We have often spoken of story and retold many stories in our weekly reflections. We might recall again that, in some sense, we see our life as a story, and we have a certain image of the kind of person we are and are becoming. And in living out our life, we follow a certain script.

On the one hand, the images and stories we are exposed to from childhood on, shape the image and script we at first follow. We interpret ourselves in the light of this script. A dominant script in our society is that of financial success. Yet it has been questioned for many ages, as in the Greek myth of King Midas and the more modern play, Death of a Salesman. In this latter play, the main character, Willy Loman, finds that, in the end, this script destroys him. King Midas is granted a wish that everything he touches turns to gold. When he tries to eat and then to hug his daughter, they both turn to gold. His gift can lead to loss of life itself and the loss of the love that gives it meaning. This theme is echoed in the key sentence in the story of Rumpelstiltskin: “Something living is more precious than all the treasures of the world.”

In effect, every story contains a way of looking at life. The script we have inherited provides the eyes through which we look at life. As we become aware of this pattern our life is following, we can reaffirm, modify or change it. What is crucial is to have a life-story that offers an image of ourselves as a person of sacred worth, and a script that takes into account all the complexities of life, its joys and sorrows, and the whole array of feelings, both positive and negative.The truth of a story concerns not so much the facts of the story–whether or not it actually happened. It concerns more deeply the vision of life the story contains: the picture of what a human being is and what life really means.

Our change in script may come through suffering. A friend once told me that we change only when we are hurts so much that we have to move. We can also change when we are given a better vision of life, a better set of eyes through which to look at life, or a better heart through which to experience life. Or we can simply outgrow our present stage of development, just as a crab outgrows its shell, and sheds it to grow a new shell. Our own growth can be a process of shedding shells that run counter to or at least do not reflect who we truly are or where we belong, where our true home lies.

In this regard, we spoke of the experience of fragmentation–of broken pieces in our life. This experience offers the challenge at once to grieve the brokenness and to seek a new wholeness. Sociologist and theologian, Gregory Baum, describes this experience in a striking way. “Life can be shattered. … Failures, sickness, disappointments, accidents remain part of life on this earth. It is possible to fall into situations where life is destroyed. It is possible to have one’s life shattered like a precious vase and despair over ever being able to rebuild it. We meet people … whose life has become a living death and we realize with fear and trembling that we too are vulnerable, we too could destroy our lives or have our lives destroyed by forces beyond our control. These deaths in the midst of life are what we are most afraid of.”

Yet, Baum adds that, even, out of the fragments left to us after the storm, there is the possibility and the summons for new life to emerge, for growth to a fuller humanness to occur. Another illustration is the Pastoral Symphony of Beethoven, in which the storm movement is followed by a gently triumphant re-emergence of light and life and activity. The early film, Fantasia, offers a beautiful visual illustration of Beethoven’s music. In a similar way, the stories of Oedipus the King and King Lear portray the emerging of a new deeper and truer vision out of the experience of physical blindness, as does the blind singer in the Odyssey. The only lame Greek God, Hephaestus, is the one who forges great beauty.

What comes from all of these sources is the conviction that there is both joy and sorrow, suffering and healing, in human life. Yet, in the story of Pandora, as we retold it last week, these may be contained in, embraced by, and grounded in, a hope and love that take into account, but reach beyond all grief.

This conviction is also echoed in the words of Karl Rahner, who acknowledges that there is in life enough darkness, as he puts it, to plunge us into despair. And yet, he goes on to conclude, is there not so much light, so much joy, truth, and love, as to foster a basic trust in the meaningfulness of life, and the meaningfulness our own life.

I think that the folk or fairy tales are a marvellous example of this perspective of hope deeper than despair, sacredness deeper than words, and light out of darkness I first heard these stories as a child. Later I told them, along with other stories, to children in a residential treatment centre. They were quite taken by them and had a real understanding of them. This experience prompted me to engage in an in-depth study of these stories. That endeavour was itself later enriched by the challenge of learning Greek Mythology and the joy of sharing it with my godson. In Sleeping Beauty, for example, it is acknowledged that we all have hedges of thorns around us. Yet the inner beauty remains and is awakened especially by love given and received.

I would like to cite a favourite example, that I’m sure to have used before, Rapunzel. In the Grimm Brothers’ version, the blinded young prince stumbles through the forest, and hears Rapunzel singing again, as she ekes out an existence for herself and their children. He gropes his way towards the sound of her voice. Rapunzel sees him from a distance and runs to embrace him. As she does so, two of her tears fall on his eyes and restore their sight. The symbolic meaning, the truth of the story, is that our own sorrow, borne creatively, can be a source of healing and vision for one another.

Writer, G. K Chesterton, says that it was good to be in the fairy tale. These stories evoked a sense of wonder and gratitude, a gratitude essentially for the gift of life itself. He adds that just as children are grateful for gifts place in their stockings at Christmas, he is grateful for the gift of legs in his own stockings.

May you find or deepen an image of your sacred self, and a story that honours the richness of your inner life, and leads you to a sense of gratitude that contains and goes beyond all sorrows, and that flows into a healing generosity for others.

Norman King, April 11, 2022
Please visit our website: www.touchingthespirit.ca

Last week, I referred to an interview in which children’s book author, Kate DiCamillo said that life is chaos and art is pattern. She said as well that story and other arts are genuine if they name life truthfully but with love. She cites Charlotte’s Web as an example. E. B. White, its author, tells of the sad death of Charlotte, the spider, yet does so with a genuine love.

She suggests that: “E. B. White loved the world. And in loving the world, he told the truth about it — its sorrow, its heartbreak, its devastating beauty. He trusted his readers enough to tell them the truth, and with that truth came comfort and a feeling that we were not alone.” Her words recall my experience with the novels of Margaret Lawrence. She reveals flaws in all her characters, yet really loves them.

Author, Sam Keen in his interview and book, Your Mythic Journey, says that, in any relationship, we discover that neither we nor the other person lives up to our idealized picture. We are then faced with the challenge of whether we can love this “flawed creature.” It is interesting that the word flaw has the same origin as a flake of snow, a flagstone or piece of stone, or indeed a fragment, that is, a broken piece, of anything.

We all experience some degree of brokenness, a lack of wholeness, a fragmentation, and the accompanying sense of pain and sorrow and loss. The challenge, as we have said many times, is to recognize at once this flawed character, in ourselves, others, and our world, yet still maintain its sacred worth. It is to blend truth with kindness, including towards ourselves. It is to love the flawed yet sacred creature in each of us.

In saying that “ life is chaos and art is pattern,” Kate DiCamillo echoes the creation stories from many traditions. They speak of drawing meaning out of chaos, often through words, which usually means, in effect, through stories. She observes that she tries “to make sense of the world through stories.” And adds: “We have been given the task of making hearts large through story. We are working to make hearts that are capable of containing much joy and much sorrow, hearts capacious enough to contain the complexities and mysteries of ourselves and of each other.”

We have spoken of the heart as the core or centre of a person from which flow and into which are gathered all the experiences of life. A heart made large is one that is stretched to experience widely and deeply and, in that process, to learn to love. Referring to the poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, she speaks of experiencing the totality of life with a sense of wonder, and then of naming it with love.

It reminds me of the story of Pandora, as retold by myself and my six-year-old godson, which I will include here.

     Pandora’s Box.
Once upon a time, there was a lovely young woman named Pandora. Her name means all the gifts, and she was endowed with all the gifts that any person could want. She had a beautiful box that she kept unlocked by her side for a long time.

One day she thought that it was time to open the box. So she called all the people she knew and even many that she did not yet know. She gathered them all around her and brought out the beautiful box.

She then carefully and gently inserted the gold key and turned it. The lock clicked open. She slowly lifted the lid, And out came all kinds of creatures, some beautiful, and a few others not so. Out flew joy and peace, wisdom and courage, truth and justice, compassion and strength. But then came fear and hurt, sadness and anger. And finally hope and love.

The people were confused. They recognized all the feelings but did not know how they fit together. Then hope spoke. “Sometimes you will feel afraid, and sometimes you will be sad or angry. But I will always be with you if you turn to me. And I will help you in difficult times.”

Then love spoke. “You will sometimes feel lonely and lost, but turn to me and I will walk with you. I will lead you to people who will care for you. And I will help you to care for people too. Then I will be like the box that contains everything within something beautiful.

“And you will know that the box is life. It contains everything, It contains all the feelings. But it is a beautiful box, and it will always be open.”
Retold by Aidan and Norm

May you find your own inner story, the story at the heart of who you are. And may you respond to your story with a heart of wonder and love. And may you expand that heartfelt story in ever wider circles, for the healing of the world.

Norman King. April 04, 2022

Last week, I spoke, in part , of the meaning of the Greek word, alethia, and the Latin word, revelatio. Alethia, which has come to mean truth actually means the removal of forgetfulness, or remembering. In this sense awareness, or understanding, means coming to realize what we may have forgotten or lost sight of. G. K. Chesterton reminds us that we have forgotten who we truly are. In Greek mythology, memory is the daughter of earth and sky and the mother of the muses. These are the many arts, literature, music, sculpture, and much else. This association suggests that it is story and painting and music and the like that help us get in touch with our true self, that help us remember who we truly are.

I heard recently a podcast interview in which children’s book author, Kate DiCamillo said that life is chaos and art is pattern. Story and other arts are genuine if they name life truthfully but with love. She cites Charlotte’s Web as an example. E. B. White tells of the sad death of Charlotte the thoughtful spider, yet does so with a genuine love.

The pragmatic orientation in much of education today regards it as job preparation, essentially preparation for yesterday’s jobs. It readily reduces us to an economic cog and neglects the fulness of our humanity. A more rounded exposure to the arts and sciences, beyond pragmatic information, helps us to grow and develop as a human being and not just an economic function. Exposure to the best that humans have thought and created enriches us as full persons. It helps us to create a life and not just make a living. It helps us make of our lives a work of art and mot just a product

The Latin word revelatio has a similar sense. It is a removal of a veil, that is, whatever prevents our seeing or understanding. The word blind likewise has a sense of darkness or absence of light, and has the same root as, the words black, blank, or bleak. As we noted, it is used metaphorically in literature, in stories of King Oedipus or King Lear, or in the song Amazing Grace, to indicate a lack of vision, a lack of understanding. Both Oedipus and Lear progress from mere cleverness to wisdom, from a more surface attachment to a deeper love, but not without suffering.

As Viktor Frankl stresses, such wisdom and compassion come, not through masochistic wallowing, but through a courageous response to inevitable suffering. Many of the religious traditions also speak of enlightenment, and the healing of blindness, a coming out of darkness into light.

A similar theme is found in Plato’s allegory of the cave, or in E. M. Forster 1909 story, The Machine Stops. The folk tale, The Blind Boy and the Loon, tells of how a blind Inuit child is immersed in water three times, each time ever more deeply, until he is able to see clearly. Coming to see, growing in our vision, is an ever deepening process from darkness to light, from ignorance to awareness, from indifference to compassion, from self-preoccupation to justice.

Sometimes the notion of discipline is conveyed as a form of cruelty to ourselves, of punishing ourselves, not just for allegedly doing wrong but for being wrong, not just for what we do but for who we are. The original meaning of the word, however, is to learn. Our growth can perhaps be viewed as a process of struggling to learn, or better to understand, to develop a vision. This process can involve first, to experience life fully in all its chaos, its hurt, and especially its wonder; and then to name experience with truth and depth and love. It can perhaps be viewed as a struggle with what prevents us from seeing clearly and deeply, with what hold us back from being more completely free, and inseparably with what hinders our sense of sacred worth and consequently our capacity to love.

In this regard, we have spoken before of the role of solitude, friendship, and social involvement. We might just add here a few words on silence. Spiritual writer, Morton Kelsey, notes: “Detachment from habitual, unthinking activity is part of the process of growing up. It is the first step in learning to live as a separate individual and trying to stand on one’s own two feet. … Only in silence … does self-knowledge begin.” He adds: “Out of silence disturbing emotions often come to the surface which are difficult to control. … In the silence one can allow the feelings to arise, disconnected from their ordinary targets in the outer world, and learn to deal with the depth of the psyche directly.”

Along similar lines, Benedictine nun and social activist, Joan Chittister writes: “Silence separates you from all the masks and distractions of life. … Only silence can bring you to the union of the self with the spirit within you that makes life true, makes life authentic, makes life worth living.” Again in the words of a child in Kathleen Norris’s class “Silence reminds me to take my soul with me wherever I go.”

That is perhaps the challenge: to be in touch with our soul, to be at home to our inmost self, to remember who we truly are: a being of sacred worth, deeper and more than, and not overcome by our mistakes or even our betrayals. This process makes possible and is inseparable from our compassion for one another and our sense of justice.

Spiritual writer, Thomas Merton puts it this way: “One who attempts to act and do things for others or for the world without deepening his or her own self-understanding, freedom, integrity and capacity to love. will not have anything to give others.” Elsewhere, he describes this deepening and its effects: Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, … If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed. …At the centre of our being is a point … pure truth. … It is like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven. It is in everybody, and if we could see it, we would see these billions of points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely.

May you come to be more an more at home to “the secret beauty of your heart,” and may that sacred centre radiate more an more outwards at wherever you are and in whatever you do.

Norman King, March 28, 2022

The long months of the pandemic have not only been an unfamiliar experience for many, but have often created a profound feeling of weariness, lassitude, and lethargy for many, as well as a sense of sadness and irritability. As many of you know, I have an interest the root meaning of words. I came across a definition of lassitude as a condition characterized by lack of interest, energy, or spirit. The word itself has the same stem as the word “late,” which also relates to the sense of weariness, slowness, or sluggishness.

The word “lethargy” comes from ancient Greek and means inactive through forgetfulness. In Greek mythology, lethe was the river of forgetfulness, where one’s past life was lost to memory. And Plato spoke of knowledge as remembering. The word alethia, is literally, non-forgetting, and has evolved into its meaning as truth. It is similar to the word “revelation, which from its latin roots is the removal of a veil. As the song, Amazing Grace, voices it. “I once was blind but now I see.” It strikes me that when we hear something that strikes us as profoundly true, it is less a matter of discovering something new but of becoming aware of something we always some how knew but perhaps did not realize. One of the most gratifying moments in many years of teaching came when an adult student said to me. “You put into words what I always somehow knew but couldn’t say.”

In ancient Greece, too, a contrast was made between physical sight and spiritual insight. It was reflected in the legend that Homer to whom the authorship of The Iliad and The Odyssey are attributed, was blind. A blind poet sings of the journey of Odysseus, a blind seer warns Oedipus of the danger of uncovering a painful truth, and Oedipus himself becomes wise only after he is blinded. This thought is continued as well in the Shakespearian play, King Lear. Like Oedipus, Lear only realizes the meaning and importance of love after he is blinded.

We can also recall the essay on folk tales by G. K. Chesterton who says that we have often forgotten our name, forgotten who we are and the experience of wonder, evoked by the folk tales, can help us to remember our true self. Wayne Muller also speaks of the inner voice of our true self.
Neither my pain nor my confusion can stop the relentless companionship of this true and faithful voice. Something more vital, strong and true lies embedded deep within me. Sometimes I barely see it, can’t quite touch it. Then I experience a starry night, a forest after a rain, a loving embrace, a strain of sweet and perfect melody–and that is all it takes to remind me who I am: a spirit, alive, and whole. It helps me remember my nature, hear my name.

All these rambling thoughts come down to the idea that the lack of energy, the sadness, the irritability, and even perhaps the depression we may feel, can cause us to lose sight of, to forget who we truly are. Muller says that we must be careful how we name ourselves “If we believe we are a thief, we will act like a criminal. If we think we are fragile and broken, we will live a fragile, broken life. If we believe we are strong and wise, we will live with enthusiasm and courage. The way we name ourselves colours the way we live. … We must be careful how we name ourselves.”

What this means, in our perspective, is that deeper than all weariness and much else, there is our sacred self, a being of intrinsic worth, a value that remains, even when we cannot feel it. Whatever else in life happens that can push us toward forgetfulness or veil this conviction for us, it is essential to cling to this sense of worth, even as if to a life raft.

How do we do so? I find it a continuous struggle. Henri Nouwen whose vast writings on spirituality, were rooted in the conviction of the “belovedness’ of every human being, found this to be a lifelong struggle, one that involved a lengthy period of depression. Parker Palmer is an author from the Quaker tradition which hold that there is “that of God,” an inner light in every human being. Yet he also experienced three profound periods of clinical depression, which he wrote about in a book, Darkness Before Dawn: Redefining the Journey through Depression.

Certainly, speaking with a wise and caring counsellor can be helpful as can a limited dependence on medication where there is a chemical imbalance. Yet the hope that “this too will pass,” the recognition that this experience that this experience will pass can also be helpful. We may also recognize that we may for a time lack the energy required for activity, and allow ourselves for a time to be in that space. At the same time, solitude, friendship, and social involvement are certain ways of responding to a whole variety of different life situations.

Solitude is quiet time by oneself. Its simplest traditional expression is simply to attend to one’s breathing in its three movements of breathing in, pausing, and breathing out. It can also be helpful to read something that speaks to us. This is not a reading to devour information, but a more reflective process in which we let the words we read sink into our heart and soul.

Friendship can also be helpful: a friendship which is rooted in mutual trust and expressed in open conversation from the heart. It is a matter of mutual speaking and listening from the heart, the core or centre of who we are. Author Sam Keen writes: “Strange as it may seem, self-knowledge begins with self-revelation. We don’t know who we are until we hear ourselves speaking the drama of our lives to someone we trust to listen with an open mind and heart.”

In addition, we grow as well through some activity of outreach in which we do something for others. Even small acts of kindness can count for a lot. So too can involvement in some kind of organization that deals with something in which we have a personal stake or interest, such as Amnesty International or Doctors without Borders. At the same time, as I learned from my brother Mike, the basic gift we have to offer is our presence, being there and being all there for one another. Upon that presence, but not replacing it, can be built the possibilities offered by our particular gifts and interests, as they are able to respond to the present situation and conditions in which our life is currently lived out.

May you find within yourself both acceptance and strength, and a continual recognition of your sacred worth, despite any persisting weariness. And may learn to extend your presence, wisdom, and caring in ever wider circles.

Norman King, March 20, 2022

We have spoken many times of the notion of home, and that it essentially means being at home to ourselves and so able to be at home to others. It is not so much a physical location as a place at the very core of ourselves, regarded as sacred, and where there is a sense of safety, belonging, and outreach.

Some thirty plus years ago, I was able to stay with my mother during her last days. She spoke of wanting to go home. She was in the hospital at the time and I asked her if she wished to be able to conclude her life at her apartment. She said then that she wanted to go home to George, her husband and my father, who had died the previous year. Home for her was more than anything the person with whom she had spent over fifty years of her life.

It has struck me since that time that our home is with those that we love and who love us. Our home is in the heart or core of our own self and of those who have entered our heart or whose heart we have entered.

Miriam Therese Winter, musician and theologian, has an article I have quoted before, called “Music the Way Home.” She says that home is not just a place outside us, but is a metaphor for a place within us. “It means to live from the inside out. To do so is to be at home.” She adds that “wholeness, healing, integration is what the inner journey is all about.” It happens when, instead of a divisive dualism, our inner and outer selves and the world within us and around us are in harmony. For her, it happens, however fleetingly, through music, which shares our journey into ultimate meaning. “When we embrace music as a healing presence, we are already home.”

Her words echo those of Eva Rockett, who has written that the beauty of music can reach behind all our defences and touch the core of the condensed self. What they seem to be saying that our home place is our inmost core or centre, the place that no wound can touch, the sacred self, of which we have consistently written. Music, meditation, friendship with its intimate and open conversation, and any expression that reaches to our core or allows us to get in touch with our core, brings us home.

This sense of home is echoes as well in the spiritual, Going Home, whose melody is inserted into Dvorak’s New World Symphony. The spiritual speaks of a place beyond fear, with family and friends, and adds that “it’s not far, just close by, through an open door.” Besides suggesting a physical place beyond cruel enslavement, it suggests a place within. The door is to our inmost soul, where Meister Eckhart and Howard Thurman tell us that no wound could ever reach. This vision is also expressed in another spiritual, I’m Trying to Make Heaven My Home, and in the African American folk tale, The People Could Fly.

A similar perspective is found in the writings of Joseph Campbell in his portrayal of the hero. The journey of the hero consists in leaving home, struggle and victory, and return with a gift. For Campbell, this journey is one of inner rather than outer geography. It involves leaving one’s present level of growth and development, a struggle especially with our fears and hostilities, and arriving at a new level of understanding and daring.. It is a quest essentially to become a whole person who lives from his or her inmost core. The gift is the gift of our self , our inmost self and our whole self. It is the gift of our presence, our wisdom, and our compassion.

Many years ago, I jotted down a definition of the hero or heroine. “The hero is the person who ventures beyond his or her present stage of growth and development to a new and purified level of thought, feeling, and activity, by struggling with their fears and hostilities; so as to discover and live from their true and inmost self, and to share this wisdom and compassion with others.” In briefer words, we might say that the hero or heroine is the person who comes to be at home within themselves and are then able to be a home for others, a safe place as well as a place of challenge, a place of belonging and of outreach.

The story of Hansel and Gretel gives two examples of homelessness and a final example of at-homeness. At first the children are cast out and deserted. They are then are shut in and threatened with being swallowed up. They are first locked out and then locked in. These are images of rejection and of smothering. Both situations are forms of homelessness, of not belonging. Home, in contrast is a place where one can come to, be in, and leave from, without being locked in or locked out, rejected or devoured. It is a place of safety, belonging and outreach.

In the story, the children, wander for a time through a dark forest and a period of lostness, punctuated briefly by the beauty of a bird’s singing that reaches deeper than all their sorrows. Then they find an abundance of treasures in the house of the witch. In effect, they are realizing their own inner worth and gifts that are deeper than any fear or hostility. They can then share these with others.

It seems that many people in our society suffer from homelessness, a far greater number than those who lack a physical home. It is very easy in our present world to be caught up in externals, to be captured by fear and its expression in hostility. To that extent we are homeless, away from our real home, our inner sacred core, and limited as a result in our response to one another. Bring Him Home is a beautiful song from Les Misérables. Beyond survival and safety, it suggest a fulness of life informed by love.

May you grow to be more and more at home to yourself, comfortable with who you are, recognizing your sacredness, honouring and developing your gifts, and sharing yourself and your gifts with those closest to you and the wider world as well.

Norman King, March 6, 2022
Please visit our website: www.touchingthespirit.ca

In the Greek myth of King Oedipus, as portrayed in the play by Sophocles, there is a moment when a plague ravages the city. Oedipus vows to discover the cause and exile the person responsible. Tiresias, the blind seer, after much prodding, reluctantly says to Oedipus, “You are the man.” Oedipus gradually discovers the truth of this statement and exiles himself.

Among the many insights of this play, there is the hint that what we look for outside of ourselves, turns out to be within ourselves. The real exile is from ourselves. In a later play, Oedipus affirms that the only response to the errors and sorrows of life is a profound love. What seems to be involved here is, at first, a gradual process of self-discovery, that invariably carries some degree of pain. The best response to this unveiling is seen as a love that reaches beyond oneself.

Perhaps this ancient story helps us to understand freedom as the gathering and gift of self. We have spoken of how our personal story is shaped by many influences, how we need to uncover the script we are actually following. We then need to try to situate our own story within a more universal story, one that tells of the unfolding of our own worth and that of all that is. This is, in effect, the story of our gradually becoming free and finding the fulfillment of our freedom in the gift of our sacred self to something beyond that self.

A common view of freedom, repeated to me over many years of teaching, is the ability to do what we feel like provided we don’t hurt anyone. The difficulty with this approach is that, first of all, it fails to distinguish between what we feel like on the surface and what we really want. The first is obvious: if we feel hungry we like to eat, if we feel tired, we wish to rest, and so on. But what we want from our inmost core takes years to discover. It is a slow and often arduous process to uncover who we are and what we truly want to live for. We move beyond the scripts imposed upon us by family, society, or culture, to this deeper awareness only through times of solitude and with the help of intelligently caring others. And, of course, the naming of experience is helped by images and stories and other art forms. As spiritual writer Thomas Merton once expressed it, we may find that we have climbed the ladder but that it was against the wrong wall.

The second difficulty with this common approach is that it sees our freedom only in opposition to and constrained by others. It looks at life in a context of rivalry, of “us” and “them,” where others are viewed primarily as limitations and even enemies. It fails to recognize that the support and challenge of others is essential to our freedom; that the worth of others implies responsibility to them; that freedom is situated within a relational, communal, and social context. In brief, can we be free without friends?

Theologian Gregory Baum states simply: “love … gives freedom.” “Only as we are loved by others, only as we share in community, do we come to accept ourselves. We discover our worth as persons through the love of others and our share in the life of the community. … The love and care [persons] receive from others create the strength in them … to come to greater self-knowledge, to assume wider responsibility for themselves, and thus to become more fully human.” (A counterpart of this view is that hatred negates freedom; it is a prison.)

In other words, we do not start off free, but we become free. The process of becoming free requires a progressively deepening understanding of self, of our deepest needs, longings, and hopes. It also requires an ever expanding vison of life. Our freedom is as deep as our understanding and as wide as our vision. It also requires what we might call a progressive inner wholeness, a harmonization and reconciliation of the complexity and conflicts within ourselves.

A good example is the Morley Callaghan story, All the Years of Her Life. A young man is rescued by his mother from the consequences of his petty theft at the drugstore where he works. As they arrive home and she sits down with a cup of tea, he notices at last her fragility and age, and a sense of personal responsibility for his own life finally dawns on him. The story concludes: “He watched his mother and he never spoke, but at that moment his youth seemed to be over …It seemed to him that this was the first time he had ever looked upon his mother.”

In another story, The Little Business Man, Callaghan tells of a 12- year-old boy who goes to live with his aunt and uncle, after the death of his parents. His uncle is totally pragmatic and Luke turns for companionship to an old dog. When the uncle realizes that the dog is now half blind, he decides that the dog is “useless” and that it is time to get rid of him. The boy, Luke, rescues the dog and makes a “practical” arrangement to keep the dog. The story ends with Luke’s realization: “He vowed to himself fervently that he would always have some money on hand, no matter what became of him, so that he would be able to protect all that was truly valuable, from the practical people in the world.”

Becoming a free person, then, involves a deeper self awareness, including a recognition of diverse influences, inner conflicts, and what has been called our shadow side. It also requires the development of a sense of self-worth. Otherwise there is a tendency to deny difficulties within ourselves and project then on to others. There can also be near endless futile attempts to prove a worth that a person never really believes. It can result in a life that is driven rather than unfolds from within, that seeks scapegoats for its unhappiness, and ferments with unfaced fear and hostility. The counterpart is a sense of worth that acknowledges that we share all the negative emotions, that we experience limitations, failures, and even betrayals. But these to not do not take away the underlying sacredness and are compatible, with growth to maturity, loving relationships, a sense of compassion, and a real joy in living.

We mentioned before how a young child will ask, “Where did I come from?” We said that the child is not asking for a biology lesson, but a story in which he or she is the main character and welcomed into the family or care-giving group. The child is really asking–as we do throughout our lives: “Am I important and do I belong.” This, I believe, is our underlying human quest: both to have a sense of our own worth and to find a home, a place to belong, a place to share and give ourselves. It seems that we cannot become free without a sense of our sacred worth. Yet, along with that sense, there is a profound yearning to take that valuable self and give it to something or someone beyond ourselves.

This again is an understanding of freedom ( more accurately of becoming free), as the gathering of ourselves into our hands in order to give ourselves to what is worth the gift of our whole self from the heart. In this understanding, freedom is not the avoidance of decision or commitment. It is rather the possibility of commitment, of gift of self to what is worthy of that gift. In this sense, freedom is expressed and fulfilled not in refusal, but in the very gift of one’s self.

This journey, in awakening solitude, in trusting friendship, and in social responsibility, would seem then to be the path of freedom. May you come more and more to understand and name all that is within you, both darkness and light; may you ever deepen your sense of your sacred worth; and may you offer that valuable self to what is truly worthwhile.

Norman King, February 27, 2022