That Thing About Choice

There is this crossroads in life, the two choices where you can be super holy and a saint… or you can be nominal.

I want to talk about the nominal, the part where most of us live. We live here because it’s easy and it’s fun. Being nominal does not mean a sinner headed straight for Hell, it is (in a sense) doing the very least amount possible. Not taking part in your own salvation, but rather relying on God’s mercy to carry you through. The nominal is the least amount of sacrifice to enjoy the greatest amount of pleasure. This is a gray area because it asks the question: just faith or faith and works.

The astounding factor is that God lets us choose. We choose if we want to take the road of actively seeking sanctity, or passively relying on God’s mercy. And this is a hard choice, sin is SO SHINY, it’s fun, and it’s a good distraction-especially the small ones that are “no big deal”. The majority of us are not getting visions of heaven or hell, so we cannot see the rewards or repercussions of our actions. Therefore nominal is ok to us because it’s not setting us on a straight path to either. We long for heaven, the home we cannot see, the place where our soul is fulfilled. But down here on earth where we are making choices daily that play a role in our sanctification.

Gaudium et Spes (Church in the Modern World) says:

The world of today reveals itself as at once powerful and weak, capable of achieving the best or the worst. There lies open before it progress or regression, brotherhood or hatred. In addition, man is becoming aware that it is for himself to give right direction to the forces that he has himself awakened. Forces that can be his master or his servant. He therefore puts himself to question.

So why not be nominal? Why actively seek out sanctity when you know it won’t come from you anyways? Because the world is open to us…we are all at once powerful and weak, seeking progress or regression. It is our choice as to what will happen. As we gain knowledge and power, will it become our master or our servant? We choose. Nominal is dangerous because it clings to nothing; neither the things of this world nor of the next, and you can get carried away in anything at that point.

As we’re choosing, we’re changing. This is in juxtaposition to Christ who is the same yesterday as He is today, as he will be tomorrow. We change, we are inconsistent…but He is not. That is why it is so important to cling to Him. He is that higher power helping us master our choices. We cling to the unchanging so that we are not caught in the current of the modern world’s ideals.