There’s a minor memory from my early days as a mother that I always recall with shame. It was just a little thing. My toddler ran out ahead of me and went through a set of automatic doors, but stumbled, and ended up standing in the way of the doors as they closed.
In disproportionate terror (because all of my emotions were outsized at the time), I thrust my hand into the doorway to make the doors open. Then I snatched it away. Then I stuck my hand out again, and then I snatched it away.
I did this, rapid-fire, several times while the door opened and closed and opened and closed and my child cried in bewilderment. Finally, some saner person stepped in, body-blocked the door, and we all emerged on the other side.
Nobody was hurt but I was ashamed and disgusted with myself. I contrasted myself, savagely, with people who run into burning buildings to rescue children, or who dive into frigid water to save a drowning stranger.
“I didn’t even think about it,” they tell the reporter covering the scene. “I’m no hero; I just did what I had to do.”
Whereas I, a mother who allegedly loved her children, couldn’t even get myself to stick my hand in a door to save my baby from being crushed. SOME MOTHER. That’s what the reporter would say about me. SOME MOTHER SHE TURNED OUT TO BE.
But over the next 25 years or so, I have learned something about heroism, and choices, and free will.
We tend think of free will as the less emotional, more muscularly logical part of us that objectively assesses our choices and consciously selects good or evil.
Free will is, we imagine, when we find ourselves suspended in a sort of temporal vacuum, evaluating facts, desires, and fears, and make a calculated choice to do whatever it is we want to do.
And that’s probably why people who’ve done clearly heroic things feel uncomfortable with praise. They didn’t evaluate the risk, recall that God told us to love our fellow man, and deliberately choose to charge into the inferno. They just acted, and it didn’t feel like a choice at all.
But free will is both more complicated and more basic than that.
Sometimes I do use my free will with calculation and deliberation. I realise I’m being tempted to do wrong or prompted to do good, and maybe I struggle, and then I make a choice. But sometimes I do just act. I do just do the right thing, or the wrong thing, without thinking.
This, too, is a variety of the exercise of free will, because it comes from the kind of person I have previously decided, over and over again, to become throughout my life.
That’s probably what we see when someone acts heroically without thinking. He has primed himself, through a lifetime of little choices, to be the kind of person who will do the right thing without deliberation. He is acting out of the centre of who he has chosen to become.
So the person who leaps without thinking is, indeed, a hero, and he did, indeed, use his free will.
So, then, what about the weird “should I or should I not save my kid” thing I did all those years ago? Did I hesitate because, deep down, I only sort of cared about her?
I’ve learned to look more gently on my past self. Of course I loved my child. Of course I wasn’t really torn about whether or not to let her be squashed before my eyes.
I hesitated, and chopped my arm in lieu of anything useful, because I was incredibly sleep-deprived, and mentally, physically, and emotionally overwhelmed all the time, and perpetually hollowed out with self-doubt, and that’s what lead to my irrational behaviour.
I wanted with all my heart to do the right thing, but I literally didn’t know what was the right thing to do. I never knew what was the right thing to do. So I chopped my arms up and down like a weirdo, and didn’t achieve anything. But we came out OK.
Just as a thousand acts of generosity and unselfishness train you to do the right thing without hesitation, a thousand little cuts that weaken your psychological and physical sense of self can impede you from it.
We’re trainable, but we’re not machines that can be programmed with precision. It’s complicated.
Anyway, I remembered this moment as I gazed, the other week, at the giant, slightly kitschy mural over the altar at our church. Jesus is dying on the cross, and around him are his mother and loyal friends who would not leave him.
In the foreground are indifferent soldiers, people running away, and members of the Sanhedrin, frowning and turning from Jesus as they discuss his legal case.
In between the two groups, in the centre of a mural, is a man off balance. His hands are outstretched, one toward the Lord, and one away. His body is not static, but he is tipping away from the cross toward the viewer. His eyes are wide and his mouth is open, and he doesn’t know which way to go.
This mural is not a masterpiece, but boy, did the painter get that guy right. That guy is me, most of the time. That guy is most of us, most of the time. That’s what else I have learned in the last 30 years. The things that demand our free will catch us off balance. We think we know who we are, but who we are is more wobbly than we realise.
Maybe we snap into action and do something without thinking, because of who we have become deep down; or maybe we pause and consciously deliberate, weighing the pros and cons of going this way or that.
But maybe we stand there wobbling with our mouths hanging open, feeling the pull in both directions.
We’ve trained ourselves incoherently, sometimes making that interior person better and more attuned toward the good, and sometimes making him worse, more prone to evil. We all do this. And we are also all prey to human frailties like exhaustion and stupidity and confusion and self-doubt, none of which are sins, but which do hobble the things our best selves want to do.
Sometimes we surprise ourselves and behave better than we expect. Sometimes we shame ourselves and act worse.
But I look again at that tottering man, poised so perilously between right and wrong, and I see his head is craned around, and he is staring at the Lord.
That’s also who we are, deep down: we are Jesus’, and even this weak, wobbly loser knows it. We are made to seek him, to return to him. Or at very least to look toward him, and to beg him, even as he dies, to come save us.
Who doesn’t wobble? You know who. It’s Jesus. I know I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: Stat crux dum volvitur orbis.
He alone is perfectly steady, perfectly consistent, perfectly coherent. God alone has perfect free will, and Jesus used it to die for us, without hesitation or deliberation, because of who he is. His freedom is the kind that makes us free. The first step is to look toward him.
Simcha Fisher is the author of The Sinner’s Guide to Natural Family Planning.
