Most of us have some experience of coming up against these kinds of problems, times where a desire to retain our freedom to choose has worked against us. I often recall a moment of realisation when I was halfway through a cycle tour across Europe, rounding off a year of travel. I was reading an article written by a young woman touring China on her bike. She described her day-to-day reality of getting up with the light, packing up her tent and her few belongings, and moving from town to town. She had no agenda, no responsibilities, no one to answer to. She received a lot of generosity from strangers along the way, but these encounters were fleeting, and she would also spend days on her own without interaction. “I’ve have never felt so alone, or so free,” was the pull quote from the article.
I was flicking through the magazine in a cycle shop, in a town I didn’t even know the name of. I remember thinking “I’m living that life, and I don’t feel that way at all.” In fact, while the perpetual travel had been exhilarating, it had also become deeply unsettling and disorienting. When you can wake up and go wherever you like, you begin to wonder what reason you really have to choose one place over another. Day to day, I would move through staggeringly dramatic landscapes, rambling countrysides, charming little ramshackle towns with coffee shops where the old men were gathered for morning natter. But more often than I liked, I felt a nagging sense of detachment, a difficulty feeling really part of things, or of pinning down who I was in it all. What I was experiencing was a kind of freedom, but it was of a shallow variety, and it could only be enjoyed for so long.
I’ve sometimes thought about that experience as my commitments in life have deepened, as my responsibilities have grown, and as any dreams of unencumbered travel (to the bathroom without kids hanging off me, let alone to far off lands!) have faded. The choices I’ve made—to put down roots in a community, to marry, to serve in the Church, to bring children into the world, to stay home while they are young—have placed significant limits on my ability to do as I would like, and there have been ambitions and aspirations to set aside. But each of these commitments has also opened the world up in ways I could not have anticipated. I have a deeper sense of home, and of connection to the land. I have a better understanding of my need for others, and my responsibilities towards them: we share life together, we belong to one another. And as demands on me have ramped up, I’ve had to lean on God more too, and I’ve discovered more of his faithfulness. In many ways you could look at my life and say I’m less “free” than I was, but I actually feel more myself in certain ways.
In the life of faith, freedom of choice is at most a condition for a much fuller thing. Freedom itself is something more like being able to act meaningfully, to choose wholeheartedly—as if there were no choice!—the things that make for our highest good. Jesus’s parable of the treasure intimates some of this: there are treasures we can only lay hold of at a cost. But when we know that the treasure is in fact treasure, there can be joy even in setting other things aside to own it. I suppose I just want to encourage you that there is real goodness in limitation (though that’s not always advertised to us!) When we choose one good thing to the exclusion of others, we’re not just closing down our options, we’re embracing the very possibility of meaningful action.
But the parable makes an even more radical claim, I think. Because we are creatures, our highest good ultimately lies in choosing God, the source of our life and being. The person in the parable of the treasure is a paragon of freedom: with joy he has sold everything for the one thing needful.
It’s all very well to grasp this in theory; harder perhaps to grasp how the day-to-day decisions or the weightier commitments we make correspond to this picture. Over the years, I’ve been helped a lot by something I was once told by a nun. On the cusp of making the decision to marry my husband Jon, I (rather dangerously) asked her about how she had come to take orders. She told me that at a certain point she had realised that marriage was not an end in itself. I have found this to be astonishingly good advice, for marriage and a good many other things. What could be more disastrous than treating a commitment like marriage as an end in itself, something to pursue for its own sake? What a weight to place on another person, to treat them as an ultimate good, the answer to all your needs and desires! What could be more liberating for two people than to realise that marriage is one context, among others, in which to grow, in which to serve each other, in which to discover more of God’s goodness, and to be shaped more fully in God’s likeness?
I think this goes for other things too. A certain amount of pressure comes off our decision-making when the goods we are choosing between are freed from the burden of being ultimate for us, and when we realise that “living or dying, we belong to the Lord” as the Apostle Paul puts it in his letter to the Romans (14:8). Our lives present us with all kinds of circumstances. Some we have a part in choosing, some just happen to us. But in all of our circumstances, we’re invited to discover God’s grace, and to grow in love. That’s what this life is for, and that should give us some healthy perspective.
If that feels a bit abstract or hard to put legs on, I would say that this shift in perspective is something that happens in prayer, so that’s the place to start. When we’re faced with a decision to make, we need to learn not just to ask “What do I want?”, but also “What are you doing, Lord?” and “How can I make room for that?” Of course, “What do I want?” is a very important question too, because we are in the territory here of allowing God to reorder our desires, to bend them towards himself. When I’m faced with a difficult decision—especially one which might require me to give up a certain kind of story I have about myself or my life—all sorts of feelings come rushing to the surface. Hidden desires, buried griefs, and secret fears all jostle to get a hearing. Beautiful things can be made of such moments, messy as they may feel. When we learn to name the needs and longings that drive us to grasp at this or that outcome, the griefs and fears that prevent us from letting go of some other, we are close to discovering how our desires—for intimacy, security, relevance—are expressions of a more fundamental need that can only be met in God. So, by all means, follow your feelings back to thier source, and don’t be afraid to pour everything out, both your griefs and your wants, before the Lord. In doing so you’ll find yourself known and loved.
And this is where that second reading of the parable comes in. After all, as the children reminded me the other day, perhaps the person in the parable is God who—free in love, without any need for self-protection–has given everything to make us his own.
To be clear, I don’t think it is entirely wrongheaded to see ourselves as the subject of the story. Understood this way around the parable tells us much that is true. But I do worry that, taken on its own, this reading can appeal a little too much to our sense of gallantry. We are all prone to fantasies and false narratives, and one of mine has sometimes been that God needs my sacrifices: that in fact our relationship depends upon my ability to give, or to give things up. This is a dangerous fantasy to live out, and it hasn’t served me at all well in the face of some of the difficult and complicated things I’ve faced as I live out this (limited!) existence. There are some losses that feel too hard to countenance. I have not always found myself free from difficult feelings of regret about decisions I’ve made, even really good ones. And however glibly Christians may talk about self-sacrifice as “empowering”—indeed however sincerely we may believe in “dying to live”—the actual experience of giving up things that our heart has been set on can feel like dead loss. Perhaps the parable asks something of us that is, in the end, humanly impossible. Unless, that is, we understand that there is a movement at the heart of it that is beyond our effort: a movement of pure grace.
Our lives are a gift. We are sustained moment to moment by a God who does not need anything from us us to become more himself, but who nevertheless wills us into being, and pursues our friendship for the pure joy of it. We are his treasure. I can think of nothing more liberating for our action, more inspiring for our courage, or more soothing for our wounds, than to name this grounding reality. When we are faced with a tough choice, especially one which involves the possibility of loss, this is where we must come. Over and over for me, it has been a sure footing for taking the next step.
