A Little Spiritual Help
THE JOY OF FREEDOM

God alone is truly and absolutely free. He alone is totally free from
extraneous conditioning or even non-voluntary inner compulsion. He alone can
say: "let be" and it is done. He alone is not caused, but is truly the uncaused
cause. Man, as creation, would appear to be totally caused by the Creator, and
therefore not free. But that is precisely the ambiguity of man. He is created.
Yet he is also a creator, because he is made in the image of the Creator. The
image is what is constitutive of man as man, distinguishing him from other
animals. What is at the depth of human nature is not his sin, but his freedom.
Because at the depth he is free, therefore at the depths he discovers also the
source of his freedom, namely the Creator God. That does not mean, however,
that God is simply the ultimate depth or ground of our own being. That He may
well be, but it is more correct to put it this way: He is freedom; we are made
in His image, therefore we find freedom in our depths; when this freedom
discovers the love and the wisdom that also lie at the depths, we experience
that freedom as direct access to God. That is joy. That is adoption to sonhood.
There prayer is learned.

But the way to the depths can never be found in isolation. That road passes
through the depths of other people. Even the omphaloscopia (navel-gazing) of
the Athos hesychasts was not an attempt to find God in the depths by
self-isolation. Freedom, love and wisdom are all maintained and transmitted in
community. It is as the community reconciled by the Spirit encounters God in
His grace, and renders to Him its self-oblation in loving self-surrender and in
identification with the oblation of Christ on the cross that man in community
experiences the joy of freedom. This Eucharistic encounter with God is what
makes man authentically human. Here he experiences liberation from that awful
dilemma of man - that if he approaches the Holy God he dies, and if he does not,
he dies also.


...
Metropolitan Paulos Mar Gregorios
The Joy of Freedom: Eastern Worship and Modern Man Pages 65-66 The Christian
Literature Society, Madras, India 1986 first published in 1967
032509

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