Understanding Free Will

The teacher assigns homework.  The child has the options of:

1) Doing said homework well and earning both a good grade and possible praise from teacher and parent.
2) Doing said homework indifferently and possibly eeking out a good grade or more likely garnering a lesser mark and some grumbling from the parents.
3) Blowing off the homework and getting growls from mom, notes from the teacher and additional work, a bad grade and a slip designating that the assignment is late. 
And there are all the variations inbetween...

The child knows all three basic consequences.  The child knows good from bad, right from wrong.
But there's this pesky thing, free will. 

It allows us to knowingly, freely choose the worst of all possible outcomes because we don't want to go about the hard business of studying and gaining knowledge and learning what has been presented. Choosing the best option requires of us that we use our gifts.

Sin works the same way. We can know God's will.  We can even know the consequences of failing to abide in His love.  Yet we chose freely and knowingly that which short circuits our best chances to grow and delve deeper into how it is God calls us to love.  It's easier to take the pill, to blow off the sacraments, to rage at the world or others for their misguided views than to educate or even better, pray for those with whom we have definitive and difficult relationships.  It's our free choice to do so, it's just we make lots and lots and lots....of stupid free choices. 

But God loves us enough to respect our freedom, the gift He has given us to not be robots.  Robot children would do their homework perfectly every time.  Real children sometimes decide to watch Batman, sneak downstairs to raid the second refrigerator of the leftover birthday cake and then announce at 10:30, they don't understand this assignment or hide that they didn't do it or that they did do it but lost it, or that they forgot to turn it in, or that they forgot about the assignment entirely or blew it off. 

God would not rail at this johny-come-lately for showing up last minute with a bit of homework to do, but God does not tire of our whiny free willing sinful selves.  He loves us for what we are and what we could be if we loved Him more. But he does have expectations, that we will use our gifts wisely, that we will do what we ought, that doing what we ought reveals our love, while doing what we want because we want it means we wind up with a lot of extra stress, mess and poor marks.

The sins we freely chose to commit, keep us from God, just as the child who has multiple missing assignment slips might keep themselves from going to their parents or to the teacher, out of fear and shame and a desire not to face the consequences of freely chosen actions.  But ultimately, the hiding doesn't work, nothing is hidden, and only we are deceived in this process, deceived by the belief we could hide anything at all.   The only way the grades and homework situation turn around, is the child  admits there is a problem and begins the hard process of doing things differently.  The only way we access grace is to begin to submit ourselves to scrutiny and recognize our own innately sinful nature, and seek forgiveness. Start over.  Freely choose differently than we have, and do it again and again and again and again, to slowly grow ourselves in the habit of conforming to God's will out of free will.

With that being said, I had to ask of myself, "Did you do your homework?" And the only honest answer is I really need to go in and ask for some extra credit assignments to boost my grade.

Midterms

There are moments when I'd really appreciate an Interim report on my parenting skills. 

Then I think what my G.P.A. might be and I'm grateful that for all known purposes, there is no public record that can be seized upon in a court of law.  Unless you count this blog. Hmmmm.

I imagine a grid with each child on the left hand side listed separately as though a subject, Music, Spanish, Chemistry, English, Math, Art, PE, Religion, Social Studies and History.  Naturally, I'm better at some subjects than others, and while I'm great on the homework front for several of them, the pop quizzes they keep throwing at me kill my average and sometimes I forget to study or turn in things late.  I've done extra credit on every child, but the value and weight of that extra stuff varies.  In some cases, it may even be sinking my cumulative average.

The end objective in parenting and education is the picture you have in your head, the vision of your child adult, active, engaged in life, emotionally stable, intellectually curious and spiritually grounded in the reality that we are not here for ourselves, and everything we say, do and don't say and don't do, reflects who we are and how much we love.  But often those visions get added onto, with clattery bells and whistles of aspirations whispered, crazy dreams, ambitions that are the result of competitive parenting, pressures from the outside, and even just today I'm feeling peevish and thus persnickety about you in particular goals. 

It's so easy to get sucked into the muck of silliness, where our children become the sum of our aspirations, rather than the product of our love and their labor.  It's my son the doctor lawyer priest varsity football player concert pianist who is trilingual and grows heirloom tomatoes.  It's my artist Senator Olympic medalist Pulitzer prize winning former CEO who travels to far away places to give  important speeches on how to change the world.  Condensing all they are into what they do is the fastest way to kill the joy of raising human beings. 

It isn't all real, it isn't all necessary, but it's a dream scape version of our idealized offspring, fisked clean of all those foibles and flaws that get in the way, like the fact that a child can be a neat freak but not in any functional way, meaning all clothing he wears must be fresh out of the dryer, but he doesn't have to make his bed or shut his drawers. Or how she is a literal brainiac who can produce pages of complex Chemistry and mathematics equations, but fears cooking anything that doesn't come out of a toaster or microwave.  Another kid can remember everything anyone ever said, unless it was in class and about a subject. 

So as I consider child 1, child 2, child 3, 4, 5, 6,7, 8, 9 and 10 and the fact that one went to school today with his hair doing a fair imitation of a cockatoo and another wrecked because she had a hot dog for lunch but I was out of ketchup and a third who stayed up late doing homework she should have done over spring break and a fourth bragging about how she studied for the state capital test by using the computer (I worry), and an email about a child freaking over a poster he has to do on Italy which is due tomorrow and which he brought in early but wasn't finished ---because he brought it in early, I'm thinking, okay I don't really need grades. I just need a gut check to make sure I'm not auditing any of these classes.