Yet, life and the reality of what it means to follow his teachings call us to a deeper reality, a deeper spiritual maturity. So the choice is more than a mere intellectual acceptance of his statement.
Ron Rolheiser writes that the life Jesus presents is a choice of embracing a deeper moral decision. Following Jesus involves a deep and often painful moral decision to sacrifice worldly desires. It is a conscious choice to accept the “cross”—an emotional crucifixion—in favor of deeper meaning and divine love. It’s accepting a “new maturity,” which balances loving the world’s energy (creativity, relationships, joy) while acting as “salt and light” rather than being consumed by it.
St. Augustine struggled with the choice between faith and the world until one day he realized something. A searcher by temperament, Augustine spent the first thirty-four years of his life pursuing the things of this world: learning, meaning, love, sex, and a prestigious career. However, even before his conversion, there was a desire in him for God and the spiritual. However, like us, he saw that as a separate desire from what he was yearning for in the world. Only after his conversion did he realize something. Here is how he famously expressed it:
“Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved you! You were within me, but I was outside, and it was there that I searched for you. In my unloveliness, I plunged into the lovely things which you created. You were with me, but I was not with you. … You called, you shouted, and you broke through my deafness. You flashed, you shone, and you dispelled my blindness.”
Saint Augustine was an example of human procrastination. Like Augustine, many of us keep saying, eventually I need to do this, but not yet!
Rolheiser writes that “Ultimately, God is the only game in town, in that no matter how many false roads we take and how many good roads we ignore, we all end up on the one, same, last, final road. All of us: atheists, agnostics, nones, dones, searchers, procrastinators, those who don’t believe in institutionalized religion, the indifferent, the belligerent, the angry, the bitter, and the wounded, end up on the same road heading towards the same destination – death. However, the good news is that this last road, for all of us, the pious and the impious alike, leads to God.”
It would seem best to realize this early, so we do not have to write: “Late, late, have I loved you!” [Excerpts from Ron Rolheiser’s “Our Unconscious Search for God,” February 2021]
