SILENT CHOICES

I will never forget the first time that I entered a supermarket shortly after returning home from living in a small Indian town. I stood frozen in the salad dressing aisle for about ten minutes, unable to move. I had been living in an impoverished town with open sewers and starving children. The fact that I could choose a bottle of salad dressing from fifty options felt revolting. I simply could not process this contrast. The choice left me paralyzed; I left the supermarket.

We live in a culture that provides personalized options for just about every possible scenario. We are forced to make choices every hour of our day. There are moments when we can’t properly process our options, so we default to the lowest hanging fruit. My teacher Ann Ulanov describes the consequences of this on one’s spiritual life in her book Primary Speech: A psychology of prayer:

Choice presents itself early on in prayer. We discover levels to our desire. We want lesser thing; we want greater things. Smaller satisfactions beckon just as loudly at first as large contentments…We would settle for a lifetime of detective story thrillers and deny ourselves the nourishment of great novels and poetry. Spiritually, we fasten on junk food, giving up the sweet smell of a fresh cucumber or juiciness of a ripe red tomato…We prefer to stick to gossip with acquaintances and refuse the soul-stirring conversation of real friends…We reach out for inferior things this way and turn from the best. We may come then to refuse God’s love…And God’s answering wrath is to leave us to our choice-to languish in these lesser pleasures since we have refused the greater things he offers.

The final line of this excerpt is heartbreaking. We imagine that divine wrath shakes mountains and rages forth with fire and destruction. Dr. Ulanov suggests otherwise: it is manifest in the silent choices that we make to neglect our better selves, to pursue trifling matters instead of pushing ourselves to greater heights. I need reminders to give up spiritual junk food. Should you as well, consider this message that sweet tap on shoulder, that friendly reminder that it is up to you to choose the juicy tomato over that always regretful bag of salt and vinegar potato chips.