“Elijah appealed to all the people and said, ‘How long will you straddle the issue? If the LORD is God, follow him; if Baal, follow him’” (1 Kings 18:21). A synthesis of opposing ideas is not always possible. Sometimes a moderating position is untenable. For example, a jury has to decide whether or not to send a defendant to jail. They can’t put one half of the defendant’s body in jail and leave the other half of his body out of jail. A decision has to be made one way or the other.
St. Ignatius Loyola was a master of making such decisions. After due circumspection and deliberation, he would make a clear decision and hold to it firmly, seeing it all the way through. His Spiritual Exercises are a kind of guide for making such decisions and implementing them. The Spiritual Exercises guided St. Jacques Berthieu to become a missionary to Madagascar, even though he was already a man of middle age. How could he, a man in his later thirties, learn the Malagasy language from scratch and be effective with it? How could he change from a European lifestyle to a Malagasy one? The process of missionary training was quite a struggle for him. He exclaimed: “My uselessness and my spiritual misery serve to humiliate me, but not to discourage me. I await the hour when I can do something, with the grace of God.” He was not ashamed by his uselessness or overwhelmed by his misery, but he courageously persevered in his training and went on to serve successfully in Madagascar for 15 years before being crowned with martyrdom. He died in 1896 and was canonized in 2012.
Elijah the prophet, St. Ignatius Loyola and St. Jacques Berthieu did not straddle the issue. They knew when and how to choose, and they persevered courageously with their decisions. May you have the grace to do as they did.