Refer It Upwards

A US-based friend once told me of a young Christian friend of theirs who, when asked (for instance) whether they wanted to go to the shops or something, would screw up her eyes in an attitude of intense concentration. When asked what she was doing, she would say she was ‘asking Jesus what to do’. After a moment or two the answer would come and she would, or would not, go shopping.

Although this might be a somewhat eccentric model of bringing the Lord into your decision-making, I find the great spiritual director Fr Somerset Ward advocates something not that far off. ‘Every day we make innumerable choices’, he argues (to summarise) in one of his Instructions I read this week, ‘and to bring those choices before God allows our decision-making faculties to be shaped by his will. Even when the choices seem small and trivial, perhaps from the divine viewpoint they are not; and if they are, the habit of referring them regularly to God will prepare us for those greater decisions which really matter’.

I think, contrastingly, that clear choices occur less frequently in a day than Fr Somerset Ward imagined. Many of the things we do are constrained by the decisions we have already taken: my day is dominated by routine and the tasks my role places upon me, and what I need to do in order to fulfil those obligations. Some decisions are what I call phantom choices: that is, they are theoretically there, but in fact unrealistically distant. As I stand at the level-crossing waiting for the train to arrive, for instance, in theory I face a choice whether or not to jump the gates and run across, but really this is something that operates at a lower level than a choice, which I think has to consist of two options either of which you might realistically take, and I am vanishingly unlikely, on a cold winter’s day, to make the physical or moral effort to leap the gates, break the law and risk the fine. I don’t feel a need to refer that to God.

And you may be familiar with the technique Christians sometimes employ of considering ‘What Would Jesus Do?’, perhaps wearing a pastel-shaded rubber wristband to remind them of it. It strikes me that most of the time, concerning most situations, we haven’t got the faintest idea what Jesus would have done, and this is very different from referring a choice to God: instead it’s a way of organising our own reasoning, still relying on ourselves more than the divine.

Once upon a time I would have said that God is almost certainly uninterested in whether I go shopping or not and so to bring him to bear on the choice to do so would be a bit weird. I’m not sure this is true now. I don’t expect any positive response to referring my choice to God (and might doubt my soundness of mind if there was one) but instead I’ve found that doing so does have an interesting effect; it makes me more aware that he is there, a far more subtle and strange effect than a voice or vision might have, and that to an extent reshapes my expectations and reasoning. Fr Somerset Ward was basically right: quelle surprise.