Humans need freedom. As slaves, fettered and confined, they are bound to deteriorate. We have spent a great deal of thought and time on external freedom; we have made serious efforts to secure our personal liberty and yet we have lost it again and again. The worst thing is that eventually humans come to accept the state of bondage -it becomes habitual and they hardly notice it. The most abject slaves can be made to believe that the condition in which they are held is actually freedom.
During these long weeks of confinement I have learned by personal experience that a person is truly lost, is the victim of circumstances and oppression only when he is incapable of a great inner sense of depth and freedom. Anyone whose natural element is not an atmosphere of freedom, unassailable and unshakable whatever force may be put on it, is already lost; but such a person is not really a human being anymore; he is merely an object, a number, a voting paper. And the inner freedom can only be attained if we have discovered the means of widening our won horizons. We must progress and grow, we must mount above our own limitations. It can be done; the driving force is the inner urge to conquer whose very existence shows that human nature is fundamentally designed for this expansion. A rebel, after all, can be trained to be a decent citizen, but an idler and a dreamer is a hopeless proposition.
Human freedom is born in the moment of our contact with God. It is really unimportant whether God forces us out of our limites by the sheer distress of much suffering, coaxes us with visions of beauty and truth, oor pricks us into action by the endless hunger and thirst for righteousness that possess our soul. What really matters is the fact that we are called and we must be sufficiently awake to hear the call.
– Father Alfred Delp, S.J., condemned to death in Germany, during WWII, died 1945. (Source
Related:
Bad day, good readings
Fr. Delp’s Prison Writings
JP2 and others have written –
Freedom is not the right to do whatever you necessarily want to do, but the ability to do what you ought to do (and what we ought to do is the good). That is, freedom is not and cannot be the right to destroy your freedom, it is not the right to be not-free, because then you would no longer have that freedom, which means that you do not have a right to do wrong because wrong, i.e. error and sin, always has the result of enslaving us to further error and sin. Rather, freedom is the ability to do good, which is what you ought to do.
And sometimes it is so that paradoxically, the man in prison might be more free than the one at large in society.
Living as we do, here in the “land of the free,” are we free? We are freer than many other countries, (and certainly freer than Nazi Germany), but are we truly free (in the realm of action if not thought)? Do we have the ability to do what we ought, to do the good, or does society or government set up barriers or even work against that ability? Or has grossly obese government so interjected itself into every aspect of life, and usurped our own personal obligations, that we no longer have any breathing room or ability to move in order to do the good? Do we have the ability to think and believe as we ought, to believe what is good, i.e. the truth, or has society and government been destructive of truth as well?
So long as we allow ourselves to be so caught up in society and/or government, in worldly things, then we can never be truly free. It is only by detaching ourselves from those chains and attaching ourselves to the good of love and truth (God) that we are set free.