Mission Week 2007:
Challenged To Choose: The Courage to Act
February 2 - 10

Mission Reflection - Monday, February 5

Joseph Mueller, S.J.
Assistant Professor of Theology
Director of Undergraduate Studies and Majors

To take the first step toward deciding to do what is right or best, we need to recognize that a peculiar fork in the road faces us. Once we see that we can give ourselves away to someone or just pass this chance by, once we know that our next move could make us a hypocrite, the moment we can’t avoid treating life as either a worthy adventure or a meaningless joke, then we have come to the grand entrance to ethical decision. If we choose to walk through that open gate, we will still have the chance to know, in that deep place that lies beneath words, that life is good. If we decide not to hide from an ethical decision, we open ourselves to realizing what it felt like for Moses to talk face to face with God (Exodus 33:11) or for Elijah to throw himself prostrate on the ground before the still, small voice that carried the Lord’s command to love (1 Kings 19).

Vatican II’s Pastoral Constitution on the Church in Today’s World pointed to something of this experience when it declared that “conscience is the most secret core and sanctuary of the human person, in which he or she is alone with God, whose voice resounds in the person’s innermost reality” (section 16). We don’t have to settle for the blind faith that tries to will our parents’ or our some church’s god into existence so we can avoid suspecting that life is pointless or empty. Instead, if we honestly face the moment of ethical decision for what it is, we can experience God for ourselves as the one who, from within and beyond us, allures us inwardly out of ourselves to take responsibility for cherishing our neighbor as ourselves, our world as God’s gift, and the Generosity-in-Person who loves us all into living. The first step in making an ethical decision is to treat a decision as an ethical one. This requires of us the courage to be responsible for ourselves and for our world, and the courage to put our life in the hands of the One who is always already holding it in his palm.

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