Our Gordon Setter, Hilda, got out of her kennel last night. We evidently failed to secure the latch and she stood downstairs in the middle of the room barking. The bark wasn’t a confident, ferocious bark, it was a frightened, startled bark — the kind of bark that says, “I’m out, I’m not supposed to be out, it’s dark, and my people aren’t out here with me. Help!”
Freedom can be a scary thing.
To one degree or another, I think we all find it that way and we run from it. We allow other people to make decisions for us that only we can really make. We blame others for the decisions we make. We avoid making decisions (even though to not make a decision is to make one). And even when we do exercise our freedom we sometimes assign the responsibility for it to God, luck, or blind fate.
Abraham Maslow, the great Jewish psychologist, called it “the Jonah syndrome.” Late in life, he wrote, “We fear our highest possibility (as well as our lowest ones). We are generally afraid to become that we can glimpse in our most perfect moments….We enjoy and even thrill to the godlike possibilities we see in ourselves in such peak moments. And yet we simultaneously shiver with weakness, awe and fear before the very same possibilities.” I think he is right. I think Hilda is right.
But freedom is one of God’s great gifts to us. So why should it be scary?
Some thoughts about that tomorrow. For now, this question: Where and how do I run from the freedom God has given me?
Fred,
Great comments. I think on your last question “how do i run from the freedom god has given me” is an interesting one and I’d like to pitch something at you. What if the freedom God has given us is the ability to run, free will. Jonah, even after being spat up by the whale could have booked another ticket to Timbuktu. “God willed the free will of men and angels in spite of His knowledge that it could lead in some cases to sin and thence to suffering: i.e., He thought freedom worth creating even at that price.” writes CS Lewis. So that what God has given us, freewill, allows us to turn, not only to God, but from God.
Pete, I think you are right on target and I think that running the other way is exactly what some of us try. Of course, in running with our freedom from the presence of God, we almost always try to fill the God-spot with a substitute: either something we effectively worship with our lives (in that we make it our first priority) or with something that will deaden the sense of God’s absence: for example, addictions — which also end up filling the God-spot. Lewis was right, it’s the risk God takes in the name of creating beings who can love and be loved by God. Thanks, Pete!