Decisions, decisions

Today I am back at the hospital again (first time since I finished radiation) to get a bone density scan. For the next five years I will take a daily estrogen blocker that will starve any hidden cancer cells that could feed off it, but will also leach the calcium from my bones. The scan will give me a baseline to measure the change.  I wonder and wonder, should I really take this pill? What difference does it really make? It’s my choice to pop that pill every morning—is it worth the side effects? How would I know?

The hospital staff are well organized, and I rarely have to wait long, but just in case, I always carry a book, usually a nonfiction make-you-think kind of book. I save the novels for home. My current novel is The Light Between Oceans about an Australian lighthouse keeper and his wife who find a baby in a boat washed ashore on their lonely island and have choices to make. My current non-fiction book is about how modernity gives us so many, many choices that we never had before, including my choice to leach my bones. The question is, what does this much decision-making do to us as a society? How do we handle it?

I listened to a TED talk by Sheen Iyengar about how too many choices in the grocery store paralyze shoppers, especially if the choices are not categorized: GMO-free, gluten-free, fat-free, sugar-free, taste-free, etc. You’d think having more choices would be freeing, life-giving, but in fact, it’s not. Having too many choices paralyzes us. We procrastinate, or we ask someone else to choose for us (a consumer reporter, or a reviewer, or a tradition, or a preacher), or we close our eyes and point and come away with something we don’t really like, because who has the time to research everything? As a society, having too many choices does not make us happier. There are those classic titles out there: Erich Fromm’s The Escape from Freedom and Jean-Paul Sartre’s idea that we are “condemned to freedom,” reminding us of the agony of choice. As our world changes more and more rapidly, we are confronted with more and more choices society never offered us before. Some of these choices seem appalling, like the child who chose to have his penis removed at age five, or the government that gives thirteen-year olds the choice to sell sex. To keep from being overwhelmed, we find short cuts to help us manage our choices. World views, faiths, institutions, traditions, leaders—all of these help us pick and choose.

And it is very hard for us to understand those that modernity has not touched so deeply, and who have far less choices than we do. For them, some things are not chosen, but are simply “just the way things are” (like being born Canadian), and when someone loosens such anchors by switching them suddenly into choices, they feel threatened, untethered, and lost, like refugees in their own homes. Moving from ancient syncretistic religions into evangelical Christianity is like this, or moving from folk Islam to Christianity.  They don’t think of their religion as a choice they have made, but an identity they have been given at birth, like an ethnicity or nationality. They are cultural Christians. Cultural Muslims. They have never consciously chosen their religious identity any more than we chose the color of our passports. It simply “is.”

Which is why when missionaries show up telling a different story about the world and the path to God, these people react. We are undermining “the way things are.” When we lived in Yuvinani, a local Mixtec policeman brought us into the town hall to question us. “Where are your papers?” He asked. “Who sent you?” When we insisted we were not representing an organization, the man said, disgusted, “You are like goats without a tether. You have no owners. You should go home.”

Home, indeed. For us, Jesus is our home, anywhere. We have chosen Him and we follow Him. But not everyone even sees this as a real choice. And when pre-modernists (like the Mixtecs) reject us, or worse, harm us, as they did Juan Mercenario, the first Metlatonoc Mixtec martyr (others have followed), we might think they are choosing against Christ. Maybe. But maybe they are protecting their identity, keeping the ground from shifting beneath their feet. When the Romans and the Jews connived together to kill Jesus, he said, “Father, forgive them. They don’t know what they are doing.” Part of what they were doing was protecting their identity—the status quo. We all do this, right or wrong. It’s a knee-jerk reaction.

So many of our choices are blind, done in the dark, and we don’t know it, or we are being led by others who don’t know any better than we do (my doctor’s don’t know whether I should stop my estrogen blocker. Nor do they understand what arthritis really is. It’s all a mystery, even in these modern times). It’s not just Roman or Mixtec assassins that Jesus was forgiving when he made that cry to his Father. Jesus, “the true light, who gives light to everyone, was coming into the world.” He leads us all into choice and freedom. We’re terrible at these things on our own because even as His followers, “we don’t know what we are doing.” We all have so far to go. Let us remember that and keep listening.