By Father Thomas Esposito
Special to The Texas Catholic
A short story frequently read in middle school English classes is “The Lady, or the Tiger?” by Frank R. Stockton. The tale describes in detail an ancient king’s barbaric but entertaining strategy for determining a person’s guilt or innocence. In the great arena, the crowd watches ravenously as an accused man stands before two identical doors and is told to open one. Behind one door is a ferocious tiger who would devour him instantly, thus demonstrating his guilt; behind the other is a beautiful lady to whom he would immediately be married in an on-the-spot wedding ceremony, thus verifying his innocence. The plot thickens when the condemned lover of the king’s daughter enters the arena and stands before the “fateful portals.” While looking up at the royal box, he receives a secret instruction from the princess as to which door he should choose. She indicates the right-side door with a subtle move of her finger, and he goes to that door without hesitation.
Does she save his life and allow him to find wedded bliss with another lady, refusing to endure the horror of seeing him shredded by the tiger? Or does she send him to his death, selfishly unwilling to see him marry any other woman, especially one whom she has always despised?
Read the story for yourself to find out how it ends!
Now what aid, you might ask, does this story offer in terms of discerning one’s vocation? Nothing, really. But I always think of the two-door choice when I hear young men and women describing their fear of getting the Lord’s will wrong. There is a tendency to picture one’s discernment, whether the lifelong vocation question or a smaller decision, as a tense and perilous choice in an all-or-nothing, heaven or hell moment. Pick the right “door,” and you will be rewarded with a lifetime of joy and be given a seat of honor at the eternal wedding feast of the Lamb. Choose the wrong one, and you will suffer a lifetime’s anguish of paralyzing regret that you missed out on what God actually wanted from your life; worse still, you will hear the decrepit knight guarding the holy grail in the Indiana Jones movie say “You have chosen…poorly” as the tiger claws and gnaws you to death.
Such a view of discernment is, to say the least, misguided. But why?
The internal catastrophizing that comes from connecting discernment with the two-door analogy is wretched for several reasons. It presumes, for one thing, that you can somehow get the decision “wrong” if, having sought the guidance of others, you honestly desire to love and serve the Lord while choosing between two (or more) good options. It also features fear as the root motivator of the discernment, thereby guaranteeing that you will not be receptive to the calm love that God wishes to bestow upon you.
Above all, such an approach to discernment makes of God a callous onlooker who relishes in watching you overthink and panic from a distant and remote perch. This line of thought, though a splendid plot line for a short story about a tyrannical king, obviously contradicts the beautiful biblical assertions that God is love and that “perfect love casts out fear” (1 John 4:16-19).
These musings will not eliminate every anxious concern from the discernment process; courage will always be necessary to embrace life as a true adventure in grace rather than tiptoe through it as if it were a lethal minefield. Even if you should make an ultimately imprudent judgment, you must not doubt the capacity of God to reroute you, like a divine driving app, and gracefully right your wrong turn. The pursuit of God’s elusive will might feel at times like a game full of frustrations, but it can be, even in the moments of greatest uncertainty, a splendid response to an invitation motivated by love and the peaceful joy that always accompanies the eagerness to glorify the Lord by your life.
Father Thomas Esposito, O.Cist., is a monk at the Cistercian Abbey of Our Lady of Dallas and teaches in the theology department at the University of Dallas.
