Freedom and obedience

IT’S good that from time to time we do some serious reflections, mustering
our intellectual and spiritual energies, since they enable us to go deep, get into the essence and integrate the data we gather through observations, insights, readings, studies...

Often the problem we have is precisely the lack of such reflections. The situation leads us to be shallow and merely Pavlovian in our responses to things. We hardly think. We just follow blindly. This is dangerous.

With the habit of reflecting, we can deepen and enlarge any data we have. We become aware of their implications and consequences, where they are coming from and where they are and should be heading to.

In other words, we expand our world, widen our perspectives, discern more
things when we reflect. We become open-minded, not narrow-minded; flexible, not rigid; caring and sociable, not self-centered.

Ultimately, we would be able to relate everything to God and everybody else. This is the best reason and purpose for learning how to reflect. Without reflections, we most likely will miss God and ignore everybody else.

Reflecting actually builds up our personhood. A person is an individual of a rational nature. He grows as a person to the extent that he manages, while remaining always as an individual, to establish living and close relationships with everyone, first with God, precisely through his rational and spiritual nature.

Otherwise, he is more of an object than a person. He undermines himself as
a person when he just confines himself to himself. A person is always an individual with vital links with everybody else. He is both an “I” and a “we”.

We need to deliberately develop this habit to reflect, because our strong tendency, often without realizing it, is to restrict ourselves to what is merely here and now, what is sensible and can be quickly understood. Reality is quickly reduced to “I-me-mine.”

We have to overcome any discomfort we may have when we start reflecting on finer realities, beyond what we can simply handle and understand by way of common sense. We have to develop the appropriate discipline for this.

Among these finer realities that we need to have a deep understanding of is the relationship between our freedom and the need for obedience. Around us is the common mentality that these two are odds with each other.

Hardly anything is farther than the truth. Freedom and obedience are actually two sides of the same coin. They are inseparable, for one without the other annuls itself.

That is to say, freedom without obedience is not freedom at all. And obedience without freedom is not true obedience either. The two should be together always. Our every action, to be worthy of being an action of a child of God, should bear the stamp of this reality.

This is because freedom has to be understood as God’s gift to us. It’s his best gift to us, what radically makes us his image and likeness. Freedom, in the end, is what enables us to love. And God is precisely love.

Freedom has love, and therefore, God, as its essence. It cannot be lived and exercised properly unless it is done in love, in God.

To put it bluntly, freedom cannot be other than obeying God. Thus freedom
cannot be without obedience to God. When the two get together, then we have true love.

Our Lord said it clearly, “If you love me, keep my commandments.” (Jn 14,15) There is a certain synonymity among the terms “love”, “freedom” and “obedience”. Somehow they mean the same thing.

It’s love, God, who makes both freedom and obedience inseparable. It’s only in him that this beautiful reality breaks out into being.

This is not easy, of course, because we often find it hard to truly love as Christ loves us. We can have endless reasons to contrast freedom and obedience, precisely because we do not know how to love.

And often, one reason for the failure is that we do not know how to reflect on this finer reality about ourselves. How important to learn how to reflect!