Like many parents in the history of parenting, trying to get our five-year-old boy to eat anything that looks, tastes, smells, or appears to be a fruit or vegetable is like trying to fit a camel through the eye of a needle. It ends up being my will versus his. While I usually do win after many painstaking minutes or hours, it's definitely not the joy of my life trying to teach this boy how to eat things that are good for him.
I think many a parent can empathize with the fact that we can make our kids do just about anything through sheer force of will, but we cannot want something for them. In fact, no one can want something for anyone else. Our desires, our wills, our choices are always our own. This is more or less true on its face, and you know it instinctually, but so many people fall into this philosophy known as Determinism. Essentially, what this mindset teaches is that your actions and choices are, in fact, not your own but are merely a consequence of all the external forces and pressures that are acting on you.
This is essentially a materialistic view on ethics, and there have been many renditions of it. One obvious example is the Freudian approach to psychology, which more or less teaches that the way you act as an adult was predetermined by what happened to you as a child, and there's nothing really you can do about it. This mentality was one that Pope Saint John Paul II vehemently disagreed with.
John Crosby, in his book, "The Personalism of John Paul II" wrote this:
“John Paul teaches that, though I am subject to many such forces acting on me, I am also handed over to myself in such a way as to be able to determine myself in relation to these forces, and thus to assert my freedom in the face of them.”
This does not dismiss all the various factors and external forces that influence us each moment of each day. Rather, this approach says these things are real. They really do affect us, and you can't help how you feel about them, but ultimately your choices are your own. No one can make you play chess, let alone force you to move a certain piece a certain way in a fair game. You might have learned from a great chess master and wished to imitate his strategy, but at the end of the day, it is you who picks up the piece and moves it.
I say all this because, so very often, when I'm talking to a new client or interacting with somebody in our app, I get the sense that there's an underlying deterministic mentality. However, people trying to live authentically Catholic lives know it is not true and are trying to fight against it. And praise God for that intuition, because they are right. While there are so many factors that affect why somebody might be unhealthy or maybe overweight, at the end of the day, we have self-determination because we were given a free will by God. Being a person means that you inherently possess yourself, however imperfectly.
George Weigel, in his biography of Pope Saint John Paul II, mentions that one of his famed phrases as a confessor and spiritual director to the young people he mentored was "You must decide."
I now put those words to you: it is you who must decide to take the reins on your health journey. No one can want it for you.
No app or coach or inspirational talk can make you do the hard work necessary to conquer yourself in order to give yourself.
It is you who must decide to set that alarm early so you can pray and work out, and then it is you who must do it.
It is you who must decide to say no to the convenience food and wait 30 more minutes to eat something at home.
It is you who must decide, no one else, so stop waiting to feel inspired or motivated.
Choose. Decide, then act and live out the freedom that Pope Saint John Paul II taught over and over again.
At our last HF Community Rosary night we dove into this a bit more. Check out the recording on youtube HERE (PS - do us a favor and subscribe to the channel!)