FREEDOM
Read Time: 4 minutes
“…Freedom comes through participation in higher meaning, not through autonomy from it.” – Justi Andreasen *
Ironically, we value autonomy. The song, “I Did It My Way” is our anthem of independence.
Even Adam and Eve’s “original sin” was more than about disobedience in eating fruit. They misunderstood God’s very nature – they saw God as autonomous and self-sufficient. They wanted to be like what they thought God was.
They could not recognize that God the Trinity: Father, Son, Holy Spirit – is perfect relationship. “God is love” [1 John 4: 8, 16], and love is relationship.
God’s desire for relationship is so immense that the love within the Trinity overflowed into creation in order to share it… with us.
God made all of nature – rocks, minerals, plants, animals, and people, to live in relationship with each other. Interdependence is indeed a law of nature. In God’s plan, there is no life without it.
Loving relationship takes a step further into empathy, compassion, mercy. The deeper the love the more we are able to move toward self-sacrifice for what we love.
Our soul draws us to relationship. Beginning with the most basic – husband/wife and family, through to friendships, community, country, and even the world.
Augustine said “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you” – Confessions.
Of all our relationships, our connection with the divine, our resting in the heart of God by accepting and returning God’s love, is our foundation. Without it, we try to fill that restlessness with everything else – our grasping at power, wealth, fame… all finite things trying to fill an infinite chasm that only the Infinite can satisfy.
Individuality and community are complementary: our identity is through relationships and relationships in turn cultivate our individuality.
Disordered independence is neither freedom nor liberation, it is isolation desperately searching for meaning while it discounts the source of meaning.
God cannot love us any more or any less than God loves us right now.
Over emphasizing laws and codes of behaviour tells us that we must be good to win God’s favour. It misses the point. As Adam and Eve did not understand God, we cannot comprehend unconditional love.
It has been said that sin is its own punishment, but too often we see liars, cheats, and thieves, profiting from their “crimes”. What then is the “punishment”?
It is that our soul’s hard-wiring is short-circuited. When we sacrifice love and relationships for what ultimately cannot satisfy we build a wall of self-reliance that becomes a lonely cage before we realize it. Punishment indeed inflicted on us, by us.
“…freedom comes through participation in higher meaning, not through autonomy from it.” *
God, please move in our hearts to help us open ourselves to our need for You and for one another. Quiet our restlessness in Your gentle unfolding grace. Help us integrate our individuality with our need for relationship. Draw us in Your unconditional love to our true fulfillment in You.
* Andreasen, Justi.