Our Choices

By Deacon Keith Fournier at Catholic Online, 2/8/2008. Abridged.

LOS ANGELES (Catholic Online) - “Today I have set before you life and prosperity, death and doom.... I call heaven and earth today to witness against you: I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. Choose life, then, that you and your descendants may live, by loving the LORD your God.” (Deut. 30:15)

Jesus said to his disciples: “The Son of Man must suffer greatly and ... be killed and on the third day be raised.” Then he said to all, “If anyone wishes to come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.” (Luke 9: 22-25)

The readings of the Liturgy on this Thursday following Ash Wednesday invite us to probe the meaning of the Christian vocation by examining our choices. Not only do we make choices, our choices make us. We become what we choose, changing ourselves in the process.

As we walk this Lenten pilgrimage we can reflect on how Jesus chose, in His Sacred humanity. He walked the path of surrendered love. So should we. In His Sacred humanity, Jesus shows us the model and then provides the means for our own transformation.

With His outstretched arms on the Cross, He freely chose love and bridged the gap between heaven and earth.

We are invited during Lent to embrace even that which we do not want as the very means of this transformation.

The Christian tradition insists that even undeserved and unmerited suffering, when joined in love to the sufferings of Jesus Christ, can produce extraordinary fruit within us and around us. This is the mystery of suffering in the Christian life.

Saint Josemaria Escriva once wrote “The great Christian revolution has been to convert pain into fruitful suffering and to turn a bad thing into something good. We have deprived the devil of this weapon; and with it we can conquer eternity."

How do we treat those circumstances that cause us to struggle? How do we deal with what we find unpleasant?

This day, let us ask for God’s grace to choose life and live; to choose the way of redemptive love. Let us pick up our cross, follow the One whose choice on our behalf secured our true freedom, and find the Way.