The Feast of Freedom

As Passover approaches, I find myself wondering about the meaning of freedom. Truly wondering, because I am not sure, in spite of my younger self’s confident knowing—about freedom of conscience, freedom of religion, academic freedom, and the freedom of women and all vulnerable persons to choose their lives and to live in safety, free of oppression—that I understand what it is to live freely, or that I have ever really experienced it.

As I contemplate celebrating the feast of freedom with family and friends, the abstraction, freedom, looms over me, and I don’t know how to escape its enormity. Blessedly, a distinction that John Calvin makes in the Institutes, a distinction he borrowed from the Greek philosophers, comes to my aid. Here are three ways to begin thinking of freedom these wise souls suggest: freedom from, freedom for, and freedom in relation to things that are indifferent.

Freedom from. This seems at first glance as if it would be the easiest to understand. Freedom from stereotypes, oppression, violence, illness, sorrow, lies, bigotry, shame, care, poverty of body, poverty of spirit, anxiety, worry, enemies, hatred, the power of addiction—all that grinds life down and limits the good. It seems easy to generate list, to name the things that hold us back, imprison us, and that whose absence would lift our spirits and smooth our daily lives and that would make it possible for us to experience freedom for. But these aren’t always so easy. To see the internal chains from the past or our own limiting visions of our self and our possibilities takes great effort and often much time.

Freedom for. Should be easy, right? We think we know what we want to be free to do, certainly all that we were not allowed or able to do when we were not free. But once our restraints have been lifted it’s difficult to transform our lives and begin to do what we think we want to do. We have to grow into that freedom. And there’s the difficulty that trips up so many of us. It’s often hard to know when our chains have been removed so that we are indeed free for living freely. I read recently that human beings train elephants by chaining their leg to the trunk of a tree when they are babies. As hard as they pull, they cannot break free. When they have grown accustomed to this, the trainer replaces the chains with ropes. The adult elephant could break free of the ropes with no effort at all. But they do not try. All that power within them, and they remain shackled, prisoners.

That’s the way it was in the wilderness after the children of Israel were freed from slavery in Egypt. The oppressors were gone, dead. This massing 600,000 souls had incredible power, but they believed they were still chained to the tree of their trainer and so kept circling and circling it, waiting for the trainer to come and untie them and lead them off to work or perform as they had been taught. It took the children of Israel a generation to believe, to see that they were free and to exercise the creative power they had to build a life on their terms. They had to grow into freedom for and that growing was not easy. The gap between generations is always wide, but in those days, it must have seemed unbridgeable. Parents born in slavery and children born in freedom of former slaves—what different worlds they inhabited, what strangers they must have been to one another. How difficult and painful it was for that first generation to turn together from freedom from to freedom for. How difficult and painful it was for that second generation to understand the freedom from that carried with it the chains of the past. Maybe that’s the real miracle, that they did finally leave that narrow place, break free of the flimsy yet powerful rope tied round their leg and begin to roam freely toward a new life.

I’ll return to freedom in relation to things that are indifferent another day.