How Much Control Do We Really Have Over Our Lives?

From early on, we are taught to think of life as a sequence of choices—decisions guided by our feelings and the effort we exert to become who we will be. Who we will become is usually shorthand for what occupation we will take up to support ourselves. If not that, then perhaps we anchor our identity in roles: father or mother, sister or brother, friend or helper. But rarely do we ask about the actual capacity we have to fulfill these roles—or the constraints within which we will attempt to do so.

I don’t like the word predestination, but in a sense we are fated. We are given a particular set of obstacles and conditions—many of them fixed—that limit our freedom and shape what is possible for us. We are thrown into this world as human beings, and the one certainty shared by all of us is that we will remain human and undergo human experience. The quality and contours of that experience vary wildly. And for some of us—like me, entering my second week of ECT to treat a bipolar depressive episode, accompanied by what I can only describe as demonic suicidal ideation—that variance can feel profoundly unfair when compared to those who seem “normal,” “functional,” or generally content with life and with themselves.

Even if our actions are not strictly predetermined, we cannot shake fate. With bipolar disorder running in my family, my premature birth at three pounds two ounces, and a stressful, demanding environment growing up, it is hardly surprising that I would struggle. I did not choose these things. But we live in a fallen world—one given over to corruption, restrained only by death and by God’s determination, from all time, to take all our experience upon himself and render it potentially redemptive.

This is how I participate in God. This is how I participate in the sufferings and love of Christ for Adam—for all mankind. My vocation, at least for now, is the daily battle simply to stay alive, to remain present to my wife and children. This is the world. And Christ is not of the world. Yet we need not be afraid, for he has overcome it—even though “the light shone in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.”

And so, it seems, the Stoic understanding of fate and the Logos—the rationality of things—holds up insofar as they understood Nature to provide nothing that one was not, in principle, capable of facing through prosoche, a watchfulness over one’s judgments. To be sure, it often takes more than disciplined attention to endure many situations, and the Stoics could only go so far. But God has not left us with attention alone. He has given us a way to overcome the limitations of the world—not by escaping them, but by transfiguring them.

And in the end, what this requires more than anything is a spirit of sacrifice—of sacrificial love. St. Paisios once spoke of a time when he had come to the mainland from Mount Athos. He was in the late stages of excruciating cancer, would accept nothing stronger than prednisone for the pain, and had to brace himself with a chair just to remain standing. And yet, in speaking to, praying for, and giving himself to the thousands of pilgrims who had come to him that day—each carrying their own spiritual and material hardships—he says he was renewed, strengthened, and able to remain standing through the all-night vigil that followed.

The point he makes repeatedly in his Spiritual Counsels is that sacrificial love—suffering with and for others—does not exhaust us in the way we expect. It propels us forward rather than casting us down. For this is precisely how we participate in Christ and are granted access to his uncreated grace.

This may seem to stray from my earlier claim about our lack of choice in our circumstances, even when those circumstances involve what appears to be pointless suffering. But as Thomas Hopko once said, it is some people’s job simply to be sick. And it is precisely in this way—thrown into the world as we are—that we gain our bearings. And despite the logismoi, the demonic thoughts that assail me now and keep me from writing as I wish, I can still say this: without this struggle, how could I ever meet my Lord and King face to face and say, I too suffered in your sufferings, which you suffered first for me?

Nor could I say that I learned compassion, or that I learned how to step outside myself and care for the less fortunate. In truth, the most misfortunate are often those for whom life is easy—those who isolate their entire identity from God in the name of a job or role that, like dust, will in time be blown into the sands and forgotten.