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Defining Freedom

So, what exactly is freedom? Freedom is the ability to desire and to choose the good. If you truly love a person, you are making a decision to live your life in a way that places certain boundaries or restrictions on yourself. For example, if a husband loves his wife, he should freely choose not to flirt with other women. Instead, he should choose the good of his wife and their marriage over the temptation to commit adultery. If he loves his children, he should freely choose not to neglect them by acting like a bachelor and staying out with friends every night. With love comes responsibility, which puts the commitments of love into action. But this does not ruin love any more than tying a string on a kite ruins its ability to fly. If you were to cut the string, the kite would crash. The same happens with love. In the words of Pope John Paul II, "Freedom without responsibilities is the opposite of love."2

Freedom of the Heart

So freedom is not about escaping rules, responsibilities, or external constraints. Authentic freedom involves accepting and living out the truth of who we are (children of God) and for what we are created (love and communion). Freedom entails living without internal constraints on our hearts.

Consider this example. Bridget loves to go to the ballet. She not only loves the dancing, but the music and the costumes as well. Bridget decides to bring her friend, Elizabeth, to her favorite ballet, Swan Lake. A few minutes into the performance, Elizabeth takes out her cell phone to call her boyfriend. She's hungry and figures she'll go get a Coke® and some popcorn while she's on the phone. She stands up and asks Bridget if she would like anything. Bridget pulls Elizabeth back down into her seat, shushes her, and whispers, "You can't use your cell phone or eat in the middle of a performance! It's not allowed." Elizabeth had no idea. She just knew she was hungry and wasn't that interested in the ballet.

Although Bridget's mother had to teach her the rules of the ballet when she attended her first performance as a little girl, Bridget grew in her appreciation and love of the ballet and now naturally focused on the art before her. She did not need the rules of being quiet, not eating, or not using her cell phone, because she cared for the art so much that any other desires paled in com- parison to her enjoyment of the ballet itself. The same could not be said for Elizabeth.

So being truly free does not entail merely obeying the law or abiding by exter- nal constraints. People who are truly free are not held back nor bothered by internal constraints-they have no desire to break the external constraints (the law), so they don't need them. This is real freedom, when our hearts are redeemed and our desires come into conformity with God's desires. Then we are able to desire and to choose the good, and ultimately we desire and choose God.

Selfishness Leads to Misery

Being free to love without internal constraints is only possible through the grace of God giving us pure hearts. Once we choose God and allow him to transform our desires, then the moral life becomes a life not about rules, but about love. We obey God's commands not because we have to but because we want to. If we reject the calling to purity and truth (and seek love while pretending to be "free" to do whatever we want), we often end up empty. We have been made to become a gift to others and, by doing so, to love as God loves. If we live for ourselves, we miss the point of our existence. And living in this way leaves us unfulfilled.

A good example of being unfulfilled is the young man from the story earlier in this chapter, who drove away from the adult bookstore bewildered and depressed. He had missed the whole point of freedom. In his desire to be free, he had become a slave to his weakness of lust. That's why he felt so empty.

When his conscience stung him with a sense of pity for the woman, he was beginning to see the truth about her. He realized that she was worth much more than the money he had paid to see her. Had he not realized this truth, he would never be free to love her or any other woman, for that matter. How could anyone have the ability to receive another person without knowing the greatness of the gift that is being exchanged?

Freed From Slavery, Free For Love

Freedom always has certain truths intimately tied to it, and without these truths, we lose our freedom and our purpose. One of these truths is the fact that freedom exists for the sake of love. While we all have the desire to love and to be loved, at times that desire becomes disordered and turns into lust. Remember, lust is the desire to love that has become twisted and self-seeking instead of self-giving. Instead of being a participation in divine life through authentic love, lust separates us from the love of God. Lust is not self-donation; it is self-gratification at the expense of another.

Just as the desire to love can be disordered and manifested as lust, the desire for freedom can be disordered and manifested in slavery. If you are not free to control your own sexual desires, how can you be free to love? Living in the truth means daily observing our desires and placing them in the hands of God, allowing him to cleanse and renew us. Each day is another step toward freedom or away from it. So our choices of friends, movies, parties, etc., all contribute to our progress toward being able to worship God with our lives- with every free action-in "spirit and truth" (John 4:23).

Christ Sets Us Free

You are probably familiar with the words, "The truth will set you free." But this quote from Scripture loses its meaning if we do not come to know what Christ is saying in the words that immediately precede the more well-known part of the sentence. Christ says, "If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free" (John 8:31-32). The great news is that Jesus did not merely give us commands, he also gave us a way to become free, namely the sacrament of reconciliation.

This sacrament is a gift from Jesus to us out of his love, a gift that can truly set us free. Not only do we become spiritually cleansed of our sin, but we also become more accountable for our actions before God and man. This increased accountability helps us to desire to choose the good not only to please God, but also to support each other-the body of Christ-by using our freedom to walk with others toward heaven.

For the truth to set us free it must be "the" truth. This truth is also more than simply learning what is right and what is wrong. It is about being with Jesus. It is about following him and being faithful to him, which is also remaining faith- ful to who we are.

Christ has set us free so that, with him, we can truly say "yes" to him and his truth. Doing this also enables us to experience the authentic freedom for which we long. In the movie Braveheart, Mel Gibson's character, William Wallace, says that every man dies but not every man truly lives. Freedom is really living. Living in the truth sets us free and opens our hearts to be the men and women we have been created to be.

To understand the marriage of truth and freedom, we must recognize a basic principle called objective truth. Objective truth is the reality of how things are. This is entirely different than someone's opinion, which is subjective. Opinions are fine as long as we understand they are subjective and not equal to objective truth.

It might seem fair and fun to let people have their own opinion and make their own decisions based on what they think or feel. But let's face it: some things are always true. Molesting children, raping women, murdering Jews in gas chambers, and holding black people in slavery are all examples of intrinsically evil actions. Hopefully, you would agree that these acts are always wrong.

But often our emotions get the best of us. Feelings can lead to conclusions that have nothing to do with the truth.

Take pride, for example. We all like to be right, and we all want to believe that we have the truth. This is why it is so hard to change someone's mind during an emotional argument. When heightened emotions are present during debates, some people cannot seem to admit that their belief is wrong, either because they simply do not see the truth-for a variety of intellectual reasons-or because their pride keeps them from admitting it. Often, they imply that truth is "relative" by saying things such as, "What's true for you may not be true for me."

Consider the "I'm just kidding" syndrome. It's one of the most aggravating and hurtful habits of our culture. When joking around and hurting someone's feelings, instead of quickly saying "sorry" and asking for forgiveness, we act as if it is the other person's fault for getting hurt, And so we respond with, "I was just kidding." But what is the truth in this situation? The truth is that we crossed the line of decency and we should apologize to the person we offended. This, however, would take humility-admitting we were wrong and likely involve some awkwardness. So we derry the truth and say we were kidding. "It's your fault for being sensitive," we imply.

Sometimes we are afraid of the truth, and so we pretend to not know it or even deny it completely. We don't want to admit we are wrong because we know the truth may call for a change in our lives. When things get intense and our consciences start to bother us, we may drop the conversation or even verbally attack the other person who is presenting the truth. This is usually code for: *What you're telling me makes me uncomfortable and I don't want to believe it, so leave me alone and let me believe what I want"

When truth is abandoned or denied, then lies and falsehoods take the place of reality. Reality is reduced to an illusion. An illusion is something that seems to be true but is not. The illusion of reality can trap people into a life without freedom. This, of course, can be a major problem for such a person.

John Paul II explained the problem this way: "Once the idea of a universal truth about the good, knowable by human reason, is lost, inevitably the notion of conscience also changes." Instead of admitting there are some things that by their nature are good or evil, "there is a tendency to grant to the individual con- science the prerogative of independently determining the criteria of good and evil and then acting accordingly."4

Living this way inevitably will lead one to decide that God made some "mistakes" regarding what is and is not good for humans. Soon enough, people are creating their own morality based upon their preferences and convenience and not at all based upon what is actually good or evil. Whether we trick ourselves or we trick someone else-through lives based on fiction that poses as fact the truth is that no one lives happily ever after.

In John Paul II's very first encyclical, he wrote the following concerning the rela- tionship of truth and freedom:

Jesus Christ meets the man of every age, including our own, with the same words: You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.' These words contain both a fundamental requirement and a warning: the requirement of an honest rela- tionship with regard to truth as a condition for authentic freedom, and the warning to avoid every kind of illusary freedom, every superficial unilateral freedom, every freedom that fails to enter into the whole truth about man and the world.