The pearl of great price comes precisely at a price. Every choice is a renunciation, as St. Thomas Aquinas put it and that is why he helps us to explain why we struggle so painfully to make clear our choices, we want the right things too. Every choice is a series of renunciation: if I marry one person, I can’t marry anyone else; if I choose a certain career that excludes many other careers; if I have this I can’t have that. The list can go on in definitively. To choose one thing is to renounce others.
That is the nature of choice in most areas of our lives; we do not feel this so painfully. We choose and there isn’t a lot of sting to the loss. But the area of love is more sensitive. Here we feel the sting of loss more strongly and there we often find it hard to accept the real limits of life. What are those limits? We are fired into this world with madness that comes from gods and has us believe that we are destined to embrace the cosmos itself. We don’t want something, we want everything, our yearning is wide, our longing is infinitive, and our urge to embrace is promiscuous. We are infinite in yearning but in this life, only get to meet the finite. That is what makes love difficult. We are overcharged for our own lives.
We have divine fire inside us, we want everything, yearn for the whole world, and yet, at a point, have to commit to one particular person, at one particular place, and in one very particular life, with all the limits that imposes. Infinite desire limited by a finite choices, such is the nature of real life and love.
In trying to explain some of the deeper secrets of life, Jesus gives us this parable: are you willing to renounce other things? What is our own pearl of great price? Are we willing to give up everything in exchange for it? Are we willing to live with its limits? Until we are clear on these questions there is forever the danger that, like the wife who left the party without her husband, we will act out in dangerous and hurtful ways.
Thoreau said “the youth gets together materials to build a bridge to the moon or perhaps a place or temple…at length the middle-aged man concludes to build a woodshed with them” so too in love and life.
The child sets out to make love to the whole world and the adult eventually concludes to marry a single person in essence, to build a woodshed.
The word vocation suggests that the initiative for undertaking religious life comes from “outside” oneself, from another. You hear what God has to say in your life.
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