Ninth and last in Series

Over the last 20 years or so through reading, reflection and teaching a course at St. John’s University titled “The Problem of God,” I think that I have come to appreciate in a new way the close and deep connection between our image of ourselves and our image of God. How we think of ourselves greatly influences how we think of God and how we think of God greatly influences how we think of ourselves.

Erroneous thinking about either can hinder us from growing and developing as human persons and negatively effect our relationship with God. There is a sense in which we grow into becoming persons or perhaps it would be more accurate to say we grow into being mature persons.

In the changing images that I have had of God and self over the last two decades or so, freedom has come to play a decisive role. I am amazed that God has freely chosen to freely love us. That our response to God should be free has also become more significant in my thinking about God and self.

I have always believed that human persons are free but the role that freedom plays in our relationship with God has come to assume a more central and important position in my understanding of the Christian life. So important is freedom in our relationship with God that I believe that the holiest person in the world is also the most free person in the world. This goes against the popular view of religion as something that limits our freedom, that narrows our options and that almost does violence to our humanity. The opposite is true. Religion and religious laws are supposed to free us, to liberate us, to help us direct our lives freely toward God and neighbor.

I have a friend who regularly criticizes my view of human freedom as too idealistic. He believes that people are less free than I do. He points out all the things that could go wrong in bringing up a child, all the negative experiences that children might have in schools, all the psychological and emotional harm that can be done to children by adults and peers.

I think I see his point but I try to help him see that in presenting his view that people are not free, he only mentions the negative experiences that children can have. There are also positive experiences. When children are loved they are liberated. Being loved can free those who are loved. I have to grant to my friend that perhaps people are much less free than I think. I have to admit that no one can know for certain how free anyone is. I don’t even know for certain how free I am. Only God knows who is free and who isn’t, and how free any action a person performs is. Perhaps I might exaggerate how free people are. If I do, it is probably because I view freedom as one of God’s great gifts.

In his book “Would You Like to Be a Catholic?” (St. Anthony Messenger Press) Eugene Kennedy is good on how free a sin has to be to rupture our relationship with God. He writes the following:

“Doing something really evil – and , indeed doing something really good – requires a robustness of personality, a knowingness and a willingness to accept the risks that takes sinning out of the category of imperfection. Loving and sinning are never small, distracted activities that leave no marks on ourselves or on others. Families can understand virtue and sin because they are both functions of the way we respond in our relationships with each other, that best test …our relationship with God.

“Sin deliberately forsakes relationship, it breaks a bond and the fibers of faith and hope that hold it together. Sin betrays relationship by shattering the trust that is its bedrock. It attacks the relationships we have within the extended human family, thereby breaking our covenant, as it is called, with God who parents us all.”

St. Augustine said that it was no little thing to gain the kingdom of heaven. I agree. And I also think that it is no little thing to lose the kingdom of heaven. To sin strongly and to love strongly require freedom. Gene Kennedy is correct to stress that doing something really evil or doing something really good requires a “robustness of personality.” In acts that save us we lay ourselves on the line. We risk everything for Christ. St. Augustine also said that though God created us without our consent, God will not save us without our consent. Loving God and neighbor are free acts.