Cultivating freedom
By Fr.
ROY CIMAGALA,
roycimagala@gmail.com
June 24, 2014
IT’S a difficult animal to
tame. I am referring to freedom that all of us want to invoke to
express what we really have inside our mind and heart. Unfortunately,
very little attention is given to the fact that freedom is something
we need to cultivate, and as such it requires all kinds of processes
and procedures, and patience, and patience, and still more patience.
I remember when I graduated
from high school, my father made for me the valedictory that I had to
deliver on behalf of my class. It had an intriguing opening line,
since my father, who was a lawyer, had a flair for the dramatic in his
orations.
“Freedom is not free,” my
speech began. “Either you pay for it or it buys you out.” That was
quite a mouthful for a 15-year-old to say, and I tried my best to show
that I understood what I said and that I meant it. Those were the days
of teen-age bravura. Now, of course, this memory makes me laugh.
I somehow understood then
that what my father meant was that freedom can either make or unmake a
man. I’ve read that in some novels, and seen it in some movies and
even in real-life third-person drama. But such understanding was more
theoretical than experiential.
Still, I knew then that the
seed of curiosity about freedom was planted deeply in my heart. And as
years passed, my understanding of it also grew. And what a tumultuous
itinerary I had to pass through! Indeed, direct, first-person
experience is quite a master teacher.
Our problem with freedom
usually stems from the fact that we have a partial understanding of it
which we tend to consider as already complete and full. We hardly
realize that our idea of freedom would often be short-sighted,
narrow-minded, biased and straight-jacketed according to our own
subjective criteria.
That is why we often would
have the sensation of highs and lows, exuberance and depression. A
sense of stability and confidence is hardly felt. But life in general,
no matter how much we twist it, cannot help but show us the real
objective face of freedom through the many contradictions and
humiliations we suffer along the way.
Yes, reality bites! It
sooner or later, one way or another, will burst the bubbles that we
unwittingly have been creating for ourselves. Sometimes, we fall
crashing down to earth after we managed to build a complex and
sophisticated dream world, driven by a false idea of freedom and
creativity.
Whether we like it or not,
aware of it or not, reality will find a way to tell us that freedom is
not something that we spontaneously generated. It’s not our own
making. It is something given to us, with an objective law that
governs it.
It’s not our creation, to be
used absolutely according to our own personal and subjective terms. It
comes together with the most fundamental truth that we are creatures
and that there is a Creator. Toward it, the proper attitude to have to
is to respect it and its law. And this requires a lot of humility.
The law that governs freedom
is, of course, nothing other than God himself, in whose image and
likeness we are. That’s why Christ, the fullness of the revelation of
God to us, said: “I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes
to the Father except through me.”
It is Christ who is the
truth that will make us free. And Christ himself lived by this truth.
His sense of freedom was bound up with his obedience to his Father’s
will, no matter how painful that will was.
Saints have understood this
character of freedom very well. Many of them have gone to the extent
of explicitly saying that freedom is none other than obeying the will
of God. That, in its distilled form, is the essence of freedom.
Freedom and obedience
therefore go together. One cannot be without the other, in
contradiction to the understanding of many of us who often put freedom
and obedience as antithetical to each other.
That’s why we need to deepen
our humility to be able to see this vital connection between freedom
and obedience. And again, this humility has to be understood not only
theoretically, but also practically. In fact, it should not only be
understood. It has to be lived always through the events and
circumstances of our daily life.
To cultivate true freedom is
to cultivate a growing obedience to God’s will. Outside of that orbit,
we can only have false freedom.