THE JOY OF FREEDOM

THE JOY OF FREEDOM


God alone is truly and absolutely free. He alone is totally free from extraneous conditioning or even non-voluntary inner compulsion. He alone can say: "let be" and it is done. He alone is not caused, but is truly the uncaused cause. Man, as creation, would appear to be totally caused by the Creator, and therefore not free. But that is precisely the ambiguity of man. He is created. Yet he is also a creator, because he is made in the image of the Creator. The image is what is constitutive of man as man, distinguishing him from other animals. What is at the depth of human nature is not his sin, but his freedom. Because at the depth he is free, therefore at the depths he discovers also the source of his freedom, namely the Creator God. That does not mean, however, that God is simply the ultimate depth or ground of our own being. That He may well be, but it is more correct to put it this way: He is freedom; we are made in His image, therefore we find freedom in our depths; when this freedom discovers the love and the wisdom that also lie at the depths, we experience that freedom as direct access to God. That is joy. That is adoption to sonhood. There prayer is learned.

But the way to the depths can never be found in isolation. That road passes through the depths of other people. Even the omphaloscopia (navel-gazing) of the Athos hesychasts was not an attempt to find God in the depths by self-isolation. Freedom, love and wisdom are all maintained and transmitted in community. It is as the community reconciled by the Spirit encounters God in His grace, and renders to Him its self-oblation in loving self-surrender and in identification with the oblation of Christ on the cross that man in community experiences the joy of freedom. This Eucharistic encounter with God is what makes man authentically human. Here he experiences liberation from that awful dilemma of man - that if he approaches the Holy God he dies, and if he does not, he dies also.
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Metropolitan Paulos Mar Gregorios
The Joy of Freedom: Eastern Worship and Modern Man Pages 65-66 The Christian Literature Society, Madras, India 1986 first published in 1967
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