Escape, Freedom, and Pleasure

I just found out I’m preaching again on July 4^th weekend. Sure enough every year it rolls around, and even when I’m not installed as the preacher in a particular congregation, I find that I’m asked to sub in for someone on vacation. What do you preach about? Freedom of course. It’s such a juicy subject. The desire for freedom is central to who we are. Remember the old Star Trek episode, “The Menagerie?” The Talosians captured human beings and used them for entertainment. They didn’t understand that human beings would rather die than be caged. That’s television, but in real life we have witnessed that trade off in reality. Two murderers risked, and continue to risk, their lives in a bid for freedom as they escaped from the Clinton Correctional Facility, (what does it “correct exactly?), in upstate New York. This is a very bad thing. They are killers. It is a given that they need to be behind bars so that the rest of us are protected from the violence. In this case the criminal justice system was working as it should. Any sane person wants to see them back where they belong. That said, there is an undercurrent of excitement in their story. Will they make it to freedom? It’s a powerful instinct, this urge for freedom. But what is it?

It seems pretty elusive. In the latest Tom Cruise vehicle, Jack Reacher, he plays a character, (Jack), who lives “off the grid.” He rides buses, doesn’t own anything, has no cell phone, no credit cards and so on. He tells the defense lawyer in the story that he is free and to illustrate his point he points out the window of her office. It’s late at night and we see several people burning the midnight oil in their cubicle offices apparently pretty stressed. Are they free? Is he, seemingly without friends, without connection, on what appears to be a search for what my friend Marc calls “level 1 pleasure?” (Level one pleasure is the physical pleasures of life. Level 2 is relationship pleasure, level 3 vocational pleasure, level 4 the pleasure of unity with the One, level 5 the pleasure that comes from living out your unique expression of that One.)

My friend Eric who escaped from a camp in France in WWII, and knew something about freedom used say that if you want to be free, “You can do anything you want, unless you have to.” That pretty much gets to the heart of this business of attachment. It is our attachments that keep us from freedom. Reacher had his share of attachments. The biggest one being the biggest one for all of us really. He was attached to his image of himself.

“I’m Chevy Chase, and you’re not,” Chevy said on SNL too many years ago. We all have a way of saying that. We all look for ways to define ourselves, to satisfy ourselves; self-actualization some people call it. So we reach for the freedom to be all we can be. That’s a gift of the Enlightenment. It has set humanity on the way towards freedom. But the trouble is that with all it’s great focus on individual rights, civil rights, women’s rights to name two, with all our advancements and new “freedoms,” we miss an important step towards freedom. We start from a mistaken assumption. We are not separate, autonomous beings. The reality is we are, at the core of our being, One. The universe with all its interconnected relationships is One living breathing whole, interpenetrated by the Spirit of God. That Spirit like the wind always moving creation’s evolutionary story forward by what Whitehead called, that “gentle persuasion towards love.”

The question is, Can you trust that? Can you trust the presence of God to unfold the story as it should be, not as it should be from your point of view as a separate self, but simply as it should be. When we do that, when we live a life trusting in the creative power and purpose of the one who brought us from the big Bang to Shakespeare in 13.82 billion years, when you can do that, you are living as a unique expression of that One. That is freedom and is the highest form of pleasure for you can do whatever you want simply because you no longer have to.