Is a Believer Really Free?

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An acquaintance a couple of years ago spoke to me about her frustration with her teenage daughter who wanted to live with her boyfriend.

“Don’t you want me to be happy?’ the girl asked her mother.

This may be a familiar kind of appeal to parents of teenagers, but the appeal to happiness, expressed that way or not, isn’t limited to teens. All of us have made, and continue to make, dubious choices in our pursuit of happiness. And like many teens, we chafe at anything we perceive as holding us back.

In a recent blog, I quoted theologian and spiritual writer Henri Nouwen as writing, “Hope is the trust that God will fulfill God’s promises to us in a way that leads us to true freedom.”

Slavery to Rules?
“True freedom?” For many, religious faith means just the opposite – slavery to rules and regulations and somebody else’s idea of happiness.

So what is the sense of “true freedom,” at least in the Christian perspective? Isn’t it the kind of freedom expressed in love?

“For what is love if not being somehow linked to the beloved, captivated, duty-bound?” asks Robbie Young in an essay in Living City, a publication of the Focolare Movement. “A text message must be answered, a birthday must be remembered, and an apology must be made for feelings that are hurt.”

Freedom, we’ve come to believe, is being able to do what you want, being free to wear what you want, say what you think, choose your interests, your friends, your values, your belief or non-belief.

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“Why should I feel obliged to go to church on Sunday when I want to spend the weekend hiking in the mountains or take my kids to the face-painting festival?” asks Young.

Those of us who have been married a long time know that you spend a lifetime together daily subjecting your freedom to the wishes of the other. You don’t ask, “Why would I spend hours at my sick spouse’s hospital bedside when I want to play golf?”

That’s the kind of love Jesus is talking about when, quoting the Hebrew Scriptures, he says that we must “love the lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength,” and “love your neighbor as yourself.” When we fulfill those commandments, we may be doing what we wouldn’t otherwise want to do and refraining from what we may want to do, but in love we maintain our freedom.

As in a Glass Darkly
The problem for many is this “love of God.” How can you love someone whom you can’t see, feel, hear or touch? For me, it’s a question that’s never answered satisfactorily because in our present state, as St. Paul reminds us in his first letter to the Corinthians, “We see as in a glass darkly.”

How to love God, and how to explain his/her love for us, are mysteries. Both, however, are deeply rooted in Judeo-Christianity, and can be achieved in an analogous way, through faith. And it explains how we can be people of faith and maintain our freedom.

The freedom involved in loving clearly isn’t the kind of freedom that comes to the minds of most modern people when they think of the word. It is, however, the kind of freedom involved in faith.

St. Augustine is quoted as saying, “Love and do what you want.”

“In other words,” writes Young, “I can do what I want as long as it is love.”