Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that every choice in life is a renunciation. Thomas Aquinas said that, and it helps explain why we struggle so painfully to make clear choices. We want the right things, but we want other things too. Every choice is a series of renunciations: If I marry one person, I cannot marry anyone else; if I live in one place, I cannot live anywhere else; if I choose a certain career, that excludes many other careers; if I have this, then I cannot have that. The list could go on indefinitely. To choose one thing is to renounce others. That’s the nature of choice. We are fired into this world with a madness that comes from the gods and has us believe that we are destined to embrace the cosmos itself. We don’t want something, we want everything. That’s a simple way, though a good one, of saying something that Christianity has always said, namely, that in body and soul we are meant to embrace everyone and we already hunger for that. Perhaps we experience it most clearly in our sexuality, but the hunger is everywhere present in us. Our yearning is wide, our longing is infinite, our urge to embrace is promiscuous. We are infinite in yearning, but, in this life, only get to meet the finite. Life and love, beyond the abstract and beyond the grandiosity of our own daydreams, involve hard, painful renunciation. But it is precisely that very renunciation that helps us grow up and makes our lives real in a way that our daydreams don’t. In trying to explain some of the deeper secrets of life, Jesus gives us this parable: The Kingdom of God is like a merchant in search of fine pearls, when he finds a single one of great value, he goes and sells all that he owns and buys that pearl. That, the pearl of great price, the value of love and its cost, is in essence the challenge that young husband put to his wife when he told her to sort out the question: “Are you a married woman or are you something else?” For what 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? Thoreau once said: “The youth gets together materials to build a bridge to the moon or perhaps a palace or a temple…at length the middle-aged man concludes to build a woodshed with them.” So too in love and life: The child sets out make love to the whole world and the adult eventually concludes to marry a single person, in essence, to build a woodshed. But it’s only in that woodshed where life and love are real in this world.