c. 2005 Religion News Service
(UNDATED) Freedom is not just a political good but a spiritual value, something far more sacred than secular. Nor is it just a condition for a thriving democratic community. Freedom is a fundamental condition for the growth of human personality.
Our various usages of freedom bounce as numbered ping-pong balls do in their miniature cages on lottery night. We are never quite sure what meaning will be plucked out by the ladies with fixed smiles who preside at such drawings.
Some, such as freedom of speech, might astound those who think that freedom lets them spin words this way and that, or shock the innocence out of their audience. In return for its gift, freedom demands integrity _ or wholeness _ from all artists. As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously said in 1919, freedom of speech “would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing panic.”
Freedom imposes a spiritual demand on artists because they work on the boundary between time and eternity every day. Ernest Hemingway felt that artists were free only in order “to put down what really happened … the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or in 10 years or, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always.”
Freedom is therefore misunderstood and misused by those who think they are rendering the truth by having characters use America’s all-purpose expletive in every other line of dialogue. Or when they think they are revealing some deep truth about America by featuring scenes of men having profound or mean conversations standing side-by-side at urinals. Such low exercises squander the high freedom of the artist not only because of their plumbing fixation but because the truth of such a scene would be a silent movie.
Another quicksilver American phrase is the freedom to choose. This classic phrase of the Advertising/Public Relations Complex pulls off the trifecta of cheapening art, freedom and grammar. The meaning is vague because there is no object to the verb “to choose.” Freedom’s inherent morality and spirituality are transferred to the act of choosing itself so that we need not _ as in abortion _ ponder the full complexity of the choice itself.
This soft focus on what we are actually doing is a favored American variant on freedom. So we demand closure, getting something over with, as in mourning _ a sacred experience that cannot be hurried. Or in moving on without acknowledging where we have been, what we have done, or where we are going. Humans cannot move on freely from what they do, especially to each other, without becoming less free and less human at the same time.
Freedom’s root is “pri,” which means to love and appears in the Germanic “frijaz,” “beloved, belonging to the loved ones.” To be out of bondage means to be loved, as in the Old English “freo” which survives in our word “friend.” Freedom’s sacredness is grasped in the condition that people seek to provide for those they love. In such safe environments humans need not be on guard and so can become their true selves.
Freedom is profoundly mysterious and genuinely sacred in its demands for a place in which it is safe to be human. Totalitarians use terror to deny people this scared space for living. As historian Hannah Arendt notes, terror “destroys the one essential prerequisite of all freedom which is simply the capacity of motion which cannot exist without space.”
We may not then be engaged in a holy war but, in engaging with terrorism, we are involved in the sacred work of protecting the space of true freedom that people need in order to become truly human. It is no easy task and the choices that leaders make are not small or easy ones but demand the same integrity that is demanded of the artist. This is a difficult time and freedom must be perceived not as part of a catch phrase for a cause but as a fundamentally spiritual experience.
“Freedom,” Albert Camus wrote, “is not a reward or a decoration that is celebrated with champagne. Nor yet a gift, a box of dainties designed to make you lick your chops. Oh no! It’s a choice … and a long distance race, quite solitary and very exhausting. No cheap champagne, no friends raising their glasses as they look at you affectionately. Alone in the prisoner’s box before the judges, and to decide in face of oneself or in the face of others’ judgment. At the end of all freedom is a court sentence; that’s why it is too heavy to bear, especially when you’re down with a fever, or are distressed, or love nobody.”
(Eugene Cullen Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author of “Cardinal Bernardin’s Stations of the Cross,” published by St. Martin’s Press.)
KRE/PH END KENNEDY