Our Mission
We are a center for experiential education, rooted in the Gospels, encouraging the transformation of human consciousness through contemplation, and equipping people to be instruments of peaceful change in the world.
Passage and Verse | June 2011
Different Kinds of Freedom
By Richard Rohr, OFM
Of course this is the week that Americans naturally talk about freedom, because it is the anniversary of our Declaration of Independence from England on July 4, 1776. That is good, and yet we must also be aware we are not talking about Gospel freedom here, or the freedom offered us by our knowledge of God. It is quite common for most people, not just Americans, to confuse the two, and to worship mere political freedom in lieu of any real inner freedom offered by God and grace.
The first freedom is largely freedom from. It is the natural ego desire to be self-determining, self-directed, and self-promoting, and not to be "colonized" by others in any sense. This is good, but it does not mean you will use such freedom for the common good, for spiritual good, or for the good of others. It is ordinarily quite selfish and exclusionary, as our whole history has shown in both state and church. As long as you stay at the egocentric level, it is actually just freedom for me to do what I want, which cannot get you very far spiritually. In fact it is a blockage to the Big Mystery and to Truth.
Gospel freedom is freedom for! It is not just freedom to do what I want to do, but the inner freedom to do what I have to do. In fact, authentic God experience gives you such inner freedom that you can even find life and love and happiness when you lack the outer freedoms assured us by our Constitution (freedom of assembly, freedom of worship, to vote, and to live without discrimination because we are all "created equal,” and so forth). Many of our saints and martyrs have shown this to be true, as did Jesus on the cross.
People are "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,” as the Declaration of Independence had the wisdom to state. This is not given to us by any government, but given to us by God from the beginning, and by reason of our very existence. All people hold it equally: women, blacks, gays, non-Americans, immigrants, atheists, the handicapped in any way, the poor, all being equal children of God. Suddenly, we are not sure if we want in on this wonderful deal at all! Most groups, even after writing such inspired documents, "circle the wagons" around their own privilege, the rich, and those with access (Women, blacks, and unlanded men had no vote from the very beginning!). We did not know or mean what we had said.
But you must place your bet, men. Are you going to seek out Gospel freedom for yourself and our world, or merely wave a sentimental flag of another in-group that defines itself by exclusion—and calls that freedom? We are capable of so much more and we are ready for so much more. We are sons of God first, sons of humanity second, and sons of America third, which is a more or less nice third! This is the America that God surely blesses.
