1187 words, 6 minute read.[A Spanish translation is available here.]
If Jesus returned today, how could he tell who his followers are? He’d look not at what people say, but at what they do. Who is it that feeds the hungry, welcomes strangers, encourages the disheartened, is ready to give their life for their friends? He’d look for those who embrace the excluded, ease the pain of the suffering, defend the defenseless, not those who shout “Lord, Lord” or who declare that their presence renders a place “holy ground.” He’d look for those who waste time with the worthless, are brothers and sisters to the lonely and who take the last seat at banquets. He’d look for those who recognize Him in their neighbors and who put the needs of others ahead of their own.
In other words, he would look for those who live moral lives, since morality is nothing other than choosing good over evil, choosing love over hatred or indifference, choosing others over myself. For a follower of Jesus, morality starts with the good news that God so loves us that he sent us his only son, who loved us like a brother, who called us his friends. A Son who even accepted being forsaken by his own Father, moments before dying on the cross, so that no suffering, failure or separation would be insurmountable, so that no one would ever think that they are off limits for God’s love or the love of his followers, so that all would know that His resurrection is for them, open to them, waiting to welcome them.
Wherever there is division, suffering, exclusion, oppression, Jesus is firmly on the side of the forsaken. God’s self-giving, self-noughting love makes every person sacred and of intrinsic value. All of Christian morality follows from this central reality of God’s love for his creation and for us, humans, whom he made so that we may freely respond to his love. And He invites us to choose Him, to choose what is good, with every single choice we make and in every single action we perform. Should I feel jealous of another person’s success, or should I rejoice with them in their achievement? Should I say a certain thing about another person, or would it be gossip that wounds them? Should I buy this product, or another, knowing that a purchase impacts the lives of many who worked on bringing it within my reach, where one choice may contribute to just wages while another may line the pockets of modern day slave owners and destroy the environment? Should I sleep with my girlfriend or boyfriend as an expression of love for them, or would it be a reckless gamble with her or his life and the potential life of a child? Should I denounce abortion, or do I also need to seek the good of those who committed it, recognizing their anguish and suffering too and being aware that I don’t know and can’t know the state of their innermost selves?
God waits patiently, longs for all to come ever closer to Him and His mercy has no limits. And since following Jesus is an invitation to imitating him, I too am invited to love in the way in which God loves me and every single other person, no matter how imperfectly I or they may respond to God’s invitation to reciprocate His love. There is always a choice open to me that brings me closer to God and therefore to every other person too. No matter how far I am from God, choosing to move closer to Him is the moral thing to do and no matter how often I make the wrong choice, every present moment gives me alternatives that are more moral than others.
Not only is choosing good always available to me, but God Himself is there with me in my innermost self, in my conscience, to guide me and help me discern good from evil. Even in my most intimate self I am not alone, but it is there that God invites me to choose Him who is Good, who is Beauty, who is Truth, who is Love. And He sends me his followers to help me listen to His voice, to help me form my conscience so that it may be ever more attuned to God, to help me persist in choosing good over evil. And He helps me further still by making what is good deeply embedded in the very nature of the universe and accessible to reason.
The choice of good over evil is centered on self-giving, which is participation in God’s creative act of love. It requires self-noughting so that giving may be perfect and ready to perfectly receive a gift in return, holding nothing back and leaving nothing out. So that giving and receiving may be in imitation of the life of the Trinity itself, where the Father gives himself wholly, generating the Son, the Son empties himself wholly in return, giving Himself to the Father without exception and the Holy Spirit makes Himself nothing so that the Father and the Son may love one another in Him without constraint. Such loss comes at a price, but one that is far outweighed by the love that follows and the joy it brings.
Like the inner life of the Trinity, morality is not primarily a matter of individual perfection or achievement, but the quality of a life lived in a community that journeys towards God, a community that journeys with God. Imperfectly, failingly, but with the God who emptied himself, suffered forsakenness and died for his friends, walking among his brothers and sisters. Being composed of imperfect members, this community’s morality too is imperfect and evolving, and its perfection is commensurate with the degree to which it lives in the presence of Jesus in its midst. It strives for an ever deeper understanding of what choosing good over evil means, an understanding that grows over time as a fruit of the Holy Spirit. What once was considered acceptable becomes absolutely forbidden and what at one time was out of bounds is welcomed. Capital punishment and inter-denominational marriage respectively are past examples in the Catholic Church; what will be future ones? Everything changes and nothing does at the same time, since God’s self-giving, all-embracing love for us, whom he endows with intrinsic value by that love, is the immutable core to which we tend on our journey towards Him and with Him.
A consequence of this journey is also the need for particular sensitivity to what is on the boundaries of morality at any one time, since some of these, as yet forbidden choices may be where the journey towards God leads next, while others slope off and away from union with Him. Only an openness to God’s voice in my innermost self, in the hearts and minds of my brothers and sisters, in the voices of the suffering and forsaken and in silent prayer will lead to discerning right from wrong here, to understanding what God’s love and mercy call for in the here and now.
3135 words, 16 min read(updated on 19 February 2020 to include Querida Amazonia)[A Spanish translation is now available here.]
When faced with a choice, how do I decide whether to do one thing or another? A lot of the time I might not even think about it and just pick one alternative at random or out of habit, or I might just go along with what others are choosing. Would you like tea or a fruit infusion? It doesn’t matter – I like both. But when the consequences of my decisions are obviously serious, how do I make sense of the alternatives and what are the criteria I take into account when making a choice? Do I go along with medical treatment offered to me, when I know that it involves harm to others? And what about choices that on the face of it appear trivial but that have life-changing consequences for others? Do I buy this shirt or that one? What if one is putting money in the pockets of the criminals behind modern-day slavery while the other comes from a supply chain with high ethical standards, providing a fair wage to local communities in developing countries?
The actions that result from decisions about each of the above questions, and questions about doing one thing or another in general, can be evaluated from a variety of perspectives, one of which is also whether they are moral, whether they are good or evil. In this context I would here like to look at what the teaching of the Catholic Church is today, as presented by Pope Francis.
Here, the Catechism of the Catholic Church presents morality as deriving from freedom, where “[h]uman acts, that is, acts that are freely chosen in consequence of a judgment of conscience, can be morally evaluated. They are either good or evil.”[1] The following will therefore be an attempt to summarise Pope Francis’ teaching on what constitutes good versus evil acts, how to distinguish one from the other, how to live in a way where the good becomes ever more present in one’s life and how to help others on their journey towards an increasingly moral life. The source of this summary will be Pope Francis’ encyclicals and apostolic exhortations: Evangelii Gaudium (EG), Laudatio Si’ (LS), Amoris Lætitia (AL), Gaudete et Exsultate (GE), Christus Vivit (CV) and Querida Amazonia (QA).[2]
The starting point for Pope Francis is the kerygma, the first announcement of the Gospel, that Jesus loves me, gave his life for me to save me and that he lives beside me every day.[3] Such love from God invites us to reciprocity, to discerning our own path towards him,[4] to recognising God in others and to striving for their and our common good,[5] which in turn leads to “good living”[6] and joy.[7] It is a love that God addresses to everyone and that we are called to share with everyone,[8] not excluding anyone. “[N]o one is excluded from the joy brought by the Lord”.[9] It is a love that goes well beyond a body of teachings or a moral code and that culminates in the great message of salvation.[10]
God’s love gives intrinsic value and primacy[11] to the human person (who is sacred, inviolable and an end in themselves,[12] regardless of whether they be poor, unborn or disabled[13]) and places them, their relationship with God, and their call to loving their neighbours, at the heart of the Church’s moral teaching. “For the whole law is fulfilled in one word, ‘you shall love your neighbour as yourself’” (Gal 5:14).[14]
The gratuity and initiative of God’s love frames us, and all of Creation too, as a gift,[15] which we are invited to accept and protect. I (with my life and abilities), and my neighbours are a gift, as is the whole world, which is our common home.[16] Everything I do and every decision I take (including every purchase I make[17]) impacts the world and is a moral act.[18] Directly opposed to this reality are individualism and relativism, which follow from a delusion of absolute, arbitrary power over myself, my body and all of creation,[19] which even challenge every person’s inalienable right to life[20] and which lead to exclusion, inequality, abuse and domination.[21] I mustn’t become desensitised to these evils of injustice. Instead, I am called to respond to them with outrage, as Jesus did,[22] and to overcome them. No matter how damaged, inconsequential, discarded or worthless someone’s life may appear, God is present there, waiting to be found there by me[23] and waiting for me to share in their suffering,[24] to work for their advancement and to bring justice to them.[25] I am called to dialogue with everyone, where differences are a source of mutual enrichment rather than walls or threats to my own identity; dialogue with those unlike myself strengthens and enriches my own identity rather than threatening it.[26] “We need “to acknowledge jubilantly that our life is essentially a gift, and recognise that our freedom is a grace.”[27]
Everything is interconnected and forms a single reality, where a care for our own lives, our relationships, nature, fraternity, justice, sexuality, the family, society, politics, culture are all one and indivisible.[28] Jesus’ teachings therefore cannot be reduced to rules and structures that follow a cold and harsh logic but that ultimately end up as means of domination[29] and whose transmission obscures the great experience of Christian life,[30] which rejects nothing of the goodness that already exists in any situation.[31] Such rules and structures would both hide a false belief that everything depends on our own powers and end up complicating the Gospel,[32]leaving little room for grace and turning our religion into servitude.[33]
Pope Francis gives the following example of the integral approach that is at the heart of his teaching:
“Our defence of the innocent unborn, for example, needs to be clear, firm and passionate, for at stake is the dignity of a human life, which is always sacred and demands love for each person, regardless of his or her stage of development. Equally sacred, however, are the lives of the poor, those already born, the destitute, the abandoned and the underprivileged, the vulnerable infirm and elderly exposed to covert euthanasia, the victims of human trafficking, new forms of slavery, and every form of rejection.”
(GE, 101)
Instead of rules and regulations, Jesus presents us with two faces: that of the Father and that of our brother, “or better yet, one alone: the face of God reflected in so many other faces.”[34] The Gospel, at the heart of which is life in community and engagement with others,[35]sums this up in the golden rule: “In everything, do to others as you would have them do to you” (Mt 7:12), which is to be applied in every case, especially when facing difficult moral judgments,[36]and which grounds every moral norm.[37] “Our Lord especially appreciates those who find joy in the happiness of others. If we fail to learn how to rejoice in the well-being of others, and focus primarily on our own needs, we condemn ourselves to a joyless existence, for, as Jesus said, “it is more blessed to give than to receive” (Acts 20:35).”[38]
Sexual morality in particular often leads to “incomprehension and alienation from the Church”[39] and while sex can be a basis of undue exaltation, self-obsession, submission, exploitation or violence,[40] it is first and foremost God’s “marvellous gift to his creatures”.[41] Rather than being a taboo, it is a gift, given with the purpose to love, to build conjugal friendship, to fulfil the other, who is a gift for me,[42] and to generate life.[43] “[E]very person, regardless of sexual orientation, ought to be respected in his or her dignity and treated with consideration.”[44]
Work is another important good, since it gives meaning to life on this earth, is a path to growth, human development and fulfilment, a means for helping the poor while striving to giving them too access to work[45] and a way to cooperate with God in the work of creation.[46] It too is open to abuse in a great variety of ways, including “in clandestine warehouses, in rings of prostitution, in children used for begging, in exploiting undocumented labour.”[47]
The social dimension of our lives has strong moral implications, calling us to respect the good name of others[48]and to work towards the common good, social peace, stability and security, provided by an order that incorporates distributive justice and prevents violence.[49] “[P]articipation in political life is a moral obligation”[50] and maintaining credible institutions, with political representatives free from corruption, is a basic need.[51]
A key role in living a moral life is played by our consciences, which enable us to discern and act upon the invitation of the Gospel[52] and to realise that “what we consider objectively good is also good “for us” here and now.”[53]Conscience can recognise when a situation is incompatible with the Gospel and is therefore sinful,[54] what a person’s most generous response to God can be in that situation, given their limitations, and that this “is what God himself is asking amid the concrete complexity of one’s limits, while yet not fully the objective ideal.”[55]Conscience gives us an “awareness of both our gifts and our limitations.”[56]
Consciences need to be formed, which is the work of a lifetime “in which we learn to cultivate the very sentiments of Jesus Christ, adopting the criteria behind his choices and the intentions behind his actions (cf. Phil 2:5)”.[57]This mustn’t amount to replacing consciences,[58] since “[o]thers must be acknowledged and esteemed precisely as others, each with his or her own feelings, choices and ways of living and working.”[59]
Adhesion to the Church’s moral teaching is always incomplete, but what God expects of us is to do what we can, ask for what we cannot, to pray to him with humility[60] and to always remain open to new growth and to new choices that make us advance towards the ideal of perfection.[61] “[A]ll of us are a complex mixture of light and shadows. Love does not have to be perfect for us to value it.”[62] Also, caring for those who do not adhere to the Church’s moral teaching is an expression of charity rather than a dilution of faith.[63] We are called to make ourselves “weak with the weak… everything for everyone” (1 Cor 9:22)[64] and accept the other person “even when he or she acts differently than I would like”.[65]
Pope Francis gives the following example of such potential for growth:
“When a couple in an irregular union attains a noteworthy stability through a public bond – and is characterized by deep affection, responsibility towards the children and the ability to overcome trials – this can be seen as an opportunity, where possible, to lead them to celebrate the sacrament of Matrimony.” and contrasts it with cases of “cohabitation which totally exclude any intention to marry”.”
(AL, 78)
The key here is to grow from where one is towards a fuller life of the Gospel,[66] a growth that can “only occur if we respond to God’s grace through constant acts of love, acts of kindness that become ever more frequent, intense, generous, tender and cheerful.”[67] Each one of us advances gradually by combining both God’s gifts and demands[68] and we need to acknowledge our limitations, otherwise we inhibit the working of grace within us and “no room is left for bringing about the potential good that is part of a sincere and genuine journey of growth.”[69]
Pope Francis gives an example of this attitude:
“[A] woman goes shopping, she meets a neighbour and they begin to speak, and the gossip starts. But she says in her heart: “No, I will not speak badly of anyone”. This is a step forward in holiness. Later, at home, one of her children wants to talk to her about his hopes and dreams, and even though she is tired, she sits down and listens with patience and love. That is another sacrifice that brings holiness. […]”
(GE, 16)
We must avoid judgments that do not take the full complexity of a situation into account,[70] remembering that each person’s situation before God and their life in grace are mysteries[71] and that “[n]o one can be condemned for ever, because that is not the logic of the Gospel!”[72] “[… It] can no longer simply be said that all those in any “irregular” situation are living in a state of mortal sin and are deprived of sanctifying grace. More is involved here than mere ignorance of the rule. A subject may know full well the rule, yet have great difficulty in understanding “its inherent values”, or be in a concrete situation which does not allow him or her to act differently and decide otherwise without further sin.”[73]
Pope Francis gives an example here of
“a second union consolidated over time, with new children, proven fidelity, generous self giving, Christian commitment, a consciousness of its irregularity and of the great difficulty of going back without feeling in conscience that one would fall into new sins.” and contrasts it with “someone who has consistently failed in his obligations to the family.”
(AL, 298)
Discernment is key to identifying what possible ways we have for responding to God and growing in the midst of limits. “By thinking that everything is black and white, we sometimes close off the way of grace and of growth, and discourage paths of sanctification which give glory to God. Let us remember that “a small step, in the midst of great human limitations, can be more pleasing to God than a life which appears outwardly in order, but moves through the day without confronting great difficulties”.”[74]
Morality is not “a form of stoicism, or self-denial, or merely a practical philosophy or a catalogue of sins and faults”[75] and it is reductive to look only at “whether or not an individual’s actions correspond to a general law or rule, because that is not enough to discern and ensure full fidelity to God in the concrete life of a human being.”[76]Instead of a focus “on rooting out every threat and deviation, we should appear as joyful messengers of challenging proposals, guardians of the goodness and beauty which shine forth in a life of fidelity to the Gospel.”[77]
We are called to examine our lives in front of God, leaving nothing out. We can always grow in every aspect of our lives and offer something to God. All we need to do is ask the Holy Spirit to free us and give him access to all parts of our lives. “God asks everything of us, yet he also gives everything to us. He does not want to enter our lives to cripple or diminish them, but to bring them to fulfilment.”[78] “God loves the enjoyment felt by human beings.”[79] “The greatest danger would be to prevent [others] from encountering Christ by presenting him as an enemy of joy or as someone indifferent to human questions and difficulties.”[80]
In summary, I believe that Pope Francis’ teaching builds on three pillars: First, that God loves each one of us precisely as we are, without exception, and that he invites each one of us to ever greater closeness with Him and therefore with everyone else too. Second, that the choice of the good is open to each one of us in every moment, no matter what mistakes we may have made, and that God delights in every step we take in His direction. Third, that we are to help each other both with discerning what the right thing is to do and with then doing it – while the place where moral decisions are taken is in every person’s conscience, that conscience is to be formed and supported in a community that together travels on a journey towards God.
[2] I have not included the encyclical letter Lumen Fidei, since it is with Evangelii Gaudium that Pope Francis sets out the framework of his pontificate and subsequent encyclicals and exhortations proceed from there.
[The following is based on two talks given to groups of young adults in Barcelona and London in December ’17 and January ’18 respectively.]
Today I would like to share something with you about who Mary is for me and I will try to do that in three ways: say something about who she is, tell you about my relationship with her and reflect on what this relationship has taught me about what love is and who God is.
Who is Mary?
Instead of painting a comprehensive picture, I would like to focus on three moments in Mary’s life that I believe tell us a lot about who she is: the annunciation, the ~30 years she spent living with Jesus before his public ministry and her suffering at the foot of the cross. What I hope to do here is to highlight that Mary is more than an object of piety, that she is more than meekness and compliance and that she is an example for all Christians and people of good will, whether they be women or men.
But, let’s start at the beginning, which in terms of the Gospels is Luke’s account of the annunciation, where we are drawn into an event of courage, non-conformity and selflessness and where the very nature of the universe changes categorically. Mary, a young woman is presented with a startling request: to become the mother of God. She is unmarried and pregnancy would make her a social outcast, she would be rejected by her fiancee and would bring dishonour on her family, not to mention that she can’t even get her head around how this could possibly happen since she is a virgin. Yet, she takes a leap of faith and gives her consent. And everything changes. God, the uncreated, eternal, infinite, all powerful, while retaining all of these attributes, also becomes a clump of cells in Mary’s womb. Incarnate in the created, not only finite, but infinitesimal, not only weak but highly vulnerable. Mary’s self-giving, in spite of her doubts, reservations and incomprehension is immediately rewarded in a way that makes a hundredfold look positively mean.
In a recent homily on the feast of the Annunciation last year, Pope Francis drew parallels between Mary’s response to the Annunciation and our own reality today, when he said:
“Like in the past, God continues to look for allies, continues to look for men and women capable of believing, capable of remembering, of feeling part of his people so as to cooperate with the creativity of the Spirit. God continues to pass through our neighbourhoods and our streets, he goes everywhere in search of hearts capable of listening to his invitation and of making him become flesh here and now. Paraphrasing St. Ambrose […] we can say: God continues to look for hearts like that of Mary, willing to believe even under the most extraordinary conditions.”
The second moment to reflect on is what the Gospels are silent about. The long years during which Mary, her husband Josep and their son Jesus lived together as a family. After the initial, extraordinary, cosmic drama of Jesus’ incarnation there followed decades of what I hesitate to call “ordinary” life. It couldn’t have been! Just imagine it – Mary, the mother of God, Joseph, a just man whom God chose to teach and raise his only son, and Jesus, God made man, all living in a small town in Palestine. Working, doing household chores, getting together with friends, being good, religiously-observant first-century Jews, being frustrated and angered by social and political issues, having to budget their resources with prudence, having worries and fears, hopes and dreams. Yet those who met them, who got to know them, must have felt that there was something special here. This family drew them in, they felt welcome there, they felt the warmth of how Joseph looked at Mary, how Mary took everyone as a member of her family from the first moment and how their son, Jesus flourished as a child, grew up to be a kind and friendly youth and developed into a wise, just and loving man.
This is a period in the life of Mary that Chiara Lubich also spoke about and where she saw the Holy Family as a real model for us to imitate:
“[It must have been a] family, whose members starting with a supernatural vision, seeing Jesus in others, end with the most down-to-earth and simple expressions typical of family life. A family whose members do not have a heart of stone but a heart of flesh, like Jesus, like Mary, like Joseph. Are there among you some who are suffering because of spiritual trials? They must be understood as much as and more than a mother would. Bring them the light with a word or by example. Do not let them feel the absence of the family warmth, on the contrary, let them feel it all the more. Are there among you some who are suffering physically? Let them be treated as favourites. It is necessary to suffer with them. Try to understand them right to the depth of their pain. Are there some who are dying? Imagine yourself in their place and do for them whatever you would have done for you up to the moment of your last breath. Is one of you rejoicing over some success or for any other reason? Rejoice with him or her so that the joy is not spoilt and the soul closed in on itself, but the happiness is shared by all. Is one of you going away? Do not let him or her leave without a heart filled with a single legacy: the sense of the family, so as to take it with them wherever they go. Never put any kind of activity, either spiritual or apostolic, before the spirit of the family.”
Finally, let us consider a third picture, which is that of Mary standing at the foot of the cross. There, above her hangs the mangled, broken, twisted and damaged body of her son, her own flesh and blood. She looks at him and sees the baby she gave birth to, the little boy who learned to walk, read, do geometry, the man who never stopped being her child and who brought heaven into the midst of the world, who announced the good news of God’s love for all, who cured the sick, who revived the dead and who was then betrayed and condemned to death by his peers. Such suffering may be unimaginable to us, but it is shared today by mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters and friends of those killed in natural disasters, by illnesses, in wars and out of hatred. Yet, for Mary even this unbearable burden was only part of the story. She also saw her son cry out to his Father: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” His physical and psychological torment culminated in a complete loss of that which made him who he is – his being one with the Father. Mary looked at her son lose his faith. She saw God without God. The God who changed the universe in her at the annunciation was now gone, leaving her son a mere husk of a man. What would I have done in her place? I, like the apostles, would have run and run far – seeing Jesus on the cross would have been unbearable beyond words. Yet, Mary stayed. She didn’t care about the cost to herself, what it would look like, what the consequences would be. She chose to be there with and for her son while utterly helpless in the face of his suffering. She had to stay, because it was in this moment that her son loved us most – giving everything, holding back nothing, showing us that he is there in all our suffering. And Mary’s response of silent unity with her son spoke volumes. It took courage, it ignored social disapproval and it was utterly self-less and self-giving.
Yet the question remains: why did they – Jesus in his forsakenness and Mary in her desolation – have to suffer so much? Here Chiara Lubich again proposes a key:
“How beautiful is Mary desolate in this turning of herself towards humanity to gather up the fruit of her son’s death – truly co-redeemer in this working together for the redemption of all. I see her with him running towards humanity which has become their god out of love for God! Both ready to leave everything for us. We too, like them, must leave God for human beings, must leave unity for the Jesus forsakens scattered throughout the world. Must make of unity our launch pad towards humanity. Must come, must live for sinners and not for the righteous – like him, like her.”
What is my relationship with Mary like?
When I say that I have a close relationship with Mary, I don’t mean to suggest something esoteric, elitist or extraordinary (although the extraordinary is to be found everywhere!). What I mean is that she is someone whose presence I seek and find in my relationship with others. It is not dissimilar to me finding a shared friend in my relationship with another friend, or finding my parents in my relationship with my siblings, or my wife in my relationship with my sons. Analogously, I find Mary in all my relationships, since she is the one through whom Jesus, in whom all relationships subsist, came to us.
When I meet someone new, I see her since she is the mother of all and recognising her reminds me that this person who is new to me is at the same time my sibling, to be cared for, to be welcomed, to be treated with lightness and warmth. When I find myself mindlessly in the midst of a routine, I glimpse her and the routine recedes into the background of a conversation with her – after all, a routine shared is a routine halved :). When I am troubled, when it is unclear to me what I should do, when what happens doesn’t make sense, I find her beside me, consoling me and leading me to her son. When I see exclusion, discrimination, injustice, I recognise her among the excluded, calling me to herself, giving me courage to join her. And when I see suffering, I see her son and her by his side, with space for me to stand beside her. Useless, impotent, but present and ready to look for the little that I may be able to do.
Let me give you an example to illustrate what I am talking about here. During the last months there have been many challenging moments at work, where I saw that my colleagues were struggling with the pressures they were under. One Monday morning, when I arrived at work, I saw a young colleague looking physically unwell, as pale as a sheet, another colleague injecting panic into every conversation and a general sense of defeat and disillusionment among all who worked on a project that my brother Peter and I are leading. The previous week some technical challenges emerged and the general feeling was that they could end up making our project completely collapse, after ten years of hard work and before it brought anything to the company. This was unquestionably a moment of crisis and I knew that the expectation was for me to lead, to drive, to persuade and ultimately to win! I certainly wanted our project to succeed, no doubt, but the question that kept going around in my head was: “What would Mary do here?” I saw my colleagues like lost children at that moment, who first of all needed to be loved. And who better to learn from than their mother! Mary would surely comfort them, tell them they were special and give them a hug. I couldn’t do that literally, but I set out to go around, talking to them one by one and making sure they felt my closeness, that they felt understood and that they knew that we were in this difficult situation together. It was a day spent alongside Mary and therefore a day spent recognising Jesus in all.
What does Mary tell us about what love is and who God is?
Finally, we can also look at the above and ask what it tells us about what love is and who God is. Here there are two aspects that I would like to focus on, both of which are expressed with particular clarity in a mystical vision of Paradise that Chiara Lubich had in 1949. At that point she and her friends had spent five years of putting the Gospel into practice in their daily lives and when they went on holiday to the Dolomites, Chiara started receiving intellectual visions. Speaking about one of them some years later, she described Mary in the following way:
“On that day I understood Mary, perhaps through an intellectual vision, as I had never seen her before. And now twelve years have passed since that day, but I still have the clear impression of the unexpected “greatness” that this discovery of the Mother of God in the Bosom of the Father made on me. As the blue of the sky contains sun and moon and stars, so Mary appeared to me, made by God so great as to contain God Himself in the Word. I had never had such a notion of Mary, but there her divine greatness (divine by participation in the divinity of God) was impressed upon my soul in such a way that I do not know how to say it again.”
God, who is Love, makes Mary, his creature, greater than himself to the point where she contains him. Yet, this extreme humility in turn adds to God’s greatness because it shows the measure of his love for Mary. The result is a virtuous cycle of love where my making myself small so that the other may flourish fulfils me too and makes me grow, which in turn adds to the greatness of the other person whom I love and so on. Asking here who is greater then becomes a misunderstanding, since the “greatness” that follows from love has no limit once the first step of making oneself “small” out of love is taken.
A second vision that Chiara Lubich received shows an image that sheds light on the relationships among the persons of the Trinity, Mary and all of humanity. Here I’d like to read you just one passage from it:
“The tree of humanity was […] created in the image of God. When, in the fullness of time, it blossomed, unity was made between heaven and earth, and the Holy Spirit espoused Mary. Therefore, there is one flower: Mary. And there is one fruit: Jesus. And Mary, though alone, is nevertheless the synthesis of the entire creation in the culminating moment of its beauty when it presents itself as spouse to its Creator. Jesus, instead, is creation and the uncreated made one: the Marriage consummated. And he contains Mary within himself just as the fruit contains the flower. Once the flower has served its purpose, it falls and the fruit matures. Even so, if there had never been a flower, then neither would the fruit have ripened. Just as Mary is daughter of her Son, similarly, the flower is child of the fruit which is its child.”
To get a clearer reading of this mystical and poetic text, let’s listen to what reflections it inspired in Fr. Pasquale Foresi, one of Chiara Lubich’s closest collaborators, who in 2006 wrote the following:
“God is the Father who gives himself wholly in the Son, who in turn wholly gives himself back to Him. And their mutual love – the relationship that unites them among themselves – is the Holy Spirit. Being like God then means living this same Trinitarian dynamic with Him. […] Also to us, then, created “in the likeness” of God, must be given the possibility of giving God to God, that is, of returning to him as creatures truly capable of being like him. This possibility took shape fully on earth, at a given moment in history, in Mary. She is the creature who was made capable of generating in the flesh the Word, the second Person of the Trinity. We must understand this prerogative of Mary in all its extraordinary depth, which makes it unique among all creatures. Mary, being Mother of Jesus, is the Mother of the only human-divine Person of the Word, to whom she gives human nature, which in him unites in most profound and most perfect union – “without division” and “without confusion”, as the Council of Chalcedon affirms – with the divine one. Mary is therefore, in the true sense, Mother of God. God has been able to bring about so much in her because of her free consent to the divine plan prepared from all eternity: “May it be done to me according to your word” (Lk 1:38). At the same time, Mary, because conceived of by God as the one who in herself sums up the whole creation, has opened to creation itself the possibility of generating God. This is how with her and in her the freedom of the human person reaches its truth and its fullness.”
What stands out to me here is the level of intimacy and unity between God and us, his creation, which has its pinnacle in Mary, the person whom God singled out in his relationship with humanity and who is at the same time one of us and one with God. Through God’s relationship with Mary we see the relationship we are all called to and in which we all already share through Mary. And again it also speaks about what love is, regardless of whether you believe in God or not. The relationship we are presented with between God and Mary is one where the lover surrenders to the beloved, risks their own plans by placing them at the mercy of the beloved, but ultimately arrives at a relationship of such unity with an other, who is so dramatically different from their self, that they both become each other’s source and fulfilment.
[The following is the text of a talk given at Regenerate 2016.]Yesterday morning we looked at a sketch of the breadth of freedom, ranging from the individual to the social, from the theoretical to the practical, from the protective to the enabling, and from the ephemeral to the sustainable. The journey we shared took us past three milestones, three paradoxes, which I’d like to recap at the start of this morning’s reflection. The first paradox was, that an excess of freedom can bring us to its opposite, to slavery, either because it is used in an unsustainable way that leads to choices which limit freedom, or because one person’s freedom is used to limit that of another. The second paradox introduced the idea of obedience having the potential to lead to freedom, rather than to its opposite. By freely obeying my conscience, the voice of reason, the advice and guidance of others, my freedom can grow instead of being diminished. Finally, the third paradox spoke about freedom being possible in spite of external circumstances. When I direct the little of it that I have left towards the good of others, my freedom to love them grows, in spite of having few “freedoms to” and “freedoms from” left. Taking a step back, these paradoxes show how freedom is a rather peculiar thing. When I take your freedom away, I am diminishing my own. When you infringe my freedom in one way, I still have other ways to make my own freedom grow and I can help you grow your freedom too. When I choose to direct my freedom towards your good, our freedom grows and persists. Looking at this tree of freedom, with its rich network of branches extending far and wide, I would this morning like to change perspective and examine its roots. What is the source of this freedom, that is so universally attractive and for which so many are willing even to risk their own lives? Here, as we have already seen yesterday morning, Jesus presents himself as the answer by pointing to truth as the source of freedom and by identifying himself with truth. In fact, Jesus only speaks three times about freedom in the Gospels. The first time is right at the beginning of his public life, where he goes to a synagogue in Nazareth and presents himself as the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy that the oppressed will go free (cf. Luke 4:16-30). The second is when he stops a mob from stoning a woman accused of cheating on her husband, after which he says that famous “the truth will set you free” (cf. John 8:1-59). It is the third, and final time when Jesus speaks about freedom in the Gospels that I would like to focus on though. Here he is dealing with the aftermath of having restored the sight of a blind man, who is subsequently harassed by some Pharisees who don’t believe him, who question him – and his parents – twice, and who in the end throw him out of the synagogue. When Jesus hears about this, he seeks out the formerly blind man to see whether the ordeal had shaken his faith. The man tells him: “I do believe, Lord” and worships him (cf. John 9:1-38). Jesus then takes a swipe at the Pharisees by declaring:
“I came into this world for judgment, so that those who do not see might see, and those who do see might become blind.” (John 9:39)
This definitely rubs the Pharisees up the wrong way, who snap back: “Surely we are not also blind, are we?” (John 9:40), which gives Jesus the opening for launching into one of his landmark speeches, in which he presents himself as the Good Shepherd and where he foretells his death on the cross and his resurrection. Jesus says:
“I am the good shepherd, and I know mine and mine know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father; and I lay down my life for my sheep. […] The Father loves me, because I lay down my life in order to take it up again. No one takes it from me; I lay it down of my own free will, and as I have power to lay it down, so I have power to take it up again; and this is the command I have received from my Father.” (John 10:14-15,17-18)
And how does this go down? Badly. “Many of them said, “He is possessed and out of his mind; why listen to him?”” (John 10:20). But, let’s look more closely at what Jesus said here about freedom. First of all he situates himself in a relationship with the Father and with us, his sheep. Second, he tells us that the basis of this relationship is self-giving and a self-giving that demands everything, that goes to the point of him giving his life for us. Third, Jesus tells us that this self-giving is not directed towards death, towards nothing, but that it passes through them so that life and the Father’s love may follow. And, finally, Jesus tells us that all of this love-motivated self-giving is done freely by him. No one is forcing his hand, taking his life from him. It is Jesus who chooses to do so freely, for us and out of love for the Father. Here we see yesterday’s paradoxes at play: Jesus freely obeys the Father’s will and directs his freedom towards our good so that we may receive freedom as a result. Let’s follow this root deeper though. The last time Jesus speaks about freedom, he points us to his upcoming death, his ultimate, self-giving act of love towards us. But what is it that he tells us about freedom by how he lived that extreme suffering? Here Chiara points us to the specific moment in which Jesus’ suffering, and therefore self-giving love for us, is at its most extreme. During the Second World War, in her home town of Trent in Italy, Chiara and her companions have made the discovery of God-Love as the ideal of their lives and have dedicated themselves to putting his Word, the Gospel, into practice. This lead them to helping the poor, those who have lost their loved ones, their health and all their possessions during the bombing of the city. Their desire for responding to God’s love was so strong that they gave everything for those in need, not sparing even their own health. At the beginning of 1944 this resulted in one of Chiara’s companions, Dori Zamboni, catching an infection that left her covered in sores. A priest was asked to bring her the Eucharist and on one occasion, when Dori was in prayer after communion, he spoke to Chiara about when Jesus had suffered most during his passion. The priest suggested that it was at the moment when Jesus cried out: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46) But what does this moment of Jesus’ most extreme suffering have to do with freedom? To understand how it is here that he teaches us what freedom is, Chiara unpacks what Jesus’ cry of forsakenness means:
“He had given everything. First, a life lived beside Mary in hardship and obedience. Then, three years of mission, revealing the Truth, giving witness to the Father, promising the Holy Spirit, and working all kinds of miracles of love. Finally, three hours on the cross, from which he gave forgiveness to his executioners, opened paradise to the thief, gave his mother to us, and ultimately gave his body and blood, after having given them mystically in the Eucharist. He had nothing left but his divinity. His union with the Father, that sweet and ineffable union with the One who had made him so powerful on earth as the Son of God and so regal on the cross, that feeling of God’s presence had to disappear into the depths of his soul and no longer make itself felt, separating him somehow from the One with whom he had said to be one: “The Father and I are one” (John 10:30). In him love was annihilated, the light extinguished, wisdom silenced.”
By not only giving his humanity, his body and blood, but also his divinity, his union with the Father, Jesus becomes nothing in the moment of being forsaken on the cross. He holds nothing back. Any safety net he may have had is gone. All sense of certainty is gone, and even his words in this moment are empty. The Word, through whom the universe was spoken into being, no longer announces. All it can do is ask a question. The most basic question. “Why?” We are witnesses of an event that manifests total self-giving and displays absolute nothingness. And it is here that the deepest root of freedom lies. Jesus Forsaken has nothing, is nothing, and nothing can therefore condition his next move. No expectations, no obligations, no pressure, no rules, no traditions, no restrictions can act on him, who is nothing. And what does Jesus do?
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46)
In his moment of greatest suffering, having emptied himself, Jesus directs his absolute freedom towards the God by whom he feels abandoned. Let us return to Dori and Chiara though, to see what this gift of having Jesus’ moment of greatest suffering revealed to them does in their lives. After the priest who pointed them to Jesus Forsaken left, Chiara turned to Dori and said:
“If Jesus’ greatest pain was His abandonment by His Father, we will choose Him as our Ideal and that is the way we will follow Him.”
Dori later spoke about her experience as follows:
“At that moment, in my mind, in my imagination, the conviction impressed itself that for us our ideal was the Jesus of the contorted face crying out to the Father. And my poor facial sores, which I saw as shadows of His pain, were a joy to me, because they made me resemble Him a little. From that day on, Chiara spoke to me often, in fact constantly, of Jesus Forsaken. He was the living personality in our lives.”
Discovering Jesus Forsaken was a life-changing experience for Chiara and her first companions, and has been a life-changing experience for many who have followed them since. It is a discovery that Chiara described in these words:
“He fascinated us, and perhaps we fell in love with him because, from the very beginning, we started seeing him everywhere. He presented himself to us with the most different faces in all the painful aspects of life. They were nothing but him, only him. Though new every time, they were simply him. […] By living Jesus Forsaken we had come to understand that He had made Himself nothing and that in this nothingness was our life. To be like Him out of love for Him, that nothingness that we really are. We nothing, He all.”
Realizing that Jesus Forsaken is present in every suffering, in every despair, doubt, anxiety, fear, failing, loss, in every moment of difficulty I experience, in every suffering person I meet, means that I can always direct my freedom towards him and be in relationship with him. No matter how great my suffering or the suffering of another, I can always recognize the face of Jesus Forsaken in that suffering and love him in that moment. Five years after her first encounter with Jesus Forsaken, and after an intense life of seeking and loving him in all whom she and the first focolarine and focolarini met, Chiara experienced a series of mystical visions in which she was shown Paradise. One such vision presented an image of the freedom that Jesus taught us in his forsakenness on the cross, which Chiara described as follows:
“We have been created in the image of God. We are like fires jetting out from the Fire,distinct from the Fire and therefore free.In order to unite ourselves to the Fire,and to be one with Him,we must freely return there through pure love,because we are if we are as we should be,that is, pure love.”
This image sheds great light onto freedom, by pointing to its dynamic, reciprocal nature of being a gift. We receive freedom – “fires jetting out from the Fire, distinct and therefore free” – but the only way for us to keep being free, and even for our very existence to persist in the long run, is by freely making ourselves a gift in turn. God sets us free and we remain free by freely giving ourselves back to him. Then we are as we should be – pure love, created in the image of God, as taught to us by Jesus Forsaken. Not only is this what Chiara understood about freedom in her visions of Paradise, but the end of that brief period in her life was a call for exercising freedom too. Chiara describes that moment as follows:
“Our experience was so powerful, it made us think life would always be like that: light and heaven. But what followed instead was the reality of everyday life. It was a rude awakening, so to speak, to find ourselves back on earth. Only Jesus forsaken gave us the strength to carry on living: Jesus forsaken, whom we found present in the world we had to love – a world which is what it is – namely, not heaven.”
This meant that Chiara had to make a second, even more deliberate choice of loving Jesus Forsaken, who asked her to return to him in the world. He was waiting for her in the many sufferings of the world and hers was a free choice to make. At this moment, Chiara wrote a poem to Jesus Forsaken, which I would like to share with you now and with which I will conclude this talk. It is entitled “I have only one Spouse”:
“I have only one Spouse on earth: Jesus forsaken. I have no God but him. In him is the whole of paradise with the Trinityand the whole of the earth with humanity.Therefore what is his is mine and nothing else.And his is universal suffering, and therefore mine.I will go through the world seeking it in every instant of my life. What hurts me is mine. Mine the suffering that grazes me in the present.Mine the suffering of the souls beside me (that is my Jesus). Mine all that is not peace, not joy, not beautiful, not lovable, not serene, in a word, what is not paradise. Because I too have my paradise, but it is that in my Spouse’s heart. I know no other. So it will be for the years I have left: athirst for suffering, anguish, despair,sorrow, exile, forsakenness, torment –for all that is him,and he is sin, hell. In this way I will dry up the waters of tribulationin many hearts nearbyand, through communionwith my almighty Spouse,in many faraway. I shall pass as a firethat consumes all that must fall and leaves standing only the truth. But it is necessary to be like him: to be him in the present moment of life.”
[The following is the text of a talk given at Regenerate 2016.]This morning I would like to share with you some thoughts about freedom, which is the theme of our weekend. To begin with, it is worth noticing that freedom is something everybody values and wants. In fact, we’d be hard pressed to find anyone in this world who would answer the question of whether freedom is important to them with a ‘no’. The first, obvious reason for such universal acclaim is that freedom can be understood simply as my ability to do whatever I choose to do. And who wouldn’t want that? Already Aristotle recognized this, when he wrote:
“A man should live as he likes. This, they say, is the privilege of a free man, since, on the other hand, not to live as a man likes is the mark of a slave.”
If I want to go to Regenerate, being free means that no one stops me from going. If I don’t want to go, freedom means that no one is making me go. The point is not about whether I go or not, but about which of the two I want and whether I get it or not. Even without exerting our minds too much, we get to two basic forms of freedom: the freedom to do as I please, and freedom from being made to do what I don’t want. Now, if you were a single, all-powerful being, freedom would indeed seem absolute and would be the full realization of its first aspect: being in a position to do whatever you please. Since none of us are such a single, all-powerful being, a first, apparent limit on our freedom are the laws of nature that constrain us. Gravity stops me from flying and my inability to breathe under water or my body not withstanding high pressure stop me from diving to great depths. While this is obvious, it introduces constraints into the picture. At the very least, therefore, freedom is about doing as I please, so far as that is possible. If I want to climb Mt. Everest, freedom means that there are no obstacles in my way, other than ones that are a consequence of what I can physically and mentally do and of what climbing Mt. Everest entails. But, there is another source of constraints: other people. What if I want to do something that they don’t want me to do and that they stop me from doing by using their own freedom. If I use my freedom to play drums in the middle of the night, my neighbor can use their freedom to try and stop me and the result is one free person and one slave, depending on which one of us is stronger. This is the first paradox of freedom, which Plato put as follows:
“Excess of freedom, whether it lies in state or individuals, seems only to pass into excess of slavery.”
Left to its own devices, and used as the only basis for making decisions, freedom turns to slavery and becomes an excuse for the powerful to oppress the weak, for the many to oppress the few. If I don’t like what you are doing and if all I care about is what I want, then freedom leads me to stopping you being free. Your freedom and my freedom are enemies and we arrive at the Latin proverb made famous by the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes: “Homo homini lupus” (“Man is wolf to man”). At this point we pass from a somewhat hypothetical line of thought to the very real state of the world we live in, where exploitation, discrimination, marginalization and even outright exclusion are the result of the freedom of some cancelling out the freedom of others. In some countries such infringements of freedom are state policy and ruling elites exercise their freedom at the expense of whole populations. Until the age of 15 I myself lived in a country like that. At the time, Czechoslovakia was ruled by an oppressive, totalitarian regime, where it was illegal to meet in larger groups, to say anything critical about the government, to openly practice one’s religion, or to travel abroad; where large parts of the population were spying on the rest of it and where transgression was punished by being sidelined in society, by imprisonment or, during the early years of the regime, even by being put to death. The abuse of freedom can also take on more indirect forms, where the consequences of the actions of some inhibit the freedom of others. A particularly stark example here is that of access to water, highlighted by Pope Francis in his encyclical, Laudato Si’, where he wrote:
“One particularly serious problem is the quality of water available to the poor. Every day, unsafe water results in many deaths and the spread of water-related diseases […]. Dysentery and cholera, linked to inadequate hygiene and water supplies, are a significant cause of suffering and of infant mortality. Underground water sources in many places are threatened by the pollution produced in certain mining, farming and industrial activities […]. It is not only a question of industrial waste. Detergents and chemical products, commonly used in many places of the world, continue to pour into our rivers, lakes and seas.” (§29)
The freedoms of economic interests can result in the ultimate loss of freedom for the poor, which is death. Does freedom still sound like such a good thing? Should we even want freedom if it just means that it can be weaponized and turned against others? Clearly the answer here is not to give up on freedom and opt for slavery, but to recognize another dimension of freedom, which is its persistence. Instead of thinking only about how freedom lets me do what I want and how it protects me from having to do what I don’t want, let’s add sustainability to the mix. By also considering the consequences of what we can freely choose to do and subjecting them to evaluation by reason, we’ll discover that certain free actions lead to a reduction of freedom, while others lead to its preservation or even increase. If I want to lock myself in a room and throw away the key, doing so would be a free act, but one that would lead to a reduction in future freedom. Instead, constraining my own freedom in that moment (which, by the way, can be a free act too!) results in a freedom that continues instead of ceasing. This is the second paradox of freedom, which Chiara Lubich, founder of the Focolare Movement, expressed as follows:
“Obedience is not aimed at taking away your freedom but at making you free.”
But, even with sustainable freedom, we are missing an important element, which is that of the content of what we choose. Simply making free choices sustainable can still leave our freedom be the freedom of an oppressor, exploiter and discriminator – only one who can keep that up for longer. What we are missing is love! In fact, Chiara adds another dimension to freedom by expressing a preference for those free choices that are directed towards the good, when she says:
“Freedom is usually defined in this way: it is the choice between good and evil. But I prefer another definition. Freedom is going closer and closer towards good. The closer we go towards good, the freer we are. Jesus said something important with regard to freedom. He said: “The truth will make you free” (Jn. 8:32)”
Notice an important aspect of what Chiara is saying here: The pursuit of the good is a way of making freedom sustainable. The more we direct our actions towards the good, the freer we are. In other words, the pursuit of the good is not a complication or a narrowing down of freedom, but an answer to the question of how to preserve it and make it grow. What does it mean to say that the truth makes us free? This is a rather curious claim. The truth may seem like a remote and practically unreachable concept. If that is what it takes to be free then we may as well give up! This is not what Jesus had in mind though when he pointed to truth as the source of freedom. Instead, he explained to his disciples what he meant, when answering the apostle Thomas’ panicked question at the end of the Last Supper: “Lord, we don’t know where you are going, so how can we know the way?” (Jn. 14:5) Jesus’ response was simply: “I am the way and the truth and the life.” (14:6) The truth therefore isn’t some set of rules or teachings or some insight reserved for the brainy, it is Jesus himself. The Jesus who is also life and way, and therefore someone who is inviting us to live and walk with him. On another occasion, Chiara returned to these words of Jesus and explained them further:
“The truth makes us free because in those who live it, Christ lives, the “new man”; and consequently, the “old man” is dead: we are no longer slaves to our old selves (see Ephesians 4:22-24; Colosians 3:9). We are free from ourselves. But the word of God frees us also because we are no longer slaves of human conditioning. We love Christ in everyone and, with the grace of God, we do not expect anything from anyone. In addition, the word frees us from being oppressed by circumstances. In fact, nothing happens by chance or merely because it is willed by human beings. The Father is always present in our lives either because he wills something to happen or because he permits it to happen.”
The key to living and walking with Jesus, who is the truth that sets us free, therefore, is to make love the goal of our freedom. And, what’s more, love for all, no matter what. Chiara spoke about this too with great clarity and radicality:
“The first idea that can already revolutionize our souls [… is] universal brotherhood, which frees us from all forms of slavery, because we are slaves of the divisions between rich and poor, between father and children; between black and white, between races; between nationalities, even between different [regions] of the same nation. We are slaves, we criticize one another, and there are many obstacles and barriers. No, the first idea is to free ourselves from all these forms of slavery and to see [brothers and sisters] in everyone, in everyone… […] “Even in that woman who talks too much? Even in that elderly man who doesn’t make any sense? Even in that poor person? […] But is it possible?” Yes, in everyone […]. We must see them all as possible candidates for unity with God and for unity with one another. We must open our hearts and tear down all the barriers. We must put into our hearts universal brotherhood: I live for universal brotherhood! So then, if we are all brothers and sisters, we must love everyone. […] Look, these are just a few words, but they bring a revolution! We must love everyone.”
Far from being a vehicle for discord, for one person being wolf to another, for one person’s freedom being in conflict with that of another, freedom directed at the good becomes not only a “freedom to” and a “freedom from” but also a “freedom with” and a “freedom for”. The great Lutheran thinker and martyr, Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it as follows:
“[F]reedom is not a quality which can be revealed – it is not a possession, a presence, an object, nor is it a form of existence – but a relationship and nothing else. In truth, freedom is a relationship between two persons. Being free means “being free for the other,” because the other has bound me to him. Only in relationship with the other am I free.”
That a freedom directed towards the good is necessarily about the good of others follows very clearly from the Christian understanding of God, who is the unity of three persons, where each freely gives themselves to an other. It is therefore no surprise to see this insistence on using my freedom for the good of others also in the thought of great Christian advocates and defenders of freedom. Rosa Parks, who fought for racial equality and civil rights at the time of segregation in the 1950s, thought of her own freedom merely a means for gaining freedom for others. She also spoke clearly about the importance of the choices that are presented to us in the following way:
“We may choose order and peace, or confusion and chaos. If we choose the former, we may cultivate and share our talents with others. If we choose the latter, we will isolate and segregate others. We can also expand our vision to include the universe and the diversity of its people, or we can remain narrow and shallow and isolate those who are unfamiliar. […] I would like to be remembered as a person who wanted to be free… so other people would be also free.”
Thinking of the desire for a freedom directed towards the good of others as being only a Christian concern would be a mistake though, and would in fact go both against the Christian insight that all – without exception! – are children of God and against the very need for freedom to be universal, so that it may be sustainable and lasting, as Rosa Parks put so clearly. In fact, the importance of a freedom that is linked to the good of others is also present in atheist thought. A good example here is the contemporary philosopher, Slavoj Žižek, who sees our freedom threatened particularly by the interests of corporations whose aim is to develop in us habits of consumption that lead to dependence. While being an atheist, Žižek nonetheless aligns himself with aspects of the Christian understanding of freedom. Most notably he did so when speaking at an Occupy Wall Street gathering in New York five years ago, where he said:
“What is Christianity? It’s the Holy Spirit. What is the Holy Spirit? It’s an egalitarian community of believers who are linked by love for each other and who only have their own freedom and responsibility to do it. In this sense the Holy Spirit is here now, and down there on Wall Street there are pagans who are worshiping blasphemous idols. So all we need is patience.”
Underlying all of the accounts of freedom that I have shared with you this morning is an important aspect that is worth spelling out, namely that of choices. All three variants of freedom that we have looked at: “freedom to”, “freedom from” and “freedom with and for” focus on conditions being suitable for me to do what I want, initially by only considering my own self and eventually in a way where I seek the good, which is necessarily the good of others. However, even when conditions are favorable for me to act freely, there is an instant of choice in which I can decide to pursue my own selfish ends or the good of another. This important moment is described with great clarity by the Austrian psychiatrists and Holocaust survivor, Viktor Frankl, who wrote the following about his time at Auschwitz and in other concentration camps:
“We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way. And there were always choices to make. Every day, every hour, offered the opportunity to make a decision, a decision which determined whether you would or would not submit to those powers which threatened to rob you of your very self, your inner freedom.”
Frankl’s experience of seeing his fellow prisoners use their freedom for the good of others even under the most extreme of barbaric, inhumane and unfree circumstances is both a great sign of hope and a challenge to us. No matter where I am, no matter what others are subjecting me to, I am still presented with choices where I can opt for a freedom with and for others. The final example I would like to share with you is that of the Vietnamese Cardinal Francis Nguyễn Văn Thuận, who was kept prisoner in a communist “re-education” camp for 13 years and who spoke about his experience of freedom during that time in the following way, giving us an insight into his soul at a time when he faced the choices Frankl wrote about:
“When I was placed under solitary confinement, five guards were assigned to me who took it in turns to watch me, two at a time. Their leaders had told them: ‘We will replace you every two weeks with another group, so that you do not become ‘contaminated’ by this dangerous bishop.’ Soon they changed their minds though and decided: ‘We won’t replace you anymore: otherwise this bishop will contaminate all the guards!’ At first, the guards would not speak with me. They would only answer yes and no. It was really sad (…). They avoided talking to me. One night I had a thought: ‘Francis, you are still very rich, you have the love of Christ in your heart; love them as Jesus loved you.’ The next day I began to love them even more, to love Jesus in them, smiling, exchanging kind words with them. I began to tell them stories about my travels abroad (…). They wanted to learn foreign languages: French, English … My guards became my students!”
And so we arrive at the third paradox of freedom, expressed beautifully by St. Augustine:
“He that is kind is free, though he is a slave;he that is evil is a slave, though he be a king.”
Finally, I would like to make a suggestion. Let’s take this weekend, where we can put into practice the ideals of living for the good of the other, as an opportunity to experience the reality of what freedom is for each one of us.
eyebeleave 