Tha Land of the Free

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   With the United States marking 250 years since its founding in the issuing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, enduring questions about how to best foster the freedom we so value remain vital. In the popular imagination, freedom and fighting are often linked, with many books, films, and video games built around a violent struggle to establish or protect liberty. Even significant portions of the Old Testament read this way, with the destruction of encroaching enemies closely associated with avoiding idolatry, oppression,or enslavement, while ensuring entrance into the richer life of the Promised Land. Yet as the narrative moves steadily in the direction of the Incarnation, there is a subtle and slowly growing awareness of the incompatibility between the goodness of the Creator-God, the source and securer of all human freedom, and the ruin wrought by our warfare. In contrast to various other cultures and religions of the region, which tended to personify and deify war as part of their pantheons, the Israelites increasingly recognized such destructive struggle as more a malignant human or even demonic phenomenon, a divorce from divine ways and a yoking to oppressive servitude. 

    Some twenty centuries later, one of the most trenchant observers of the ‘American Experiment’, the highly educated and insightful French nobleman Alexis de Tocqueville, markedly did not identify military superiority as a critical component of the political and economic freedom he encountered in the course of his travels in the recently founded United States. Among things he considered much more important were a wide-spread investment in the common good, and a capacity for dialogue and debate–even in circumstances of great duress–as evidenced by the Continental Congresses and the Constitutional Convention.       

    Now Pope Leo, the first citizen of the United States to serve as the Vicar of Christ, has repeatedly reminded us–most forcibly and systematically in his recent encyclical Magnificent Humanity–that war is not inevitable, essential, or of Divine origin, and instead constitutes a grave failure which inevitably desecrates the infinite dignity of the human person. Declaring the long-standing and oft-referenced “just war theory” as now obsolete, he encourages deeper engagement with such foundational human realities as dialogue and forgiveness as an alternative to armed conflicts and their attendant ills. Indeed, when reason is at the service of reconciling love the magnificence of human nature manifests in an authentic way, very different from the counterfeit glory with which violence is often vested. As the New Testament Scholar N.T. Wright has phrased it, Jesus himself embodies for us a "revolutionary way of being revolutionary”, which is just as challenging and confounding today as it was to his contemporaries. We want our weapons, armour and the mythology of self-sufficiency which lies behind them; and we tend to balk when we hear that our savior intends to “banish the chariot” and “the warrior’s bow.” (Zec. 9:10).

     Drawing us out of the fatally confining diabolical logic of existence-as-competition, the Son of God moves in every age to liberate us from the diseased passions and deformed paradigms which make us worshippers of war-gods, toiling ferociously toward our own doom. Offering us not a dubious freedom propped up and preserved through exhausting power struggles, but that mysteriously durable “freedom under grace” spoken of by St. Augustine, Jesus beckons us under his yoke, which is “easy” and “light”.  For the yoke of Jesus is inseparable from the Spirit, “the Lord, the Giver of Life”, who is the wellspring of all human freedom and the architect of actual peace. The Spirit unifies us with Jesus himself, so that we can walk through life with him and like him, laying down our own lives in love rather than diminishing or destroying the lives of others in fear-driven fighting. Our inner conflict zones are gracefully and gradually healed, that we may become bearers of peace on the many battlefields of the world.


A MONK OF ST. JOSEPH'S ABBEY

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