Mission Monthly – October 1997
“First of all, it is important to remember that prayer is an encounter and a relationship, a relationship which is deep, and this relationship cannot be forced either on us or on God. The fact that God can make himself present or can leave us with the sense of His absence is part of this live and real relationship. If we could mechanically draw him into an encounter, force him to meet us, simply because we have chosen this moment to meet him, there would be no relationship and no encounter. We can do that with an image, with the imagination, or with the various idols we can put in front of us instead of God; we can do nothing of the sort with the living God, any more than we can do it with a living person. A relationship must begin and develop in mutual freedom.”
Metropolitan ANTHONY Bloom, “Beginning to Pray”
Long before ordination the discovery of this most amazing and perplexing reality of the pastoral priesthood was revealed to me. Working in the Church for many years taught me much about mutual freedom. Throughout the years, as much as I have desired for people to acquire an interest and enthusiasm for encountering Christ in the life of His Holy Church, I have understood that it could never be forcibly imposed. The priesthood has become a fulfilled extension of those early lessons and the fringe of my epitrahilion (stole) reflects and reminds me of the souls given to my care through the yolk of ordination.
It is more than difficult to grasp the total and vast amount of freedom which God heaps upon us in His total and abiding love and desire for communion with His creation. Simply put, we are completely free to act or not act, to respond or not respond, to love or not to love. When I look around and experience, directly or indirectly, the choices people make in their lives as they try to “work things out,” more often than not I sense an expectation more than a belief that God is going to somehow make things work for them, in spite of their faith, faithfulness or lack thereof. What I do not sense as much is the understanding of mutuality in one’s relationship with God (or with the other) by extending the kind of reciprocal freedom which He affords us.
God through the Church has given His creation guidelines in the pursuit of the life He would have for us. These guidelines are clear, uncompromising and filled with natural consequences. Could there be any other way than this? Or maybe the question could be better put, “would we have it any other way?” I heard on talk radio the other day a discussion about “liberty” as expressed in the American Constitution. What was interesting was that none of the “experts” could really define liberty; they said only that we would know what it is if it were ever taken away.
In truth, God would never take away His freedom; to say or think so would be to deny this part of God’s energies which we’ve been given to understand. C.S. Lewis’ comment about this in his Screwtape Letters may help explain why; “The ENEMY (God) wants (man), in the end, to be so free… He wants to kill their animal self-love… (and) restore to them a new kind of self-love—a charity and gratitude for all selves, including their own; when they have really learned to love their neighbors as themselves, they will be allowed to love themselves as their neighbors.”
Maybe if we understood that mutual freedom is all about love and desire only “for the good of the other” we might know the natural consequence of the kind of self-love that is unencumbered by possessive entrapments. This kind of love requires much patience and forbearance and a willingness to partly measure one’s spiritual maturity by the ability to live within the gray areas of life (seeing life in two colors, black and white, is the red flag of a poor understanding of the love required to create the atmosphere of mutual freedom). This is a difficult place to live, a place of little or no definition or direction, and sometimes discipline. The problem of mutual freedom is the lack of control and the possibility of failure, both in ourselves and in our neighbor. But while it is difficult to actually “let go” in pursuit of this higher virtue, just think about how arrogant and prideful it is to think that anyone, especially ourselves, could control himself let alone another person (let alone the living God). The hypocrisy of a controlling nature should be obvious to a true Christian just as the consistency of a nature willing to take the same risks God took in creation, the risk of rejection, should be seen as blessed.
There is much to be learned about freedom and the responsibility of “response” as it necessarily expresses the true reception of this Holy Gift. It begins by our “voluntary surrender” to the life of the Church, i.e. worship, prayer, fasting, study and participation in the social life of the community. St. Paul said it powerfully in his second letter to the Corinthians, “He who sows sparingly will also reap sparingly (9.6).” If we wish to receive the fullness of God’s blessings… His healings… His love… then we must move in His direction. This is our first ministry in the priesthood of all believers. If we do not, there will be no one to blame but ourselves.