I recently received something in the mail asking our church to ring its bells on a particular date in celebration of freedom. Thanks to a vacation, I didn't get the chance to deal with it until after the date in question so I didn't pay much attention to the details. I do recall it used the phrase, "let freedom ring," and it prominently displayed stars and stripes on the letterhead.
I get a lot of such mail, activities and events aimed at churches but with a strong patriotic fervor to them. Some of this simply acknowledges that faith did play a part in America's break with England all those years ago. (Back in Britain, the American Revolution was sometimes referred to as the Presbyterian rebellion.) But still, much of the flag draped, faith oriented mail I get seems to assume that American notions of freedom are right in line with Christian understandings of freedom.
Secular freedom only creates individualists, and private freedom, but not a society. It never gets around to the common good, which is a central principle of Catholic social teaching and the Gospel, which demands from you and demands for others. Then you become who you most deeply and truly are, a member of a family, a neighborhood, a society, and a planet. If you are trying to “go to heaven” alone or on your own merits, you are preparing for a place other than heaven.This is a part of Fr. Richard Rohr's daily devotion for today. He is talking about how many of us think of freedom as being able to do what we want and not do what we don't want. But as he points out, this looks very little like the way Jesus lives or the way he calls us to live. Jesus says, "Not my will but yours." He says we must become servants and slaves to all, and in today's gospel he speaks of his death saying, "The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also." (In the hyperbolic speech of the Middle East, "hate their life" is a colorful and forceful way of saying "love their life less" than they love serving Jesus.)
St. Augustine wrote of God's grace making our wills willing. In other words, freedom is of little use to us until we want the things that God wants, until we truly want the things that we know are good and right. Think of all those times we do things that we regret even as we do them. Think of all those promises to ourselves that we break. Think of how fractured our society has become because so few of us can bear the thought of giving up our freedoms for the sake of another.
We don't need more freedom. We need a different understanding of freedom. There's a hymn in The Presbyterian Hymnal with this opening line. "Make me a captive, Lord, and I shall be free." A later verse begins, "My will is not my own till Thou hast made it Thine." Those strike me as pretty good descriptions of Christian freedom. Might we all be so free.
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WELL said!
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