"If you make my word your home, you will indeed be my disciples, and you will learn the truth, and the truth will make you free."
Gospel of Luke
The "word", which is really Christ Himself, must be incorporated within our very selves. It has to be more than an intellectual understanding. We must be comfortable with living out that word in our day to day lives. And when the "word" is deeply planted in our being, then as Christ promised, the truth will be revealed to us, a truth that results in our freedom. This is not a future freedom. It is a freedom in the here and now.
So what is this freedom?
On my last ten or so retreats, I have followed Fr. George Maloney's retreat book called "Alone with the Alone". The forth day of this eight day retreat experience is called: "Jesus, the freest of all persons". It starts out with the following:
"The work of Jesus is to bring us into greater and greater freedom as children of God. Jesus still lives among us, touching us, freeing us by the love that He pours into our hearts through the Spirit. He seeks to free us from our unreal selves by allowing us to know our real selves in loving relationship to Him and the Father."
In our culture, false notions of truth and freedom are often presented to us. In our culture, truth is often considered as something relative to the criteria that we may personally choose, and freedom has to do with doing whatever we please, regardless of what God or others may think.
When we examine these false notions of truth and freedom, we discover that instead of being liberated, they become the opposite; they become enslaving. There are probably many reasons for this, but the most obvious reason is that these false notions cause a separateness between our "true self" and the "self" we perceive ourselves to be. Our interior "true self" begins to battle with the "self" we perceive ourselves to be which become reflected in our distorted exterior behavior.
All of us have been made in the image and likeness of God. It was St. Irenaeus who said: "The glory of God is a person, fully human and fully alive." Jesus lived more fully human and alive than any other human person because in every situation, in every human encounter, He lived from His "true self". Jesus adapts wonderfully to each situation in life because He seeks always the loving presence of His Father in every event. The Father is His guide and master, and Jesus seeks only to act and react insofar as he can glorify the Father. He is freed from self-absorption as He responds with the fullness of His Being to living each moment in accordance to that disposition that flowed from His "true self".
Jesus proclaims: "I do nothing of myself; what the Father has taught me is what I preach. He who sent me is with me, and has not left me to myself. For I always do what pleases Him."
This is why Jesus can say to the Pharisees: "If you reject me, then you reject also the one who sent me."
True freedom can never be found in doing what we please, when we please. True freedom is found where Jesus found it: That is when we see ourselves and each of our life's encounters as being in living relationship and harmony the Father.
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