CHRISTIAN NEWS MAGAZINE FOR KERALA MALAYALEE CHRISTIANS FROM INDIA AROUND THE WORLD
JUNE 2008 ARTICLE SERIES
VOL:07 ISSUE:06

LIVING ON GOD'S DESIGN - SERIES 3:CHRISTIAN UNDERSTANDING OF FREEDOM
LARGER FREEDOM : DISCIPLINE & FREEDOM

By DR. GEORGE K. ZACHARIAH, WASHINGTON, D. C.

Everyone talks about freedom. All around the world different people, different races, different countries are fighting for freedom. But what is freedom? In America we speak of living in a free country. But are we really free? Are we free to be who we really are? True freedom has to do with the human spirit – it is the freedom to be who we really are. A man has freedom to the degree that the master whom he obeys grants it to him in return for his obedience. He does well to choose a master in terms of how much freedom he gets for how much obedience.

“Freedom is at the beginning, and not at the end”, said Jiddu Krishnamurti. In fact, freedom is out of time. The most important freedom is not something with which we begin, but is something with which we end. It comes at the conclusion of a process and at a very high price. You never have available power without limits. Consider electricity, we get nothing unless we constrain the water, pulling it between limits in a pipe. The same is true of our intellectual life. You cannot be a scientist without control. It is truer in our moral life.

Spiritual disciplines is the door to liberation from the shifting slavery to self-interest and fear. The spiritual disciplines open the door according to Richard Foster. He says, “If we are to progress in the spiritual walk so that the disciplines are a blessing and not a curse, we must come to the place in our lives where we lay down the everlasting burden of needing to manage others…When we genuinely believe that inner transformation is God’s work and not ours, we can put to rest our passion to set others straight.” By discipline we mean that which disposes and liberates us to realize, through the working of the Holy Spirit, what is deepest and best in us, and systematically and progressively rearranges one’s priorities and affairs. We thus come to the awareness that the spiritual life is simply a life in which all that we do comes from the center where we are anchored in God.

The first mark of Christian discipleship according to William Stringfellow is ‘freedom from bondage to time’. He regarded time an aspect of the Fall, an aspect of the rule of death. Discipline, said Henri J M. Nouwen, is the creation of boundaries that keep time and space open for God. Solitude requires discipline, worship requires discipline, caring for others requires discipline. They all ask us to set apart a time and a place where God’s gracious presence can be acknowledged and responded to. I have increasingly experienced discipline in the Christian life as a concentrated effort to create space for God. How can we truly listen to God’s voice and discern the movements of God’s Spirit, when all our lives are filled with busyness and worries.

What does Christian discipleship mean in our everyday lives? It simply means living in such a way that my thoughts and actions are considered against the question, what would Jesus do? In other words, it means imitating Him. C. S. Lewis says it is the whole of Christianity. Disciple. As everyone knows, means learner. “Learn of me”, he said. One test of our discipleship is our willingness to keep being educated by him. “If a man wills to do God’s will, he shall know of the teaching”, the Fourth gospel reports Jesus to have said. One of modern pedagogy’s most seminal ideas is learning by doing. Galileo is called the father of experimental method. Long before him a Roman sage said ‘Discimus ambulando’, (we learn by walking, we learn as we walk). It has been revived in our time. The Christian is a learner, then a follower. It is a logical sequence. “I have a passion in life and it is He’’, said Paul. In John A. Mackay’s words, Christ summoned the disciples to a fellowship of the yoke, a fellowship of the towel, and a fellowship of the Word. We are called to share the ‘fellowship of his sufferings’ (Phil3:10) Discipleship has to do with decisions in accordance with your leader says, living the way he says to live.

We have to recognize the paradox that freedom is preserved only through discipline; but initial freedom is required to make discipline possible. In fact discipline is precisely to protest freedom. Every freedom has its corresponding discipline. But few realize that every discipline has its corresponding freedom. Following are a few examples of disciplines and corresponding freedoms.

  1. Not viewing ourselves better than others and the desire to control them. The obsession to demand that things go the way we want them to go, needless to say, is one of the worst shackles we have. We sometimes spend a lot of time stewing over some little thing that didn’t go our way. We get mad over it. Sometimes we act as if our very life depends on it. We may even get an ulcer over it. Almost all church fights and splits occur because people do not enjoy the freedom to give in to each other.

  2. Simplicity: Simplicity is freedom and duplicity is bondage. “God made man simple; man’s complex problems are of his own devising.” (Eccl 7:39 Jerusalem Bible) AS Arthur Gish said, “We buy things we do not want to impress people we do not like.” (Beyond the Rat Race) It is putting possessions in proper perspective. To receive what we have as a gift from God; to know that it is God’s business, and not ours, to care for what we have; and to have our goods available to others are the three basic attitudes of simplicity. Einstein had in his office at the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton a sign ‘Simplify’. It is well worth remembering this simple advice.

  3. Discipline & Freedom (I) (ii) (iii) Submission: This is a hard one for us especially the Keralites. The corresponding freedom is the ability to lay down the terrible burden of always needing to get our own way. Submission alone can free us sufficiently to enable us to distinguish between genuine issues and stubborn self-will. Our happiness, for some, is not dependent upon getting what we want.

  4. Leadership: It is letting be, allowing freedom to others to do their work, simply enabling people to be themselves, to grow and to fruit. Professor John Macquarrie has argued that for speaking of God Himself the most fundamental category more basic even than that of ‘pure being’ in which He has been traditionally described is that of ‘letting be’. “And God said, let there be…”

  5. Sharing: The corresponding freedom is release from anxiety. Sharing is that which differentiates a community from society. The ideal of Christian community is to have an atmosphere where our resources are willingly pooled with those in need instead of the desire to hoard. Giving is the best means for receiving as well.

  6. Loyalty to our roots, traditions and families: Corresponding freedom is one of stability and emotional resourcefulness needed for facing crises. I cannot resist mentioning the role our parents continue to play in our lives. It is written that when King Solomon erected the Temple in Jerusalem he attempted to bring the Holy Ark into the sanctuary, but the gates locked and would not open for him. He began to pray and chant hymns in praise of God, but the gates remained closed. Then he raised his voice and commanded ‘Open, ye gate, allow the Lord of Hosts to enter’. But still, the gates remained locked. In desperation, Solomon cried out: ‘Almighty God, remember the righteousness of David, my father.’ Instantly, the gates opened and the Holy Ark was brought into the sanctuary.

What is needed is the discipline of the warrior viz., controlling your own behavior. If we allow our emotions to deplete our energy, we have no energy to change our life or to give to others. The way you see the world will depend upon the emotions you are feeling. When you are angry everything around you is wrong, nothing is right. As Don Miguel Ruiz commented “We have a dysfunctional dream of the planet, and humans are mentally sick with a disease called fear. The symptoms of the disease are all the emotions that make humans suffer: anger, hate, sadness, envy, and betrayal. When the fear is too great, the reasoning mind begins to fail, and we call this mental illness.” Fear restricts freedom. When we are not forgiving we do not enjoy the blessing of freedom. Forgiveness is the only way to heal, absence of which perpetuates our victimhood.

The problem with most of us is that we lose control of our emotions. It is the emotions that control the behavior of the human, not the human who controls the emotions. When we lose control we say things that we don’t want to say, and do things that we don’t want to do. That is why it is so important to be impeccable with our word and to become a spiritual warrior and not the discipline of a soldier. Not the discipline controlled from outside but the discipline to be ourselves, no matter what. The big difference between a warrior and a victim is that the victim represses and the warrior refrains.

Janis Joplin sang, ‘Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose’. Michael English has a song something like this: “ When I let the cords of love bind me, I am free.” This is how I find my freedom, when I am truly free to grow into the man I’m supposed to be. Freedom , in the Bible, is first of all freedom for maturity. The opposite of bondage, as the Bible sees it, is not independence, but responsibility. Freedom is the willingness to exercise responsible power and control over the things which normally dominate us. The Bible talks about our liberation from and for, from bondage, and for service, for our fellow human beings. As Heidegger would say, we are free from the world in order to be for the world. “God’s program in history is to ‘defatalize’ human life, to put man’s life into man’s own hands, and to give him the terrible responsibility of running it. So God also makes us free for life, and not many of us are really ready to accept that kind of freedom. We are afraid of the freedom of defatalization. But to live with responsible freedom in today’s world is what we mean by biblical faith.” (Harvey Cox) For what Augustine called the lesser freedom, freedom to choose for yourself, is a precondition of the larger or greater freedom, the freedom which comes of having chosen. Anais Nin’s famous aphorism comes to mind. “We are born with the power to alter what we are given at birth.” God gives us freedom to become through disciplined living.

The Christian faith does not put liberation at the center , but reconciliation, the freedom to live in responsible relation with another. In grace, one sees freedom and obedience in direct relationship, for one is free to become in the degree to which he obeys the call to righteousness in life. (Jn 1:12) The lack of this ‘freedom to become’ perverts freedom into irresponsibility. I am responsible for how I deal with other people. I learn from others, to be sure, but I do not grant to others authority over my consciousness or follow blindly where I do not understand or agree. I do not live second hand. Just as I need to know what I am responsible for, I also need to know what I am not responsible for. I need to know what is within my power and what is not within my power. I need to know my limits, which is to say only that I need to know my identity. Our control over our own life is not unlimited. There is more efficacy in understanding that “nature to be commanded, must be obeyed”, than in telling myself, “I create my own reality.” If the idea of responsibility is to be meaningful, it must be based in reality and not in fantasy.

“Take what you want”, said God, “and pay for it” is my favorite Spanish proverb. The more we are aware that we choose our actions, the more likely we are to take responsibility for them. And learning to take responsibility for our actions is a precondition of taking responsibility for our life. Freedom as a way of thought must precede freedom as a way of life.

These two, freedom and obedience (another word for discipline) belong together. We live in the freedom of obedience. Freedom is preserved only through discipline, but initial freedom is required to make discipline possible. This was the paradox raised by Thomas Mann. It is also true that my freedom is inevitably tied with the freedom of my fellow human beings. This is what it means when we say freedom is indivisible. Desmond Tutu used to refer to an intriguing old film The Defiant Ones in which Sidney Poitier was one of the stars. Two convicts escape from a chain gang. They are manacled together, the one white and the other black. They fall into a ditch with slippery sides. The one convict claws his way nearly to the top and out of the ditch but cannot make it because he is bound to his mate, who has been left at the bottom in the ditch. The only way they can make it is together as they strive up and up and up together and eventually make their way over the side well and out. God has bound us, manacles us together. In a way it was to live out what Martin Luther King Jr had said, “Unless we learn to live together as brothers [and sisters] we will die together as fools.”

Growing into our true freedom. True freedom is the freedom of the children of God. To reach that freedom requires a life long discipline since so much in our world militates against it. The spiritual truth that leads to freedom is the truth that we belong not to the world but to God, whose beloved children we are. By living lives in which we keep returning to that truth in word and deed, we will gradually grow into our true freedom. Freedom attracts. When you are interiorly free you call others to freedom, whether you know it or not. Freedom attracts wherever it appears. In Henri J. W. Neuwen’s words, “A free man or a free woman creates a space where others feel safe and want to dwell. Our world is so full of conditions, demands, requirements, and obligations that we often wonder what is expected of us. But when we meet a truly free person, there are no expectations. Only our invitation to reach into ourselves and discover there our own freedom. Where true inner freedom is, there is God. And where God is, there we want to be.”

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