So, we were on hippies gone south, and the poster phrase, "Live by Choice, Not by Default".
I think in order to understand 'choice' in the phrase, we have to understand 'default'. Viewed from the secular self-actualization, these are the two exclusive options: it is either default into a Stepford Wife (and at Curves, they mean a fat one, at that), or (wind blowing hair fan starts along with Braveheart theme music) start making choices about your life, determine where you are headed.
In the Ellulian society (cities escaping from God), default is allowing yourself to become what your environment, your place of origin and your genetics determine. It is the easy route, the way of the cow crossing. It is acting like a cow because that is what you know. It is holding onto certain values because they are simply what you know. It is getting married because your parents did, or not going to college because no one in your family has ever gone. It is the unthinking man, Marx's common man on religious opium. Default is, to the City of Man in our day, hell. It is the worst thing you can do in the eyes of the cultural elite.
The other secular option: Choice. Instead of a cow, you can be a god. You can take each day and choose to be in it, you can send out positive energy to those around you and change the world, one ripple at a time! You can begin to be the self that you are truly inside- or better yet, since the days of EST seminars and encounter groups when people found out that they couldn't get to anything but an empty hole after stripping everything away- you can create the self you would like to be (and by the way, there's lots of great products like hair colors and psychoanalysts out there which can help you do it). You can follow the ones who are self-creative, like the woman named after the Mother of God who seems exactly the opposite of her name saint. Or you can go along with "The Secret" and THINK about what you want in order to get anything (on the downside, anything bad that happens to you is totally your own stupidity and result of negative thinking: and what kind of negative thinking does that engender towards Christ's crucifixion? I can hear it now: "Oh, of course Jesus was a great teacher, he just needed to work on His positive thinking skills"). If you wind it out far enough, it gets scary.
Enough. We know we aren't gods. A bunch of us with divinity with no redemption would make up exactly the image that Lewis paints of Hell in The Great Divorce: a bunch of selfish, oppressive ninnies building more and more palatial homes but farther and farther away from each other. That is what is the end of this "Live by Choice" mentality: if you are making up your own existence, then in effect you are alone, because all real relationships come from God.
Then let's turn from this cacophony of choice-making and towards the Catholic thing: the real thing.
We are endowed with free will, and this is never taken from us. We have a will to choose: find God or to lose Him forever. That is the choice upon which all other choices rest, the foundational choice. However, after Adam and Eve fell, we did inherit a terrible default: original sin. Our bent will is skewed towards the self, towards the three-fold sin of the Man of Lust: lust of the eyes, of the flesh, and the pride of life. The real default of a bent will is exactly what the secular culture defines as "Choice": choose what to wear, let that be self-expression; choose how to live out your sexual nature; to be self-actualized and a positive part of the culture, choose your lifestyle.
In the true sense, choice is freedom: but it is the choice to find God at all costs which gives us true freedom, for He knows how we are made to live as only the Creator can know. It is beyond us, as the EST people found out. We have to make that choice, but because of the default of a bent nature, we need help to continue to choose God and freedom. That is the very purpose of right religion, of orthodoxy and orthopraxy: to assist us to make the choice for freedom, to become truly ourselves by paradoxically losing ourselves in God.
The ten commandments, the inspired writings of the New Testament, the saints, the doctrines and traditions of the Church: all these are assists in each person's choosing God every day. This kind of life is the true wind-blowin' hair fan Braveheart hippie life: it is what the hippies were almost on to in their hippie way at the very beginning and then lost. This kind of life takes the William Wallaces and the St. Joan of Arcs. It is the only choice worth dying for. The default is unthinkable, as Hell is unthinkable.
The poster should read : "Live by God, Not by Sin". Then it would truly express the nobility it aspires to, even in the fat-farm outlet.
I think in order to understand 'choice' in the phrase, we have to understand 'default'. Viewed from the secular self-actualization, these are the two exclusive options: it is either default into a Stepford Wife (and at Curves, they mean a fat one, at that), or (wind blowing hair fan starts along with Braveheart theme music) start making choices about your life, determine where you are headed.
In the Ellulian society (cities escaping from God), default is allowing yourself to become what your environment, your place of origin and your genetics determine. It is the easy route, the way of the cow crossing. It is acting like a cow because that is what you know. It is holding onto certain values because they are simply what you know. It is getting married because your parents did, or not going to college because no one in your family has ever gone. It is the unthinking man, Marx's common man on religious opium. Default is, to the City of Man in our day, hell. It is the worst thing you can do in the eyes of the cultural elite.
The other secular option: Choice. Instead of a cow, you can be a god. You can take each day and choose to be in it, you can send out positive energy to those around you and change the world, one ripple at a time! You can begin to be the self that you are truly inside- or better yet, since the days of EST seminars and encounter groups when people found out that they couldn't get to anything but an empty hole after stripping everything away- you can create the self you would like to be (and by the way, there's lots of great products like hair colors and psychoanalysts out there which can help you do it). You can follow the ones who are self-creative, like the woman named after the Mother of God who seems exactly the opposite of her name saint. Or you can go along with "The Secret" and THINK about what you want in order to get anything (on the downside, anything bad that happens to you is totally your own stupidity and result of negative thinking: and what kind of negative thinking does that engender towards Christ's crucifixion? I can hear it now: "Oh, of course Jesus was a great teacher, he just needed to work on His positive thinking skills"). If you wind it out far enough, it gets scary.
Enough. We know we aren't gods. A bunch of us with divinity with no redemption would make up exactly the image that Lewis paints of Hell in The Great Divorce: a bunch of selfish, oppressive ninnies building more and more palatial homes but farther and farther away from each other. That is what is the end of this "Live by Choice" mentality: if you are making up your own existence, then in effect you are alone, because all real relationships come from God.
Then let's turn from this cacophony of choice-making and towards the Catholic thing: the real thing.
We are endowed with free will, and this is never taken from us. We have a will to choose: find God or to lose Him forever. That is the choice upon which all other choices rest, the foundational choice. However, after Adam and Eve fell, we did inherit a terrible default: original sin. Our bent will is skewed towards the self, towards the three-fold sin of the Man of Lust: lust of the eyes, of the flesh, and the pride of life. The real default of a bent will is exactly what the secular culture defines as "Choice": choose what to wear, let that be self-expression; choose how to live out your sexual nature; to be self-actualized and a positive part of the culture, choose your lifestyle.
In the true sense, choice is freedom: but it is the choice to find God at all costs which gives us true freedom, for He knows how we are made to live as only the Creator can know. It is beyond us, as the EST people found out. We have to make that choice, but because of the default of a bent nature, we need help to continue to choose God and freedom. That is the very purpose of right religion, of orthodoxy and orthopraxy: to assist us to make the choice for freedom, to become truly ourselves by paradoxically losing ourselves in God.
The ten commandments, the inspired writings of the New Testament, the saints, the doctrines and traditions of the Church: all these are assists in each person's choosing God every day. This kind of life is the true wind-blowin' hair fan Braveheart hippie life: it is what the hippies were almost on to in their hippie way at the very beginning and then lost. This kind of life takes the William Wallaces and the St. Joan of Arcs. It is the only choice worth dying for. The default is unthinkable, as Hell is unthinkable.
The poster should read : "Live by God, Not by Sin". Then it would truly express the nobility it aspires to, even in the fat-farm outlet.
