The Highest Freedom

If I present myself to you as a human person with emotional vulnerability and a claim to your attention, your honor, your gratitude, your response, I am perceived as being needy or demanding, or as trying to make you uncomfortable. The demand you feel, the pressure to respond with due consideration, is not of my making.

My free act of communication, invitation, gift, is free to the extent I am free of any demand, or unattached to any expectation for results. But the origin of a truly free act is outside the plane of mere action, gesture, information, or exchange. It is this Source whose image you have a duty to honor, Who places you under the obligation of freedom.

The highest freedom is the capacity to freely do what you must, what you should. The forms and courtesies by which we guard the holy ground of encounter with human beings made in the image – to veil and so to reveal – God are not empty, old formalities, or meaningless human conventions. They are, at their best, deeply rooted in the highest reality and so generative of the greatest freedom.

By the free and conscious act of courtesy, we may fill a simple human form with the glory of God and help to reweave the context of human being. Free gift means ‘no strings attached,’ but in freedom you discover that all strings attach to Gift.

Here is a passage from Stratford Caldecott’s Beauty for Truth’s Sake. My heart sang when I read it, feeling that finally, someone understood what I knew to be true about our obligations to one another to refill the emptied signs and forms all around us. I wrote to thank him for his book, and though he had begun the journey of ‘dying of cancer,’ he stopped on the way to write back and to encourage me again in my own work. Not only did he write these words, he lived them:

“The elemental courtesies of conventional etiquette and good manners are the vital channels for preserving this spirit in everyday life. …an education that actively cultivates such modes of behavior will begin the process of building a society that is liturgical to its very core, in which the ‘air’ of grace can circulate. Harmony of soul can only be restored through effort, and the restoration of manners and kindness is an important beginning. Without it, little else is possible.”

I know that my presence, my vulnerability and neediness, my pain, and even my free gifts to you may make you feel uncomfortably obliged. Please know that my intention is to be an invitation to freedom so as to delight in sharing the Great Dance of freedom with you.