How free am I?

What does it mean to be free?

My Franciscan educators, back in the 1950s and 60s, contrasted their philosophy with the philosophy promoted by most of the rest of the Catholic academic world, philosophy shaped by Thomas Aquinas. Our Franciscan heroes were John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham. Those writers stressed freedom as an essential characteristic of the human condition. Through three years of study of that Franciscan version of Neo-Scholasticism, I came away with a sense of the beauty and wonder of freedom. But that freedom did not mean I could do anything I wanted to do. Freedom meant that I could do loving things and know that I was doing them freely because I wanted to do them. Nobody was forcing me to do them.

That became the basis of my thinking of love as a gift.

When I love someone, when I deliberately choose to treat that person with respect, with vulnerability, and with faithfulness, my love is a gift to that person. I don’t have to give it.

A gift implies freedom. A gift does not have to be given. A gift cannot be bought and sold. We have the wonderful custom that we do not allow price tags to be attached to a gift.  Cutting off the price tag removes the gift from the realm of measurement and strict reciprocity. It is true that a gift creates an expectation of a return gift, but the return cannot be in exact dollars and cents. It need not be immediate—the expectation can lie dormant for months and even years. “I owe you one” is a statement of solidarity between two people, not a statement of dependence. When the person receiving the gift feels oppressed by the dependence that a gift can create, the gift has gone off the rails.

In our Franciscan vision, everything is in some sense a gift from God. God did not have to give me life. I do not have to return that gift. When I do actions that I see as a return on the gift of life to me, I am acting freely. I do not have to do that. I do it because I want to. That gives me an intense dignity.

Every one of us has that kind of freedom, the freedom to respond to God’s gifts of life and love. From the earliest moments when a child is conscious of self, a child can give freely to God. That is one basis of the dignity of every child. Every child should know that they have that wonderful freedom and power—they can love God freely, just because they want to. My limited experience of children with disabilities tells me that even a child with serious mental disability is able to freely respond to love from others and from God.

How free am I?

In some ways, the story of my life can be seen as a story of “limited” possibilities. My family of origin had many limits, economic and psychological. When I decided in sixth grade that I wanted to be a Franciscan priest, was I free? The educational program that structured my joining the Franciscans took fourteen years. At any point during the first ten of those years I was free to walk away from the program. Then, at the end of ten years, I made a promise to “live the gospel” for the rest of my life. Was I free to do that?

There were factors that surely played into my decisions. In grade school I was generally not well accepted by my peers, mostly because I was fat and had almost no athletic skills. I looked forward to living in the seminary where I would not have to play softball. I was seriously mistaken, because the high school seminary program required every one of us to take part in every sport: softball and touch football in the fall, basketball and bowling in the winter, and baseball (“hard ball”) in the spring. We could ice skate when the seminary pond froze. I was good at none of those things. Why did I stay?

Surely I was rewarded in grade school by some of the Franciscan sisters who taught me. I got good grades, and was obedient. I do not recall comparable rewards at any later point in my seminary career, though certain teachers quietly recognized that I had certain abilities that other young men did not have. Was I free all along those years to continue pursuing the goal of living as both Franciscan and priest?

In some sense, I felt that I had to make that choice. I didn’t know why. Nobody was forcing me. Neither of my parents put any pressure on me. Even weeks before my ordination, my mother was saying “If you should be ordained . . .” Was I free?

I have concluded that freedom is a story that I tell about myself. I can tell the story that I was pressured to do something, and I can tell the opposite story that I did it freely and without pressure. When I tell my story as a story of freely doing things, I feel calm and joyful. I refuse to tell my story as a story that says I did something because someone else made me do it.

So maybe freedom is simply a choice between versions of the stories of my life.

Some people seem to go through life telling the story that they have no choice about important things in their lives. Are they mistaken? Is the story that they have no choice a demon from which only someone else can free them? Is the story that I have been free to make the important decisions in my life an angel?

The language of angels and demons reminds us that there are stories we tell about ourselves that are put on us somehow by others, and that those others can make our lives joyful or painful.

My Christian faith says that God wants every human person to tell their life story as a story of freedom and love, and that every one of us is called to try to free others if a demon of powerlessness seems to have taken over their story.

Maybe any one of us can be an exorcist, but we can’t practice exorcism without support from a loving God.

 

 

O