From the Exhilaration of Freedom to the Threat of Freedom

And there they were. Standing on the other shore. Safe at last. Free. They drummed. They danced. They sang. Every one of them giddy with weightlessness, the burden lifted, the yoke removed. All that pent-up energy released into rejoicing and thanksgiving.
When they woke to the world around them again, they packed their timbrels and turned to face the days ahead.

What faced them terrified them. An enemy vaster than imagining. A nothingness that swallowed up all that approached it. Boundless wilderness of time and space. And nothing, nothing to cut it down to size, carve it into pieces they could manage. No tasks to perform, no masters’ wills or whims to obey, no rituals to observe, nothing to be built or finished. Everything at the still point before the plunge into the beginning. A vast expanse promising only expanding terror, lostness, no way to get one’s bearings, each step erased as it is taken. A cruel infinity demanding to be conquered, choice upon choice, act upon act, knowing itself to be invincible. Crushing immensity. Rapacious void.

Some stopped there, never to move again. Without benefit of Kierkegaard or Nietzsche, the existentialists or the absurdists, they knew the anxiety of open being and closed it off, knew the burden of freedom and shucked it off.

Others set off, in fear and trembling, into that unknown, following those who dared to blaze a path out of faith and hope, risking their lives on a tangled path carved out slowly, by excruciating and liberating trust, by law and by blood, cut into stone letter by letter, drops of blood spilling into the shifting sands on the way to a difficult, life-giving freedom.

And some—who can tell who they were or how they came that way—befriended that immensity. An immensity opened inside “as vast as night and light” that met the immensity outside and called it home. You can meet them wandering freely there today, their feet kissing the ground, their lips embracing the sky.