Free Will

This is the wonder of man that so frightens the cowards: every man is in control of himself; his acts are his own, he has full responsibility for every moment of every day, the success or failure of his life rests squarely on his own shoulders. He, and he alone in all the physical universe, is free: free to choose between the paths to his goals, or to abuse that freedom and abandon the human things for which he was made. He has a spiritual appetite commensurate to his spiritual knowledge; his will measures up to his intellect. He can know truth and goodness without limit; so his heart is free in the face of any one particular good since his mind can see it's limits, the promises it does not make, the desires it leaves unfulfilled.

What things that free will of man chooses in this life make or break a man. The evil we know may do us no harm if it does not stir desire, at least no harm beyond wasting time and energy that are not suffiecient for a knowledge of all good things. But the same is not true of our loving. To know a base thing, we must lift it up to our level, spiritualizing it for entry into our minds; to know what is superior to us, we must cut it down to the proportions of our own mind. Our will is not a host but always a guest; to love a base thing means to go out to it and identify ourselves with it, to love a noble thing means to go to its heights and rest in its embrace. In this life, it is quite true that it is both better and worse to love than to know; for love can be either disastrously degrading or breathlessly ennobling. Our happiness or misery is a matter of the objects of our loves.

It is still true that we must know in order to love; the heart does not outrun the head. The priority of our knowledge, the superiority of its rank comes out clearly in our eternal life with God. There we know God, not by cutting Him down to our size, not through the means of a concept or idea, but directly, face to face, through the direct union of the divine essence to our intellects. It is, in other words, by our act of knowing in heaven that we possess God, and the possession of the Infinite is our eternal happiness. The joy and love in the will is an effect of that happiness, not its cause. Here on earth, we have a foretaste of heaven by the divine love in our hearts; there we possess heaven by the eternal vision of God.

My Way of Life
- Confraternity of the Precious Blood