In my post below, I started a conversation about what I consider to be a pervasive modern heresy - the idea that we lack free will. I think it may be related to the heresy of Deism - the idea that God is not an active participant in His creation. Deism posits a 'clockwork universe'. God the great clockmaker built it and wound it up to start ticking, and is now elsewhere. In other words, there is a God but he doesn't really care about us as individuals or even as a people.
God desires that we all be at one with Him, but He loves us with a parental love. As a parent, it is so hard to watch adult or near adult children doing stupid things (or things that I judge to be stupid or harmful). How much harder it must be for God to see me, His child, do stupid or sinful things! Yet the gift of free will means that I am free to accept or reject the gift of God's love.
Another concept I have been pondering is that one choice leads to or cuts off another choice. When I chose to marry my husband, I cut off the choice to marry another and chose to devote my love to him. One door opens but another shuts. For my 8th grade graduation, we sang a choral setting of Robert Frost's poem "The Road Not Taken". I can still sing it, and I hear the music in my head when a choice beckons to me. "Knowing how way, leads on to way, I doubted if I would ever return".
I'm heading out in a few minutes to go to daily mass with a young friend and her baby. That, too is a choice. Because of my work schedule and the mass schedules, I have only one day a week when I can do this, and it is truly a gift to me to be able to go. I hope to add more to this set of ramblings later today, deus volante.
