FREEDOM

PRACTICE: Reflect and record a few thoughts on freedom.

Nina Simone, an icon of American music, recorded a song about wishing to know how it would be to feel free, to break chains that hold, to say things that should be said, to share the love in her heart freely etc.

Everybody – everybody, wants to be free. Nobody – nobody achieves that goal on this side of the dirt of death. When one is pushed or pulled from the womb – freedom is achieved from one place and lost simultaneously to the nurture and care of the medical attendants and parents… and rightly so. Left to its own, a newborn would perish.

Freedom is the ability to act or change without constraint.

Every stage of life has constraints. There is nothing more wonderful and terrifying than seeing an infant take the first step. Walking offers the infant freedom, but constraints are absolutely necessary.

This scenario does not change from early childhood, adolescence, adulthood or elderhood, just ask any elder who has health challenges and children-imposed constraints. What does change is one’s willingness or lack thereof to comply with the constraints.

Constraints to freedom come in many forms. Nina said, “I’ll tell you what freedom is to me: no fear.” One of the chief constraints of freedom is fear from within and outside. The affluent, the rich and famous are often constrained by paranoia about their safety and well-being. They build the highest, most attractive walls possible, hire the toughest bodyguards and secure the property with the most extensive and update security systems. Or perhaps the anxiety of what could happen if the money disappeared, or the fame took a nosedive restricts their freedom to live freely. The not so famous like you and I do the same. Those fortunate enough to have a moral conscience will find that a conscience constraint is much like the nurture and guidance of the community surrounding an infant. The chains and boundaries of our thoughts, attitudes, worries are just as effective at constraining as the walls and guards of a top security prison.

I believe that I have discovered the secret to the freedom fountain. Access to the fountain is granted when one refuses to let their thoughts and imagination be constrained by themselves or what society dictates. Freedom is a gift. Freedom is a skill. Freedom is a responsibility. Each of us gets to choose whether the gift is left untrained or whether it is honed to a fine-tuned skill.

Galatians 5:1

PONDER THIS THOUGHT---Pope John Paul II, “Freedom consists not in doing what we like, but in having the right to do what we ought.”