This is food; thank you for posting it. This paragraph in particular resonated with me:

There is a relatedness and a deep relationship between us and God in the very act of creation, and in the very gift of freedom. Freedom is an absolute condition of love, because love is the gift of one’s self in perfect freedom, and has no meaning apart from freedom. But there is more to it — the English word ‘freedom’ is rooted in the Old English word that means ‘beloved’; ‘my free’ meant ‘my beloved’. The word Liberty which signifies freedom in other languages defines the status of the child born free in a freeman’s household. The Russian word for freedom indicates that we are called to be our own selves, not to imitate, not to ape, not to resemble, but to be ourselves in the image of the One who is perfect freedom and perfect love-truly himself. In all this the relatedness there exists between us and God is revealed particularly in this final act of solidarity which we call the Incarnation. Not only did God remain concerned with us throughout history, but he became one of us through history, and this not for a moment, but forever; not escaping the heaviness, the limitations and the pain of our human destiny, but in order to carry on his human shoulders the consequences of his divine act of creation and of our human rebellion, our rejection of him, lovelessness, godlessness itself. The Incarnation of the Word of God, the becoming man, meant for him that he entered into the realm of time and of death and of limitation and of all the consequences of human godlessness. This solidarity was not for a moment, it was definitive. He became a man, in human history, and he remains a man for ever because ‘He sitteth on the right hand of the Father’ as a man with hands and feet pierced by the nails, and with his side pierced by the spear. Throughout history and throughout eternity we can see this vision of divine solidarity with us.

Freedom and liberty are issues that have always preoccupied me. My heretofore saints on these topics were the original founders of the American experiment, which ended in abysmal failure at the commencement of the War to Prevent Southern Independence. But Metropolitan Anthony’s essay and some of the other things I’ve been reading during this Lent have made me realize that the “freedom” the American revolutionaries droned on about was just a shadow of the real freedom that Christ came to give us: a freedom that transcends temporal concerns like property and money, and how the government forcibly extracts our property from us for various feel-good and imperial programs.

Personally, I hate, and I mean HATE that we live in a world where we have to expend so much of our creative energy trying to make a buck so we can support our families. I hate that we even have or need money. I understand that money is just a way of metering out finite resources. But, still, it stinks because it creates a strong distraction for us. On the one hand, we’ll be strongly distracted to make as much money as we can to avoid poverty, even to the point of greed. Or, on the other hand, we’ll be distracted to venally envy other’s accumulation of money and property and want to use the force and coercion of temporal government under the banner of “social justice” to extract it from them.

And what is justice, Phaedrus, and what is not? Need we anyone tell us these things? Yes we do! And God Himself has told us these things. Real justice is being reunited with the person of God in Jesus Christ. It is a real relationship with the Living God. It transcends mere intellectualism, rationalism, ecofeminism, gayism, communism, socialism, fascism and all sorts of other boneheadisms. Such a sublime relationship with the Creator of all things visible and invisible, who humbled Himself to become one of us, to be born of a woman, to eat, sleep, and die like one of us… well, it just blows your mind. I mean, why would He do it? Only one reason: He’s crazy in love with us. And I can’t even pretend to understand why.

Anyway: freedom. Christ tells us that if anyone asks of your cloak, give him your underwear, too… er, well, I forget the exact quote but it’s something kinda like that. Well, imagine a world where *everyone* lived like that. There’d be no such thing as property and, here’s the cool part, *there’d be no need for it!*

Wouldn’t be wild if we lived in a world where we didn’t need property or money in order to live? It’d be a world where everyone looked out for everyone else’s well-being. Even if the other person is a weenie, you’re somehow able to look beyond that and you still actively seek their good. Anyway, try imagining it yourself, it’s a neat thought-experiment.

We’ve seen lip-service given to the idea of altruistic societies by various hare-brained political theories of the 19th and 20th Centuries: communism, socialism, fascism and all the other *-isms, all of which fail in precisely the same exact way: they all try to do it without God. And so you’re left with a collectivist system, namely government, based on coercion, not on the presence of Christ. And basing it on love simply isn’t enough. Lots of free-love communes in the 60’s ended in petty jealousy. Why is that we even want to separate the love from He who creates love? But this is exactly what we do when we make governments imbued with the powers of compulsion and death. You could say that government, by its very nature, is an anti-christ because it is based on force and coercion, confusion and beguilement– all the tools of Satan, not of Christ.

So, freedom, *real* freedom, is not something that we find in this world without God. But if each of us had a relationship with the Living God, we would manifest His presence to each other. What kind of a world would that be?

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