Freedom! We often associate this word with our own rights in this world or our capacity to do as we will and go where we want. A kind of promise is put out to us - life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Yet the image of freedom that is put before us by the saints and by Saint John in particular is attached to our willingness to be “detached” from the things of the world. God created all things good but in our sin our tendency is to idolize them. We seek our identity and happiness in the things of this world and we work ourselves to the point of exhaustion to protect these things as well as ourselves from others. We do not want to lose what we have or what we have earned.
Yet we very quickly learn that this is no real happiness. In fact, it is the root of all evils. The deeper that root becomes, the greater our desire for the things of this world grows. It begins to produce the fruit of hatred, thefts, envy, separations, enmities, storms, remembrance of wrong, hardheartedness, and murderers. Therefore, what we hold up as having so much value for ourselves, and what seems to promise us freedom and safety eventually becomes our prison or the shackles that bind us. It is only in having tasted the things above that one begins to find joy, freedom from care, and the loss of anxiety. If we obtain this virtue, John tells us, we run the race with the swiftness of athletes of old - that is, stripped and unimpeded.
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Text of chat during the group:
The Ascetical Homilies of Saint Isaac the Syrian - Homily Seventy-three and Homily Seventy-four Part I
Letters of Spiritual Direction to a Young Soul - Letter Thirty-one Part I
The Ascetical Homilies of Saint Isaac the Syrian - Homily Seventy-two Part IV
Letters of Spiritual Direction to a Young Soul - Letter Thirty Part II
The Ascetical Homilies of Saint Isaac the Syrian - Homily Seventy-two Part III
Letters of Spiritual Direction to a Young Soul - Letter Twenty-nine Part II and Letter Thirty Part I
The Ascetical Homilies of Saint Isaac the Syrian - Homily Seventy-two Part II
Letters of Spiritual Direction to a Young Soul - Letter Twenty-eight Part II and Letter Twenty-nine Part I
Letters of Spiritual Direction to a Young Soul - Letter Twenty-seven Part II and Letter Twenty-eight Part I
Letters of Spiritual Direction to a Young Soul - Letter Twenty-seven Part I
Letters of Spiritual Direction to a Young Soul - Letter Twenty-six Part II
Letters of Spiritual Direction to a Young Soul - Letter Twenty-five Part II and Letter Twenty-six Part I
Letters of Spiritual Direction to a Young Soul - Letter Twenty-four Part II and Letter Twenty-five Part I
Letters of Spiritual Direction to a Young Soul - Letter Twenty-three Part II and Letter Twenty-four Part I
Letters of Spiritual Direction to a Young Soul - Letter Twenty-three Part I
Letters of Spiritual Direction to a Young Soul - Letter Twenty-two Part II
Letters of Spiritual Direction to a Young Soul - Letter Twenty-two Part I
Letters of Spiritual Direction to a Young Soul - Letter Twenty-one
Letters of Spiritual Direction to a Young Soul - Letter Twenty
Letters of Spiritual Direction to a Young Soul - Letter Nineteen
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