Living in the Freedom of Being

“For freedom Christ has set us free; stand fast therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.” – Galatians 5:1, RSV-CE

How is your Lenten fast going so far? Been tempted to have that forbidden piece of chocolate, or (as for me), that bacon breakfast sandwich? On this first weekend, only a few days after Ash Wednesday, it seems a little bit ironic, or at least counter-intuitive that we talk about freedom, the freedom that Christ set us free for. However, Lent is in many ways the perfect moment to think about freedom, especially our freedom as believers in Jesus.

Bishop Kirk Smith in his Ash Wednesday sermon referred to Lent as a time of returning to the “default”, the “de-fault”: meaning to be with out fault, to remove fault, to go back to factory settings. In many ways, the Lenten season is one of the greatest gifts that our holy mother, the Church gives us. It is a time for us to strip away all of the pretensions of our faith, all of the trimmings (notice how bare the Cathedral is?), and get back to the basics. So, what is this freedom? Before we talk about that, I want to unpack a little bit more about this “point” to Christian faith that Fr. Radcliffe has been developing.

Fr. Radcliffe in this week’s reading from What Is The Point of Being a Christian, writes that “The point of Christianity, before anything else is to show that there is a point to our lives. Our lives are pointed towards some ultimate end.” (p. 29). This point then is meaning, that is, the story, the Reign of God coming to earth and God making peace and restoring the earth to its original glory. One of the powerful things about our faith is that God not only gave us the promise of God’s coming Kingdom, God also gave us a glimpse of that coming Kingdom in the person of Jesus. Just as the Kingdom of God broke in at that moment in God’s self-disclosure through Jesus, we too are called to show forth the “breaking forth” of God’s Kingdom. So how do we show the “end game” of the story? We do this through making manifest the end of the journey in our own lives.

One way we do this is to live in such a way that our lives would not make sense if God did not exist. This is a phrase that iterates / repeats itself often in Fr. Radcliffe’s book, only because this is the way, the mode that our faith has to take. Here, we explore specifically freedom. Fr. Radcliffe writes: “Christianity invites us to a peculiar freedom and happiness, which is a share in God’s own vitality … our hope is sustained by this taste for the goal of the journey.” (p. 29). So what then is freedom?

Being Set Free to Be

Freedom is a word that gets tossed around a lot, especially in our American context. We talk a lot about freedom: freedom of religion, freedom of conscience, freedom of movement, …, freedom of choice. These are freedoms that we have. And here is perhaps where we might misunderstand what freedom is. One of the things that Christianity teaches us is that freedom is not something we have but something we are. The freedom of Christianity is not some juridical or legal construct that gives us the ability to do something. Instead, it is the freedom to be, to be who we are at the core of who we are, in the words of the Baptism liturgy: “marked as Christ’s own forever” (Book of Common Prayer, p. 308). Remember, that at Baptism, our identity, our being is fundamentally changed and made anew.

Freedom then, is our ability to act out of the deep core of our being, which, as Christians is deeply rooted in God. One of the truths of how we understand freedom in our culture is that freedom is about choices, the ability to make them. But, you may be forming an objection in your mind here. Isn’t the traditionalist / orthodox writer that is Ian going to talk about rules, commandments, canon law, and how following them is the spiritual way? In the words of our Lord Jesus, “the Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath”. Christian freedom is not for the sake of the rules, for the tradition, for the Canon Law. The laws and rules of Christianity are not in and of themselves the way of holiness. Like a finger pointing to the moon, they show us the way, they point us to the core of our being, and the core of God’s heart and mind. As the finger pointing to the moon is not the moon, so are the commandments, doctrines and dogmas of the Church not the core of our being, or the core of God’s heart and mind. They are way-markers, like the cairns that mark the mountain trails.

As with any spiritual endeavor or even any skill, we can’t really begin to do it on our own without first grounding ourselves in the basics, understanding the fundamentals. As with learning a modern language, we begin with the basic grammar and phrases, then expand to more complicated ones. So being free is learned. It begins with a deep grounding in tradition and practicing the Way with training wheels so to speak. Here, the rules help teach us what inner freedom looks like. They aren’t just about doing this or not doing that, but they are about learning a way to be. Here we see a parallel to the Buddhist tradition. The great 20th century Buddhist master, Chögyam Trungpa taught that this first learning is grounded in learning to be acutely mindful, to be aware of one’s actions. We need the rules to remind us to be mindful. I pray before I eat to be mindful that I am about to eat, and that but for God’s grace and mercy, I would not be eating now. I pray when I am in awe of nature, because here, once again, God’s beauty radiates through God’s creation.

Once we are mindful, once we get the basic principles, we can then get creative and be spontaneous. But this creativity and spontaneity are not the wild anarchy that we normally think of. In fact, the paradox is best expressed by another Buddhist master of the 20th Century, Shunryu Suzuki: “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few”. What’s important to understand here is not that the expert is learned and therefore closed minded. Rather, the expert is so thoroughly aware and awake that the expert can see the real choices as opposed to the false choices. To put this back into the context of Christian freedom, the “beginner” Christian cannot distinguish between those choices which reflect only his or her disordered emotions or addictions and those choices which reflect the core of his or her identity as one “marked as Christ’s own forever”.

So this freedom then enables us to make choices that are as, St. Paul put it of Jesus ministry and message: “foolishness to the world”. These are choices that are made from the depths of our hearts and our being. These choices are not easy ones, nor are they necessarily immediately apparent. The creativity and spontaneity of Christian freedom then isn’t just doing something that comes in the moment, it is rather acting from the core of one’s being where God directly sustains us in our being.

What This Non-Sensical Freedom Points To About The Reign of God

So then, what is the point of Christian freedom? What does this all have to do with the point of being a Christian, the end game? As Christians, we believe our lives are intimately connected with a story, and that this story has meaning. The story we are connected to is the story where God’s Reign will one day come, and one day, we will all be set free, to be who we are as God’s children. We know that future will one day come, because we see it breaking through in the lives of people here and now. We see it through the examples of saints, in particular, the likes of Maximilian Kolbe, Dietrich Bonhoffer, Nelson Mandela, St. Teresa of Calcutta, and many others who are known to God alone. And we should also see it breaking forth in our own lives.

Our freedom shows when we are not bound by captivity to anarchy, or when we are free to worship the living God. St. Thomas Aquinas taught that there are four frequent substitutes for God: money, power, good feelings, and honor. These are the four idols that we often find ourselves bound in captivity to. What would our lives look like if we broke free from this captivity as we have been empowered to do by our Lord Jesus? Worshipping the living God is not about being scrupulously obedient to every letter of every law. Rather, it is being fully awake in him, it is having our eyes truly and completely open to God’s grace. The rules aren’t the life of freedom, they point us to freedom, and help us live that freedom gracefully in our own lives.

So in this Lenten season, how is God’s freedom breaking forth in your life? How are you using this “default” season to be free? I invite you, through your Lenten discipline, whatever it may be, to discover how that discipline makes you free, and indeed how your Christian life makes you more free.

Grace, Peace and Love,

Ian