Essentials in life are tantalizing if they are
obtained freely. Nothing impresses the mind more than freedom. Nothing hallows
desire more than freedom. And yet still, nothing steals the body more than
freedom. There is even a saying that goes that, “Freedom is a cheap thing, but
it is the hardest thing to obtain.” Freedom is reality in a shadow.
In the common place that is the heart and the mind,
one always wants a loop hole of escape – maybe always into a world of impracticalness.
Into a world of tidy impracticalness perhaps because he/she seeks to run away,
away from things that are haunting the heart and/or the mind. I have realized
that mankind has perfected the art of running away from things. We have become too good at having our own freedom. Freedom
from things that we love and things that we don’t. We all love running away
from nothing, from exiting snares and from invincible adversities. We all run
because we choose to – which also means that we may choose not to. We run
because walking is clumsy when such situations occur. We run to ease the urge
brought about when the drums of fear keep beating for too long. We run. We just
run. We all run somehow… We run into our own freedom. Into a world we know.
The choice to run or not to run towards (or away from)
things is ours; but at some point in
our lives, the choice of what we will always be running away from (or what we
run away from) is not. Do you get it? I may not fully dissolve this into your
mind, but there is one truth that I need to be well defined in our minds: you
can’t understand freedom and a little more about freebies unless you understand
that we can’t get anywhere near freedom until we acknowledge that the search
for it is a struggle – even a chase after, a run to (or away from)… That is
what there is about freedom. Yeah, freedom is cheap and easily found, but it is
not easily gotten.
C. S. Lewis defines his redemption as a matter of a
struggle. This is what he says in Surprised
by Joy - "You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen,
night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my
work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not
to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity
Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed:
perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England. I
did not then see what is now the most shining and obvious thing; the Divine humility which will accept a
convert even on such terms. The Prodigal Son at least walked home on his
own feet. But who can duly adore that Love which will open the high gates to a
prodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes
in every direction for a chance of escape?"
The talk about freedom, deliverance, salvation and
redemption applies to every creature on this planet. Those terms are so closely
linked with Christianity that we all think their T & C only apply to such
spheres. It doesn’t matter (and to me it never matters) what we are or where we
are, what we believe in or don’t, what we spend our time thinking about or not
– all men need freedom from one thing or
another. Freedom is a universal
thing.
While talking to another freethinker friend of mine,
she had an assertion that there is nothing that mankind really needs to be
saved from, maybe only himself; and that there is no such savior who can wholly
save men from nothing… That is
debatable, but let me not go into that…
Up there, we see C. S Lewis struggling to meet with
God. He didn’t want to, but he knew he needed
to. The power of choice was on his side –to deny that he needed freedom or
to accept that he needed it. He knew he needed something he had never found in
his atheistic ways, something that was a shadow he always walked with but was
not part of, something that laid him desperate yet could not easily reach it
until he accepted some help from that shadowy guest of his… He knew that he so
desperately desired to overcome this fear, and yet he was afraid of what it
will make of him. So day after day when the shadow of desperation fell on him,
he tried to sneak away, until that night
that he had to admit he needed freedom and he came towards it screaming
(read, he ran to it not wanting to…)
Lewis’ story is just a picture of what most of us face
from day to day - an inner struggle with
self in trying to convince ourselves that we are too expensive for freebies or
that our relationships, marriages, spiritual lives, children, parents,
families, jobs, education (name them…) can do without a bit of pampering from
the Master above. We pretend that God is not there or that He doesn’t exist:
all in the name of not wanting to do that which we so definitely know He wants
us to do. We want to stretch our lives to the limit of ourselves, but when it
comes to stretching further, we pretend that all is well and continue living
with the agony and pain of self denial. And the series goes on and on, and on,
until life becomes faded and tasteless. But most of us even after reaching this
point rarely come back to our sense to say, “I
need to take care of this shadow and emptiness…” So we keep on losing and therefore making
excuses about why things are so tough within us, why we can’t breathe that much
and feel free, why life is
suffocating, why our relationships are not working, why our lives are not
getting better, why our friends treat us like they treat us, why we feel
abandoned, why we are poor and feel cursed, why our families are a den of liars
and psychopaths, why we can’t get jobs or marriages, why we need to visit
psychiatrists and psychologists and not God, why our spiritual lives and
retarded, why we keep losing and never win, why we need to start yoga lessons,
why we can’t find peace at all, why we feel as miserable as starving pigs, why
my sickness is not getting away or why his/herr sickness is not diminishing, why,
bla bla bla…
But the
solution to this endless chase is always simple: we need to take time and allow
ourselves to be hauled into the world of the unknown. To allow God to transpose
us into the beauty of His unknowns, because only the unknown that is good is
effective enough to set us free. The angst and anxiety in our search for
freedom will end when we stop denying that we need help and yell out to God for
help. Psychologists may help, but only for a while – they only offer human
solutions to human problems. God offers eternal freedom in all ways of life:
right from sin to that petty thing that is pestering you. Why should they use
on you the same comments that Jeremiah used on the Israelites in Jeremiah 2:13-14?: “My people have committed two sins: They
have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken
cisterns that cannot hold water…”
Run to your freedom today. Run to
God. Stop chasing for freedom in life’s shadows, because it is never found
there…
Morris.
