The Anchoress
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
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