The concept of freedom has eluded humanity since the beginning. We so highly value our liberty, but in recent months it has taken a backseat to safety in the fight against the coronavirus.
Many of us find ourselves becoming agitated over the erosion of our personal freedoms. Whether or not we believe that the government is justified in placing rigorous restrictions on our lives is irrelevant at this point. No matter where you stand philosophically or the value you place on personal freedom, you are under the law. You will be fined for not complying.
“There is a paradoxical law of human life here: one cannot become truly free unless one accepts not always being free!” Father Jacques Philippe writes in his book Interior Freedom.
“To achieve true interior freedom we must train ourselves to accept, peacefully and willingly, plenty of things that seem to contradict our freedom.”
This sounds disappointingly tame. Some of us have fire in our bellies, and we feel like making a lot of noise and rallying support around our point of view. We see what is happening on a global scale, and we feel frightened and hemmed in. A primal fear starts to rear its head, and we go into defensive mode; the enemy is everywhere.
This panic and fear would indicate that we have not yet attained interior freedom. Once we understand the nature of interior freedom, we can start to glimpse what it is Christ came to accomplish.
If the world had its way, we would be hanging onto every word we hear from the media. In fact we’d never turn off the news. We’d also click on only the most biased, sensational “news” articles online, the ones that have been carefully curated by algorithms for our unique nightmare experience. We would let our lives be overtaken and governed by fear.
But, thankfully, because of the dignity of our baptism, we will not be bullied; we will not be afraid. Right?
The best way you can claim your interior freedom is first by recognizing that you are a child of God. No one will ever take away your inheritance. You have an eternal soul that cannot be destroyed by a virus, wildfires, gender wars, racial injustice, or corrupt governments.
Christianity is threatening. But not for the reasons you might think. It is threatening because, if we have God’s grace, we will love until the bitter end. We will go down with a smile on our face on that blessed day. Those who watch us conduct ourselves will have no choice but to consider the reason for our joy.
Following the Second World War, Austrian neurologist Dr. Viktor Frankl wrote a book called Man’s Search for Meaning. In its pages he imparts wisdom he accumulated during his imprisonment in various German concentration camps.
“The one thing you can’t take away from me is the way I choose to respond to what you do to me. The last of one’s freedoms is to choose one’s attitude in any given circumstance,” he writes.
“We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
We often don’t live up to the dignity of our baptism. We often aren’t the ones doling out our last piece of bread. We treat each other harshly when we act out of our own woundedness and give way to our fear.
But if we are committed to restoring this broken world to Christ, one soul at a time, he will give us everything we need, beginning with the interior freedom to forge onward with dignity and confidence, come what may.
