Lenten Call to Conversion: Growing in Freedom

In our previous meditation we concluded with some thoughts on conversion and freedom. It is to this subject that I would like to turn again here.

In discussing conversion I used the image of turning over our souls to Christ. In conversion we seek to do more than simply run up a new flag; we seek to transform our ships into a different sort of thing altogether.

Pope Benedict, in his recently released second volume of Jesus of Nazareth, says that until his Resurrection, Christ's disciples—and indeed his whole Judean audience—were welcome to take or leave his teaching much as we would the teachings of any itinerant philosopher. Without the Resurrection, the Pope writes,

“[Jesus] would no longer be a criterion; the only criterion left would be our own judgment in selecting from his heritage what strikes us as helpful. In other words, we would be along. Our own judgment would be the highest instance. Only if Jesus is risen has anything really new occurred that changes the world and the situation of mankind. Then he becomes the criterion on which we can rely.”

For those choosing a life of discipleship of Christ, the Word spoken by the Father is not one criterion by which we can direct our life, to use the Pope’s language. Christ is the criterion. For Christian’s there can be no holding back. To return to our analogy a final time, we find freedom in total surrender, entrusting the galley, the engine room, and every last cabin; entrusting our marriages, our careers, our wounds, our aspirations, our finances, our sexuality, our hobbies, etc. — in a word, our all. For if Christ is who we believe he is, what folly it would be to hold anything back!

One of the fallacies of the modern world is the false division of religion and spirituality. You’ve probably heard someone say, “I’m a very spiritual person, but I’m not religious.” In an age of ‘tolerance’ where the only thing not tolerated is concrete belief, it’s much safer to be ‘spiritual’ than ‘religious’. Spirituality is tame, but Christ is not tame. Turning to Christ, as the Catholic Apologist Peter Kreeft likes to say, will cost you no less than everything. 'Spirituality', in the popular understanding of the phrase, does not cost anything, you can fit it in on the weekends—unless something else comes up. The Christian religion is a question of totality, and that’s what we’re ultimately driving at.

The Church is oft criticized for clinging to an outdated set of moral principals. There is a spectrum of theories as to her motivation, but the cleverest critics ascribe to Mother Church the intention of keeping the faithful — or the ‘bamboozled’, as the skeptics would have it — shackled to this primitive yoke so as to dominate them and keep the coffers filled.

By looking at the terror in the modern world caused by 'liberation', it might prove helpful to turn to a image employed by G.K Chesterton. In his characteristically prophetic way Chesterton describes the liberating power of truth compared with the pseudo-liberation of libertinism:

“Many a sensible modern must have abandoned Christianity [under the pressure of the conviction that] priests have blighted societies with bitterness and gloom… I look at the world and simply discover that they don't.  Those countries in Europe which are still influenced by priests, are exactly the countries where there is still singing and dancing and colored dresses and art in the open-air.  Catholic doctrine and discipline may be walls; but they are the walls of a playground.  Christianity is the only frame which has preserved the pleasure of Paganism. We might fancy some children playing on the flat grassy top of some tall island in the sea.  So long as there was a wall round the cliff's edge they could fling themselves into every frantic game and make the place the noisiest of nurseries.  But the walls were knocked down, leaving the naked peril of the precipice. They did not fall over; but when their friends returned to them they were all huddled in terror in the centre of the island; and their song had ceased.”

  

Let’s grant the validity of this attack for a moment, and see where it’s gotten our culture.

We have seen the fulfillment of modernist liberation in a number of areas. In just one example from among many, when modern man liberated woman from the servility of her traditional callings, he replaced the old chains with new ones. Modern man says to woman, ‘Men have been able to exercise their sexual passions without repercussions since the dawn of time, now it’s your turn: take this pill, and if that fails, feel free to kill the child within you.’ What has this ‘freedom’ amounted to: objectifying her with pornography in a multi-billion dollar industry (surely most the profits going to men), the psychological, spiritual and biological trauma of abortion on demand, the ever increasing pressure to fit into the mold of sexual iconography poured out from Hollywood, and the loss of the joy of wifehood and motherhood.

Looking around himself and seeing a world grasping for fulfillment, Chesterton asks modern man to reconsider Christianity:

“The great ideals of the past failed not by being outlived (which must mean over-lived), but by not being lived enough. Mankind has not passed through the Middle Ages. Rather mankind has retreated from the Middle Ages in reaction and rout. The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.”

The modern notion of freedom as the ability to do whatever we’d like has been tried, and has been found wanting.

This Lent let us return in our hearts and in our minds to the true understanding of freedom, to the freedom that Christ offers: freedom from sin. The true understanding of freedom is a mere liberation from constraint. As St. Thomas Aquinas says, “To will evil is neither freedom nor a part of freedom.” True freedom is the ability to achieve the heights of human vocation, the virtues, classical and theological. St. Thomas, in his characteristic precision, describes freedom thusly:

“Sinning is nothing else than a deviation from that rectitude which an act ought to have… Were the craftsman's hand the rule [in his] engraving, he could not engrave the wood otherwise than rightly; but if the rightness of engraving be judged by another rule, then the engraving may be right or faulty. Now the Divine will is the sole rule of God's act, because it is not referred to any higher end. But every created will has rectitude of act so far only as it is regulated according to the Divine will…”

In closing, I would like to illustrate the traditional understanding of freedom as the ability to do the good with a lengthy quote from one of my favorite contemporary authors, Thomas Howard. In his wonderful book On Being Catholic Howard writes:

“[The paradox of freedom] is visible, of course in gymnastics. Those godlike young men and these pixies from Hungary and China: How have they won through to this state of affairs in which discipline and mastery and control seem synonymous with beauty and freedom and perfection? It is a state of affairs altogether beyond the reach of all who do not feel it worth their while to abandon everything for the pursuit of this crown.

         "Or music. The tenor. The pianist. The oboist. They seem positively to exult in the challenge put to them by the score and to mount up with wings like eagles, transforming the impossible task into soaring and leaping joy. How did they win their way through to these precincts of freedom, while the rest of us croak and fumble with the keys in a melancholy way?

         "The paradox, of course, could be chased all through the fabric of human life. The freedom to do something is not easily won. The greater the perfection sought, the greater must be the remorselessness of our own self-abandon to the discipline that constitutes the steps up to the summit where freedom reigns in great bliss.

         "To be Catholic is to see the force of all this and to see all of it as testifying to that which is true of our humanity itself. Concupiscence has undone us. We can scarcely crawl, laden as we are with all sorts of venality and cravenness and pusillanimity and meagerness of spirit and sloth. But there, in the precincts where our humanity dances in all the glory with which it was invested when it was created and crowned with the imago Dei: Oh, that we were there! as the old carol puts it.”

I again encourage you: open your hearts to Christ anew in this Lenten season. Ask the Lord for the grace to follow him and for the grace to grow in freedom in serving Him in all you do.

May the grace of conversion be yours this Lent!