The difficulty of grasping freedom

I've been fascinated by the Netflix series "Rectify", about an accused death-row inmate who gets released from prison when DNA evidence overturns his original conviction. There's some fascinating depictions of human struggle, and some good questions about God and faith raised throughout. But what particularly strikes me is the difficulty the lead character has in accepting, and adjusting to freedom after spending 20 years on death-row. Who says there's nothing good on TV anymore?

Others in real life have documented this experience.

Viktor Frankl, a psychiatrist who chronicles his experience in a German concentration camp writes about his liberation: "Timidly, we looked around and glanced at each other questioningly. Then we ventured a few steps out of the camp. This time no orders were shouted at us, nor was there any need to duck quickly to avoid a blow or a kick. 'Freedom,' we repeated to ourselves, and yet we could not grasp it." 

While our expectation might be to assume that the opportunity for freedom would automatically lead to joy and delight, it appears to be not quite the case. (I'm limiting myself to these two examples, but there are a myriad of others)

We think about the concept of freedom in Christianity a fair bit. We talk about liberation from sin and freedom from bondage to our past lives lived in darkness. The scriptures use imagery of prisoners being released, of slaves set free, and even metaphors of death and resurrection to convey the kind of rescue and new life that God offers us.

But many of us don't live like we've been set free.

Sometimes I hear preachers suggesting that the problem is we just don't realize we've been set free. And they seem to think if they're just enthusiastic enough about reminding us of the fact, that we'll be jolted into recognition and come to our senses. Others have proposed a series of practices and routines to help us integrate the reality of liberation into our identity.

But that doesn't quite ring true for many of us does it? It's not just a lack of awareness, or even taking the liberation of our souls for granted that explains the difficulty of living in freedom.

It seems that like all prisoners, we struggle to grasp freedom, struggle even to embrace it for a far more complex reason than a lack of awareness.

After watching Rectify and reading Viktor Frankl, I suggest to you that perhaps our difficulty accepting freedom is this: that imprisonment, whether it be a real prison, or an emotional/spiritual prison of our own making, changes us. To be imprisoned by anything is a fundamental degredation of our humanity, and we are powerfully shaped by it in ways that make liberation and freedom enormously difficult to embrace.

And it's not just a matter of identity. It's not just that we take on the role of a prisoner and integrate it into our self-concept, as important as this might be. Viktor Frankl suggests it is also the fundamental breakdown of a human's capacity to have a future, or live for a goal. Prison leads us to believe that the real opportunities in life have passed. Over time imprisonment forms this belief in us so deeply that we cannot fully experience freedom when granted, because we have been shaped into humans that cannot imagine a meaningful future.

Others have eloquently written about the overwhelming anxiety that comes with freedom, because freedom infers responsibility. Responsibility to choose well in this life, or at least choose meaningfully, is all the more difficult in a society where all the stories of what constitutes a good or meaningful existence are subject to being contested. Without our modernist certainty, we are aimlessly afloat looking for something to tell us what to choose in a field of myriad life options.

So freedom, whether it be the dehumanizing forces of being imprisoned, or the anxiety that awaits in being responsible for one's life, is not nearly so simple as naming and claiming it.

I don't have answers for what do about these terrible dilemmas. But I think there is some value to all of us being honest with ourselves and each other about the difficulty of grasping freedom. Let's not glibly assume that the spiritual liberation of the Christian story is an easy or immediate experience. Let's not expect of ourselves or each other that we will walk into freedom with any less hesitation than any other prisoner who's been released. As Frankl describes in his later writings, many who were liberated spent the lifetime afterward struggling to accept liberation and be free. Some never did. Others found ways to restore their humanity and re-discovered that the real opportunities of life had not passed but were indeed in front of them.

Let us at least be honest enough to acknowledge that freedom is a wonderful gift, and yet also a difficult and troubling journey that involves re-discovering our humanity and wrestling with it's terrible implications.

Let us be more patient with each other, understanding that the freedom God offers is a process of liberation, not a one-time event. That each of us is perhaps moving towards freedom, but struggling to grasp it. And when we return to our broken and imprisoned ways, it is not an ungratefulness to our liberator, but merely a reflection of the normal human process of moving in and out of the freedom we are offered.

Let us exercise compassion towards each other as fellow prisoners who are struggling to accept liberation: all of us as former inmates on a journey towards freedom.