Two Roads Diverged, and It Didn't Matter

Yesterday was my 7th wedding anniversary--a day of celebration and good memories. I was tempted to post something on Facebook like, "7 years ago today I made the best decision of my life," but then I wondered...was it the best decision? Or rather, have the last seven years really been about that one decision? Don't get me wrong: I think I made a great decision marrying my husband. It's just that more and more, I resist the idea that we have these huge decision points, and that everything follows from having picked the right, or the wrong, path to follow. It seems so much truer to me that we have lots of little decisions (some of which, like marriage, certainly carry big consequences), but that the way we experience life is really what happens after those decisions. I think we can get awfully wrapped up in the two roads diverged metaphor of life, and forget that whichever road we choose, we have more choices to come about how we interact in that part of the forest. From a marriage perspective, that means that my husband and I don't "have" a good marriage (or a challenging marriage, or a fun marriage), but rather that we create one. Of course anytime I write something down I immediately see all the disclaimers to the idea. And of course there are marriages that, no matter how much you work to create something good, just won't get there--and there are decisions that truly are forks in the road with no going back. But I'm at the very least intrigued by the idea that some of the urgent, do-or-die decision points are in our minds, while the little ways that we choose to live might go unnoticed but ultimately have a deeper impact on what our lives really look like. How about for you? Have there been big decision moments that defined you? Or have you found that a fork in the road can lead to paths that you still shape yourself?

Choosing to Be in Community

Sometimes you have to hear something you know in a new way to really understand it. This past Sunday I was chatting with a member of WES, waiting for the line to the post-Spring Festival brunch to get shorter. Like most Sundays in my life, it was a hectic morning: getting the family ready to go, arriving at WES and helping people find what they needed to put the morning together, attending to some of the little details that make a Sunday "happen." And at that particular moment I was hungry for brunch myself, and worrying about whether people were finding places to sit, and trying to focus on the conversation. The conversation in which this member, gesturing around him, said something like, "Look at all of these people, choosing to be in community together. It's so great." And you know, it was! It is! All of the details of a Sunday, all the details of any day in a congregation's life, really boils down to something as simple, and remarkable, as people choosing to be in community together. It's common for clergy to complain about consumer culture, about the way that people choose this congregation or that church or this synagogue because they want to get something, because they like this music better, because they've heard this one has great donuts. The idea behind the complaint is that American society has lost its staying power, that we have choice in so many aspects of our lives that we bring it to our religious lives too, and expect the congregation to mold itself around our interests. And there's something to that (in fact, I gave a whole platform about that once). But this past Sunday, I thought instead about the power of choice, and that a culture of choice makes it all the more wonderful when what we choose is to be together, to be in community. So here's a shout-out to the WES member who reminded me that there's a reason we run around on Sunday making sure all the details fall into place--and that, even more amazingly, we choose that reason, every week.