Choices

 I am a celibate priest. I made a choice.  I have never known the love of two people who decide to get married.  Nor have I suffered the divorce of two married people.  But then again they have not known my celibate experience of love.  Living means we make choices.  If we have a chance for a vacation and  two choices, we make one and leave the other.  We want to pontoon down the Danube and we want to backpack into the high Rocky Mountains.  It does little good to be way up the mountain and well into your backpacking trip to be sitting in your tent while the wind howls and the rain falls, wishing you were on the  Danube.  I ask myself here at the monastery, a choice I have made, what can I see and experience that makes today all worth the choice.  On a rainy/snowy and cold windy day, I don’t wish I were in a fine San Francisco restaurant eating a good fish.  Choice always means we don’t get something, but then we do get something from the choice.  The gift in choice is sometimes hidden, while the wishful is simply fantasy fueled by myopic self-pity.  I have found it so.