You will know the truth and the truth will make you
free. What does that mean? What does it mean to
be free. It’s a loaded word, isn’t it? It’s amazing how
many “freedoms” that we are encountering in our world today that we never
imagined before.” So the popular meaning is that I am free to do
whatever I want to and nobody can tell me otherwise. It were be a
terrifying world if that were true! That isn’t what the scriptures
mean. So what does it mean?
In what ways are we un-free? What are the things
that keep us from being completely free? Our sins and our
faults. Sr. Genevieve mentioned how much she and her brother fought
as children. That kept her as a child very un-free. You
know that when you are angry, you are not free. You are not free to
pay attention to the other person, you are not free to sit down peacefully and
read a book, you are not free. You are just owned by your
anger. So that would be one. You can go through all of
those seven categories of Evagrius, and they are all ways in which some force
alien to ourselves, but that we have made our own, takes over and owns
us. And we are not free to be even the person we want to be, never mind
the persons God wants us to be.
So to be free in the deepest definition is to be free to
become the persons we are really meant to be. It takes us a whole
life time to discover what that really is. I suspect we really find
the truth when we step over the threshold into the other world. Oh,
That’s what I was supposed to be! But the more we hang out with
Christ, the more we become disciples, the closer we get to being free to grow
into who we are meant to be. And it’s a delightful discovery, isn’t
it?
Some of you have read the poem about when I get older I can
wear a red hat with a purple dress. The idea is that as we get older
we discover that we no longer have to be defined by other people, and by
expectations that have nothing to do with core realities. I don’t
have to be defined by any of that. There may be rules that I have to
follow for the sake of social well being. But I do not have to be
defined by other people’s expectations. The expectation that really
defines me is God’s expectation, and he’s not sitting back with folded arms and
saying “Now this is what you should become.” God is right there
interacting with us in our communion with Christ, saying “This is what you can
become. Wanna play?”
So the more we go through life, the more deeply we grow into
communion with Christ, not as defined with definitions of “do I have mystical
prayer?” or any of those things, but the kind of deep communion with Christ
that doesn’t necessarily have words or feelings associated with it. The
deeper that grows, the free-er I am not to be defined by other peoples rules
and expectations. Unless their rules and expectations happen to be
that I become my best self, and some times there are people like that, and
there are rules like that.
So this is a very profound kind of freedom. It’s
the fruit of what Benedict tells us four times in rule, “Prefer nothing to
Christ”. You can read that a million different ways.
- Prefer
nothing to the love of Christ.
- Prefer
nothing to Christ’s love for you.
- Prefer
nothing to your love for Christ, because that’s where truth and freedom really
lie.
Now that doesn’t mean that other people don’t count – of
course they count. Because Christ is not just a single eye, Christ
is his entire body. But the truth will make us free because what we
will discover, as Christ says elsewhere, “In my father’s house there are many
dwelling places, or many rooms.” The house of many rooms means many
different things, I think. It’s based on the temple, which had many
little rooms around the courtyards. They were used for storage, and
some were used for people like the widow Anna to live in. He was
actually talking from a visual image that the disciples would have known.
But think of the house of God as a house with many
rooms. There’s a room where we can find our way, and be enriched, no
matter where we are in our own lives, no matter what part we are in. Every
single dimension of ourselves can be found in this house of many rooms, like
suppose I worry. I particularly like to worry about things I can’t
do anything about and they are next week, not today.
So what did the gospels say – Do not worry about what you
have to eat or drink. I don’t think that means don’t have feelings
of worry, but don’t let that rule you. Or, I’m feeling tired – My
rest is in God alone. I’m feeling a real need to be in deeper
communion with someone else. “Love one another as I have loved
you.” Every dimension of ourselves, of our truth as it is now, and
our truth as it is becoming, every single dimension we can find in this house
of many rooms. So we know the truth was Christ but we come to know
our own truth as well. And we don’t have to apologize for any of
it. Really, it’s all there somewhere.
And the way of dealing with it is one of the reasons that
the book of Job is there. There’s patient Job for about two
chapters, and starting with chapter 3 there is Job telling God how the cow ate
the cabbage and how he should not be doing what he is doing, in no uncertain
terms. And he’s angry. It reveals a human being at
his understandable worst, growing into a different kind of wisdom, very
painfully. That’s the human story in one of its aspects, and there
it is, right in the Bible. So the Bible is not all pretty. It’s
not supposed to be all pretty, because we’re not all pretty. Our
reality is not all pretty. Our all of our reality is in God’s hands
and it is capable of growing into ultimate beauty.
So I think our mandate from God today is, I think, make my
word your home. That’s a very Benedictine mandate. Make
my word your home.
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