Commitment vs. Choice OR Don't Wait Until You Want To
Readings to accompany the first video
We make choices every day. We decide what to wear, what to eat for breakfast, what route we’ll take going to work, what activities we’ll plan for the weekend. At the same time there are activities that we don’t choose, we just do them without having to make a choice. Hopefully you don’t have to decide to get up in the morning, to get dressed, to eat a meal, to care for your family. Activities like these we just do. It isn’t a matter of making a choice. You don’t think about it, you do it.
Most of us, if we’re honest, put our spiritual practices in the “choice” category. We will “try” to pray more. We will “decide” to spend more time in silence. We will “attempt” to be better about focusing on our faith life. And, most of us, if we’re honest, find ourselves falling down frequently and failing in our good intentions. We try to get up earlier for prayer time but we’d really rather get a little more sleep and so we decide to try again tomorrow. We would really like to spend some quality time doing lectio in the evenings but we’re tired, we have work to do and so we decide we’ll start over tomorrow.
I suspect that the root of the problem for most of us is that our good intentions all involve the fact that we are making a conscious choice whenever it is time for our practice. We “decide” whether we are going to pray. However, when there is choice there is always wiggle room. There is always a voice inside us that says, “that’s OK, you don’t have to do it today, there’s always tomorrow.” And of course pretty soon our practice is minimal or non-existent.
Linda Lomahaftewa-Parrots’ Prayer Song
Perhaps there is another way to approach the issue of spiritual discipline. If we create a reasonable commitment to our spiritual practices, in other words if we don’t decide that we will be spending two hours a day in prayer when we can’t currently manage ten minutes regularly, then we need to make the commitment that our practice is non-negotiable. It is a very rare set of circumstances when we would not get out of bed or get dressed. In the same way we can simply say that it will be a very rare set of circumstances in which we will not observe our prayer practice.
Common sense is always necessary. There may be times when your prayer practice is simply not possible. But if your attitude is that your prayer practice is what you do, rather than what you try to do, chances are there will be a lot fewer days when you simply don’t do it.
Practice also seems to work better if, even under difficult circumstances, you manage to keep at least some of your commitment. It may be a difficult, crazy time and you cannot spend your usual amount of time in prayer. But chances are you can do a few minutes. It is easier to come back to your normal practice if you haven’t abandoned it completely. Trying to get back into a prayer practice when you’ve let it go completely can be difficult.
In Christianity we emphasize that transformation is about getting past our self-will or ego and being open to the working of God’s grace in our life. When we operate out of “choice” or having to decide each time whether we will pray or engage in some other discipline, we are operating out of our ego and our ego would much rather be comfortable, sleep in, read a fun book, go out to brunch or probably do most anything rather than pray. The trick is to just commit, to not make it a choice. As Nike says “Just Do It.” Good advice for the spiritual life as well as tennis shoes. DON’T WAIT UNTIL YOU WANT TO.
