FREEDOM IS THE TRANSCENDENT

FREEDOM IS THE TRANSCENDENT



The biggest enemies of freedom are not always external; they are more often internal to the person as well as to the community.

A person who has not by discipline trained himself or herself to be free from internal constraints like drives, passions, hidden motives, and lack of integrity, can never be considered genuinely free.

True freedom is not just a lack of external constraint or alien domination; it is the capacity to be creative of the good without being constrained to so or not to do so.

To be genuinely free is to desire and will the good, know the good and do the good, not for any other purpose than that it is the good. Such freedom is vested jointly in the person and in the community, simultaneously.

Neither the person nor the community can be really free, until it has be discipline ironed out also the internal constraints within the person and the society that prevent it from desiring the good, knowing the good and doing the good.

Freedom, in fact, is genuine, free, creative love that freely gives itself for others without seeking anything in return. Freedom is not doing what pleases oneself; it is creatively doing that which is good without internal or external constraint either within or without the person and the community.

Freedom needs power to create; that power can be scientific-technological, social-structural, political-economic, or prayerful-meditational; but it is always disciplined power, whether it be the power of persons, groups, corporations, or communities.

In fact, freedom is the transcendent. Only the transcendent is genuinely free, unconstricted, freely willing and achieving the good.

It is through the practice of genuinely creative freedom that the
transcendent is best experienced... This wider sense of freedom [...] needs to be reinstated today.

True freedom always include the ability to do that which is evil or not good, but also the disciplined capacity not to use that ability.



METROPOLITAN PAULOS MAR GREGORIOS
"A Light Too Bright: The Enlightenment Today" page 235
State University of New York Press, 1992