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Letter from AmericaA choice, not choicesIndiana Jones finally made his way into the inner cave where the Holy Grail was said to be kept. To his dismay he discovered not one cup but thousands. Which one was the true Holy Grail? Right behind him rushed in the baddy, the evil Nazi leader kitted out with maniacal laugh and monocle and all. This 'evil leader' surveys the scene and pounces upon by far the most prestigious and expensive cup in the room. He drinks from it and dies horribly. Indie then has to choose. He also looks around the room. This time, though, he picks up a simple wooden cup. 'That's the cup of a carpenter', he says and he drinks from it to no ill effect. As Indiana Jones races back to save his father from dying by the means of the healing properties of the Holy Grail, the last knight guarding the cup says, 'He chose wisely.' Choice or options?He chose wisely. A more contemporary remake of the scene might play rather differently. Instead of a massive, life-defining, choice, more recent movies tend to avoid such existential dilemmas. We have action, of course, and tension and dramatic clashes between ideas and ideologies and personalities, but we do not tend to feel that life comes down to a choice. If we have to think like that we want to think there are choices not a choice. Life to us does not seem to be about choosing which road you go down, the one less travelled or not, but about a plethora of options, all of which are legitimate and none of which we may choose. I like the probably apocryphal story of British Prime Minister Herbert Asquith. He spent a weekend at the Waddesdon estate of the Rothschild family. One day as Asquith was being waited on at teatime the butler enquired: 'Tea, coffee, or a peach from off the wall, sir?' I feel the same when I go to Subway. I'd like a sandwich please. Tomato, lettuce, olives, mayonnaise, what kind of mayonnaise, roast beef sauce, would you like cheese with that, what kind of cheese, is that foot long or six inch, what kind of bread, sir? We'd be pretty surprised if we went to Subway and instead of all these options there was just a choice. Is it sandwich A or sandwich B today sir? And yet that is exactly what Jesus says the ultimate issues of reality come down to. We can choose life or death, and there is no way in between nor any other options. Decision really needed?This strikes many people today not only as unfair, unlikely and somewhat ignorant of the plethora of religious options in the world, but also somewhat boring. After all if I can go to Baskin Robbins and be asked to choose from thousands of different kinds of ice cream, why, when I go to God does Jesus want me to just have two options - is it life flavour you want or death flavour? Gosh, well, that's a hard choice. I think I'll have life. Yet many of us do find it hard. We want to keep our options open. We do not want to become narrow. In particular we want to experiment. Or we want to have an open mind. We are not indecisive because we can't make up our minds for chronic lack of mental incisiveness, but because we won't make up our minds for simple refusal to believe it's necessary. If I can have whipped cream with my saute why can't I have sexual experimentation with my God? Then we become not so much indecisive as indifferent, keeping our options open and our minds open until our brains fall out and our options dry up. As psychologist William James put it: 'When you have a choice to make and you don't make it, that itself is a choice'. While it is still day?Or the story of Ronald Reagan as a child being asked to choose between a round-toed shoe and a square-toed shoe. He couldn't make up his mind so he asked if he could come back the next day and decide. The next day he still couldn't decide, so the cobbler said he'd choose for him. Reagan came by the store a few days later to pick up his new shoes to discover that he had one square-toed and one round-toed shoe. Reagan said later: 'If you don't make your decisions someone else will'. What Jesus is saying throughout his famous Sermon on the Mount is: choose wisely!! We need to think very carefully about that today. Josh Moody,
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