Freedom and Free Will

The LORD secures justice for the oppressed,
gives food to the hungry.
The LORD sets captives free.-Psalm 146:7

The readings for today call us to freedom.  The true freedom that comes from the Lord is the only thing that can bring peace to the soul.  In this time and in this day, our country is extremely divided over the concept of freedom.  But what are we really looking for?  What need are we trying to fulfill?  My suspicion is that we are looking for acceptance and love. 

So let this blog today, with the sacred scriptures as our foundation, reflect on our search for freedom.  There are so many ideas of what it means to be free.  As a professed “guardian of freedom and the American way of life,” I have come to understand freedom in a new way.  It seems that freedom, in the cultural sense, has become the ability to do whatever pleases so long as it neither breaks the law nor hurts anyone.  Webster’s current primary definition is “the absence of necessity, coercion, or constraint in choice or action.”  I wish to argue that freedom is simply the ability to choose.  Webster says that very thing but places the emphasis on the lack of obstruction in choice.  But real freedom is not in the lack of something, but the fullness of something.  Our freedom is full of our active, conscious participation in what we do.  And it is our ability to choose that makes us free. 

We have this freedom that I think is confused with free will.  Our free will is the ability to do whatever we choose to do.  The choice is what makes freedom.  I look at my words and I agonize over what I feel is inferiority at trying to explain this.  However, I know that I cannot explain this well enough so I am going to offer the explanation given in the Catechism of the Catholic Church.  “Freedom is the power, rooted in reason and will, to act or not to act, to do this or that, and so to perform deliberate actions on one’s own responsibility.  By free will one shapes one’s own life.  Human freedom is a force for growth and maturity in truth and goodness; it attains its perfection when directed toward God, our beatitude.”-CCC 1731

With this idea of freedom, the ability to do whatever, we can come back to the search for acceptance and love.  And for this I must refer to the wisdom of our Holy Father, Pope John Paul II, because my words are not nearly as well.  In his encyclical, Redemptor Hominis,  “Man cannot live without love. He remains a being that is incomprehensible for himself, his life is senseless, if love is not revealed to him, if he does not encounter love, if he does not experience it and make it his own, if he does not participate intimately in it.”  What the Holy Father tells us is that we need love.  We cannot understand ourselves without love.  Love reveals us to ourselves.  The best part of this is that with the understanding of freedom, love is a choice. 

However, love from my perspective is being mistaken for lust.  As best as I can put it, love is an inward movement of the heart.  It speaks to other hearts.  Love seeks what is best for others and not for self.  When love is used to promote self over others, then it ceases to be love.  Love cannot be objectified because its nature is sacrificial.  We know love because it feels for us, it seeks us out and we encounter it.  The most magnanimous love is that Christ, who is love, seeks us, so much that he gave his life to us and for us.  His act teaches us what the extreme selfless act should be and we are called to model that, to imitate that, in our daily lives.  Lust, by its very nature, cannot be selfless.  Lust cannot give because it is inherently selfish. 

We can be set free by accepting love.  There is freedom in acceptance of what is good.  Constraint by evil only creates circular ruts because lust and evil only promotes more lust and more evil.  In hope, love and goodness promote more love and more goodness.  

We return to freedom again.  We have the choice in our lives to do as we will.  Our choices are what define who we are and how we are viewed by the world.  If we must make a choice, the choice founded in love promotes goodness.  Making choices that promote what is best for others carry with it the inherent nobility and carry charity at its core.  This is freedom. 

The Gospel message today describes the glory of God in the Kingdom.  Our participation in the kingdom comes back to our choices.  The guidance given by the Lord is to “not go off.”  Rather our choices give us the ability to participate in the Kingdom of God.  Our hope and our sanctity rest in God alone.  Let us be free and live as God intended.  With love and freedom.