(written in 2002)
Change is a topic that most of us are
interested in these days. After reading “Making Life Choices: How Personal
Decisions Shape the World” by Margaret Betz, CSJ, I asked myself: Can I also
make a difference? Can I change this world? Can I shape a united and
interdependent world? What drives me to discern a more valuable thing? What
makes me choose a desirable value? This book is surely a thought-provoking
text filled with diverse interesting life stories.
“Making Life Choices” introduces life stories of people who witnessed life choices made in love so as to transform the world. Among them are Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Teresa of Avila, George Bernard Shaw, Rainer Maria Rilke, Dorothy Day, Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela, Viktor Frankl, Bertrand Russell, John Henry Newman, Thomas Merton, Martin Luther King, and Albert Einstein, among others. Their vision, intuition, personal responsibility, and brave initiative have renewed other people and shaped a united, interdependent, and interconnected world.
The first three chapters talk about the outer world of social patterns and structures, and the other three chapters talk about the inner world of personal desires and experiences. It is believed that our life choices can shape a better world when the outer world and the inner world meet and are harmonized. At the end of each chapter, various questions for personal reflection and recommended books for further reading are suggested. So, it can be used for group study or discussion as well.
In the first chapter, “Seeing and Shaping the World,” it is suggested that we look at the indescribably beautiful world, its images from the past, and the new image of the scientific revolution. There are different ways of seeing _ we can see the world with our inner eye and also with the eyes of faith. A better world we imagine can be said to be “a world without borders,” “a welcoming family home,” and “God's unfinished work of art”. The world without boundaries and the welcoming family home are filled with internal solidarity and service. The second chapter, “Weighing Values, Shifting Priorities,” talks about the significance of values, the value of every person in the perspective of people as images of God, human rights, and social needs. Priorities for shaping a better world are, of course, the common good and the care for the poor and powerless. Truly, personal worth is prior to material success.
In the third chapter, “Choosing to Make a Difference,” language is defined as the “carrier of culture,” the means of communicating, and the instrument of thinking. Three characteristics of American culture embedded in our language and institutions are individualism, consumerism, and violence; on the other hand, three signs of prophetic grace are solidarity, simplicity, and reverence, which have inner transforming power.
While talking about “Listening to Our Heart's Desires”, the fourth chapter, the author defines desire as “life energy”, “hidden treasure”, and “dream”. Jesus is suggested to be a man of desire. The call of God in our desires is to become someone, to do something, and to shape a better world. We have to distinguish the conflict between good and bad, true and false desires.
In the fifth chapter, “Discerning Life's Choices”, it is recommended that we pay attention to experience, reflect on the experience and trust experience on the way to experience God in our human experience. Jesus is an example and presence in the model for life choices. Our life choices are responses to God _ we hear God's call (vocation), recognize God's will (discernment), and respond to God's call(decision-making). As Ignatius of Loyola mentioned, listing pros and cons, as well as examining consciousness, is the wise way of discerning and choosing better life choices.
In the last chapter, “Rediscovering Community”, two realities in the dynamic web of life are pointed out: the delusion of separateness and the experience of relatedness. Community is built on the basis of compassion, solidarity, and service. In other words, compassion and solidarity are the very heart of the community. The community Jesus calls us to be is a community of compassion in the midst of the world. The spiritual values of compassion, solidarity, and service make a difference against all odds in our speedy life. The most interesting perspective I noticed from this book is in “Rediscovering Community" in the last chapter. In fact, rediscovering the community is the most important task we face today. Living in the era of separateness, we have a great hunger for the community with its interrelatedness or connectedness. It says ``the human being is not like an amoeba, it's not a thing. We are much more like coral. We're interconnected. We cannot survive without each other”. We surely have to recognize the importance of the interrelatedness of all life or a feeling of connectedness with nature.
The word “interdependence” (as in “global interdependence” or “interdependent world”) is mentioned about 17 times, ``solidarity", 40 times, and ``community" over 40 times in this book. These themes are recurring not only in this book but in contemporary society. An interdependent community is a way of relating to other persons as brothers and sisters who share a common origin, dignity, and destiny. The community consists of an interconnected “we” more than an isolated ``I". And this community is filled with compassion, solidarity, and service expressed as love. Shaping an interdependent world depends on our capacity to rediscover community in an ever-widening circle of compassion, solidarity, and service.
As I read through this book suggesting a certain principle, I couldn't but think of the concerns of ecology, which also emphasizes “interdependency”. “Does Science Have a New Creation Story?” says as follows: “The diversity of nature has evolved through patterns of interdependency… No one type of being is the king of the forest. Within and between populations, there are many patterns of cooperation, as well as interdependent competition... Cooperation and interdependency are the primary principles of ecosystems.” It is clear that everything is interdependent and correlated with one another.
I highly recommend “Making Life Choices” to young people on the way to making a life-changing decision. Building a better community depends on our sincere life choices, whether selfish desire or common good, separateness or interdependence, isolation or community. The future of the community ultimately results from such choices. Surely, true joy and inner peace come out of living together with love in the community. Then, let's take ``the road not taken" and ``less traveled by" as Robert Frost said a long time ago:
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood. And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth; Then took the other, as just as fair And having perhaps the better claim Because it was grassy and wanted wear; Though as for that, the passing there Had worn them really about the same, And both that morning equally lay In leaves no step had trodden black. Oh, I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back. I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -- I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.
The Korea Times/ Thoughts of the Times/ Dec. 11, 2002
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