Word of Wisdom: Freedom
“Freedom is the oxygen of the soul.” Moshe Dayan
There is something elemental about freedom. When it’s present, it is so much a part of the environment that it’s taken for granted. When it’s absent, the power of that absence can crush the heart and suffocate the mind. The entire body yearns, the whole body politic aches, to breathe it once again. Like Hollywood’s William Wallace, even the final gasp cries out for it.
We were made for freedom. We were created to exist in it, to steward it and, in so doing, increase it. But alas, from time immemorial we have been prone to swinging wildly between squandering it on the one hand while destructively trying to claw it back with the other.
Indeed, we might (with a hat tip to Freud) title the history of humanity “Freedom and Its Discontents”.
In the beginning, there was “freedom to” (sometimes referred to as “positive freedom”): it was the immortal state wherein everything was possible, with no constraints. There was, however, a choice: to exist in that abundant, immortal state through unbroken union with the Immortal One, or to trade it all in a Faustian bargain for the knowledge, control, “self-ness” that mortality offers…enjoyed within death’s desperate vortex of scarcity and decay. That that choice even existed demonstrates the expansiveness of the “freedom to” we were created to breathe.
But it was in that garden of positive freedom that the first deceptive temptations to negative freedom—“freedom from”—emerged; and ever since we accepted the invitation to investigate “did God really say…”, we’ve been looking for liberty from the shackles of loss, lack, guilt, grief, meaninglessness and monotonousness, often filling the void with anything within reach while choking on the fumes of selfish rage.
Graciously, a pathway back to freedom has been forged, a trail has been blazed to the table of fellowship, the table of relationship with the Creator who has now become our Redeemer. We have access once again to the first freedom; we have a foretaste now of the freedom our first forebears knew.
How to follow that pathway is the great undertaking of our age.
In our search for understanding of how to “live free”, it’s interesting to note that our English term free shares the same Old Germanic root as our word friend, literally “one not in bondage”. Turns out, to have friends—ones you are “attached to through personal regard and affection”—might be central to being free. To paraphrase the final scene of a holiday classic, “No man is in bondage who has friends”.
Tellingly, the Germanic root of the word also encompassed the concept of “peace”. This shows up starkly in the word afraid, literally meaning “to take out of peace”. Small wonder that one of the surest ways to make a person “afraid”—to take them out of peace—is to isolate them. To make them alone, without friends.
Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised, either, that two of the most oft-repeated phrases spoken through the prophets and apostles are “I am with you” and “do not be afraid”.
But digging deeper, we find even greater treasures. While freedom is connected to friends, to community, to the peace that connection brings, at its foundation it is something more profound, something more elemental even than the simple state of being at liberty. Freedom, we find, traces its noble lineage to a few letters strung together by ancient Proto-Indo-Europeans, forming a word that embodied the essence of our deepest longing, and the Creator’s greatest gift. It means “beloved”.
To know, to receive, to accept that we are beloved—to live saturated in the truth that we are the beloved of God—becomes the sine qua non of freedom. It is how sons and daughters throughout history have been able to endure their bodies chained, imprisoned, enslaved, all while living free in mind, in heart, in spirit. It’s how the Son endured hurt and humiliation at the hands of humanity while forging freedom for all time.
It’s how we, as sons, can live free today.
It’s how we, as fathers, can lead others into freedom right now.
“And a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased.’” Mark 1:11