Free
Free!
The whole world is free. Taken as “the absence of restraint” that is ludicrous, no one is free. Ok, the whole world is free within a context. Human beings, unlike birds cannot fly. The Chinese cannot vote, but they can become millionaires. North Koreans can breathe! Nature, too, has varying degrees of freedom: kikuyu grass will break through concrete to find the sun but it does not choose thick newspaper mulch that kills it. Does the dolphin choose anything? I remain sceptical about the scale of relate-ability of animals to choose and so enjoy human freedom.
Freedom, amazingly, easily hides in human beings, unlike kikuyu. We believe we others oppress into submission when the circumstances appear against us. We always have more power than we believe. When someone holds a gun to my head that person has no authority only the power of the gun so I am free to resist the gun holder and to die in the process never knowing that my power is greater than the kikuyu grass by bursting the gun highjack into submission.
Freedom can only be free if there are no strings attached. I cannot ask for it because then the giver is still in control of me and I am not completely free – like God setting me free, is a contextual freedom. In all realms, we must seize freedom. Politically, economically and socially we have to abrogate freedom. When we do, even the power of the gun is less than our power of being.
Choice, for human beings, is the corollary to freedom. Whatever we choose becomes our destiny. Nature does not organise its destiny. Only the human being moves along a polarity from freedom to a destiny shaped by the choices and taking responsibility for those goals. Actually, freedom reveals the other (person, God and creature in nature), but human beings hide this actuality, and tend arbitrarily to discard others and their reality, which is about equality. Arbitrary freedom leads to a diseased state of individual and little gods occupy my destiny and I worship these idols ignoring that there is a vital component to my arriving in a healthy state of being: equality. Between my idols and me, I fashion a superior stance over you and the cockroach. You are no different from the cockroach; you have no right to live to exist and if you do insist, I cast you like animals devoid of choice or the right to share my air! At its worst, hubris, concupiscence and unfaith drive my freedom. Men, just think of your insistence on having sex, “Now, woman. This is my conjugal right. I am like that dog on heat, I must have it now!” However, you are not an animal, nor is your spouse and animal. In the moment God created you, you enjoyed the capacity of treating people and animals equally. Various ideologies, cultures, and the Christian tradition ignored the tension of freedom and equality so that a male dominating, capitalist, communist, nationalist violent idol seduced you and me so that we emphasised the one or the other of freedom and equality. The task in regaining the tension is to call out the idols, throw them out of the lounge of your heart. Agree that these were misplaced love affairs and start the journey of mending the fences spiritually inside you in a meditative repair job so that the poles of freedom and equality stretch across your inside you so that no idol can enter in you.
