Becoming Free

(St. Bernard of Clairvaux - found here)

“...It is essential to qualify what we mean when, in the context of faith, we speak of becoming free. That is what [St.] Bernard [of Clairvaux] does when he comments on the verse: ‘For he has freed me from the snare of the hunters and from the bitter word.’

For Bernard it is evident that true freedom is not ‘natural’ to fallen man. What seems natural to us is to have things our way, to satisfy our desires and realise our plans without interference, to flaunt and be vaunted for our own brilliant lights. Bernard, addressing man in this state of delusion, is deliciously sarcastic: ‘What do you fancy yourself as, you smatterer?! You have become a beast for which captors’ snares are laid.’

The fact that we are so easily tripped up, that we keep falling into the same old snares, though we know so well where they lie, is to him proof good enough that we are unfree, unable on our own to make steady progress towards our life’s true goal, delivered instead to all sorts of obstructions and distractions.

Rooting his understanding of freedom in the Son’s Yes! to the Father’s will, Bernard works a revolution in our grasp of what it means to be free. Christian freedom is not about seizing the world with force; it is about loving the world with a crucified love magnanimous enough to make us freely wish, one with Christ, to give our lives for it, that it may be set free.

...To subscribe to a Christian idea of freedom is to consent to pain. When Christ tells us: ‘Resist not evil’, he does not ask us to countenance injustice. He lets us see that justice’s cause is sometimes best served by suffering for it, refusing to meet force with force.

Our emblem of freedom remains the Son of God who ‘emptied himself.’”

~Erik Varden