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 behavior.
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. … Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly.
I realize this is badly off-topic, but please indulge me. Most right wing websites, especially Catholic ones, no longer allow comments, especially ones critical of your church.
My problem: For many years I have been told that the Catholic church doesn’t hate women because they honor Mary, and that all humans are ‘feminine’ in relation to God and Christ. That is, in fact, pretty horribly misogynist. All humans are inferior to God, who is Male, so the status of being ‘feminine’ is inherently completely inferior. Priests have to be male because only males can be the image of Christ. Christ is God, so if the perfect image of God is any random male, then obviously women are not equally the image of God. Women are, again, inferior.
You do not act like you think you are inferior to men, which I admire. How do you justify in your mind the fact that your church teaches you every time you go into one that you are inferior to any male? I know what Aquinas said — women are barely even human and far inferior to men — and I know how modern theologians try to cover up for the obvious loathing all Catholic — and really all Christian — theologians had for women for centuries. Catholic theologians teach that all creativity is male, and the essence of being feminine is to be a passive lump on which the real humans act. You are creative. You act and think, and yet also accept the teaching that you’re somehow inferior to males. How? (And please don’t ‘specialchildofGod’ at me. I want to know how you deal with being told that the passive feminine is always worse than the active and creative masculine.)
Well, SINCE YOU ASKED, it does actually bother me a lot when people say that femininity is inherently passive, that women are inferior to men, etc. Because of that irritation, I asked a bunch of women I admire to help me assemble a pretty comprehensive and diverse reading list that deals with what the Church actually teaches about femininity and women. What you describe is, indeed, what many Catholics have and continue to believe and teach; but it’s not what the Church teaches! It’s what people who are wrong teach. I know you’ve been reading me for quite some time, and I do believe you’re genuinely curious about the answer, so I hope you will find something here that helps sort out actual church teaching from the crap that gets called “Catholic.”
https://www.simchafisher.com/category/read-this-not-that/
Thank you! I asked you precisely because you would give me a decent answer. I will definitely read what’s on your list. (I became interested in this topic again because I started reading Simone Weil last year and because she is far more learned that I’ll ever be, I got really lost really quickly. Still, she’s good and much more accessible than most 20th C philosophers.)
Again, thank you. And the cheesecakes look AMAZING. There used to be a place where I live that made both sweet and savory cheesecakes and I highly recommend exploring the savory ones too. I get misty thinking about their sun-dried tomato pesto cheesecakes, served with cucumber slices. Sob.)
Just last night at my daughter’s First Communion class, taught by our priest, he was talking about the seven deadly sins. The kids, of course, were fascinated by this, but I spoke up to say there were also seven corresponding virtues (our priest doesn’t mind if parents do things like this, thankfully). And then he talked about those, too. The way he explained this to the kids was great, and I was reminded of it when I was reading this article. He said that virtues are habits of goodness, and that virtuous people do the right thing because they have gotten into these right habits. And that we shouldn’t always be focused on NOT doing things (sinning) but on actually DOING things (virtuous decisions). They had been talking about confession, and of course, confession is a way to change habits from destructive ones to constructive ones.
This is exactly why I brought it up, and he of course explained it much better than I could.