Deciding When You Don’t Know for Sure

We are all uncertain about what God wants us to do. That is to say, we do not know for sure . Of course it seems silly, when you’re well past middle age and have spent your life doing what you believe you’ve been given to do, to get up in the morning or suddenly stop in the middle of the day’s work and ask, "Is this what I’m supposed to be doing?"

I mentioned this to a young man who is discerning whether he has a call to the priesthood, and he was shocked, perhaps scandalized. He said, in effect: "You mean after all these years of being a priest, of writing books, of editing and lecturing, of organizing so many projects, you still aren’t sure you’re doing what God called you to do? How am I ever to know that God is calling me to the priesthood?"

The answer is that we act in the courage of our uncertainties. I am fond of pointing out that the word decide comes from the Latin decidere , to cut off. You face choices¯whether to be a priest, whether to go to this school or that, whether to marry a certain person, whether to pursue this line of work or another¯and then you decide. And, in deciding, you have cut off the alternatives and pray you have decided rightly. But you do not know for sure . Alternatively, you are trapped in the tangled web of indecision.

In this connection, I have had frequent recourse, both homiletically and personally, to one of the most liberating passages from Saint Paul, 1 Corinthians 4. He has been trying to explain himself and his apostolate to the Christians in Corinth. He doesn’t know whether he has succeeded, and then he says this: "But with me it is a very small thing that I should be judged by you or by any human court. I do not even judge myself . . . . Therefore do not pronounce judgment before the time, before the Lord comes, who will bring to light the things now hidden in darkness and will disclose the purposes of the heart."

Do not judge before the time! I do not even judge myself! These are the words of a life set free from the tangled web of introspection and indecision.

I was thinking about the above while reading a recent and splendid book by John Peter Kenney on Augustine’s Confessions . The book is The Mysticism of Saint Augustine and, in Kenney’s "rereading" of Augustine’s classic text, the emphasis is on the inescapably Christocentric character of Augustine’s experience.

This is against the frequent reading of the Confessions as a psychological thriller, which downplays the specifically Christian and theological in Augustine’s story. He was, as everybody knows, a Neoplatonist, but a Neoplatonist with very important differences. In Neoplatonism, the ascending soul discovers its intelligible and "undescended" self in the eternal world of being as it moves from dialectical reasoning in time into pure intellect.

Kenney writes: "After this transformative discovery, embodiment has no charm [for Plotinus]. But Augustine countenances no such direct access to an unfallen self. His helplessness, his habituation to sins, his tears of self-betrayal have taught him otherwise. And so have the importunity of divine grace and the providential emergence of Christ in his life, whose power effects the conversion of his wholly fallen soul. Thus the contemplative soul cannot discover its real self within eternal wisdom, for there is no eternal self there to be recovered. Contemplation can only be an exercise in hope, the discernment of where the self may one day rest, if it should achieve its salvation. Thus, for Augustine, contemplation is inherently eschatological and, unlike in Plotinus, that eschatological hope is never realized by the embodied soul. It can only be actualized after death." Precisely. Let no one judge before the time!

The above is from "The Public Square" in a forthcoming issue of First Things . Click here to become a subscriber.