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 Evergetinos - Hypothesis XLII, Part I
The Ladder of Divine Ascent - Chapter XVIII: On Insensibility
The Evergetinos - Hypothesis XLI, Part III
The Ladder of Divine Ascent - Chapter XV: On Chastity, Part XI and Chapter XVI: On Avarice, Part I
The Evergetinos - Hypothesis XLI, Part II
The Ladder of Divine Ascent - Chapter XV: On Chastity, Part X
The Evergetinos - Hypothesis XL, Part VII and Hypothesis XLI, Part I
The Ladder of Divine Ascent - Chapter XV: On Chastity, Part IX
The Ladder of Divine Ascent - Chapter XV: On Chastity, Part VIII
The Evergetinos - Hypothesis XL, Part VI
The Ladder of Divine Ascent - Chapter XV: On Chastity, Part VII
The Evergetinos - Hypothesis XL, Part V
”The Prayer of Fire” - A Pentecost Retreat, Session Three
”The Prayer of Fire” - A Pentecost Retreat, Session Two
”The Prayer of Fire” - A Pentecost Retreat, Session One
The Ladder of Divine Ascent - Chapter XV: On Chastity, Part VI
The Ladder of Divine Ascent - Chapter XV: On Chastity, Part V
The Evergetinos - Hypothesis XL, Part IV
The Ladder of Divine Ascent - Chapter XV: On Chastity, Part IV
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