Faith & Thought    by Rev. Robert E. Lauder Hope and freedom

(Eighth of a series)
In recent years I have come to think of freedom as the most precious of gifts but also the gift from God that makes human living such a risky business. In giving us freedom, God has taken a chance on us. In a sense, God has put Himself at our mercy. Once God creates freedom, God relinquishes complete control over us. We are capable of disappointing God, of not doing God’s will. Among all God’s creatures on this earth, only human persons have this power. Freedom really is awesome.
Several events in my life have helped me appreciate freedom in new ways. In reading and teaching philosophy, I have spent a great deal of time with the ideas of existentialist philosophers such as Jean Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and Martin Heidegger and personalist philosophers such as Martin Buber, Gabriel Marcel, Emmanuel Mounier and John MacMurray. Freedom is central to the philosophical visions of each of these thinkers. Also influential in my understanding of the central role of freedom in human existence is my own effort to live a Christian life and my observation as a priest of the efforts of others to live Christian lives. After rereading Pope Benedict’s encyclical Spe Salvi, I have come to see in a new way how hope and freedom go together.
In his letter, the pope criticizes Karl Marx for overlooking the importance of human freedom. The Holy Father believed that Marx thought that if all economic needs were met, if we lived in a society in which there were no rich and no poor, then a perfect world would have been reached. Benedict points out that because of human freedom there can be no guarantee concerning human activity. People are free, and that means that they can choose the bad rather than the good, sin rather than what is moral, evil rather than what will benefit people.
At St. John’s University, I find that in some philosophy classes I teach some students have a weak notion of freedom. They tend to think that they are pawns in society, unable to direct their lives. The Holy Father stresses that human freedom is always fragile and that the kingdom of good will never be perfectly achieved on earth. He also stresses that anyone who assures people that a better world is guaranteed is forgetting human freedom.
During Christmas time, I had an interesting discussion with a philosopher who has spent the last 50 years of his life trying to find some answer to life’s problems, some vision that he can wholeheartedly embrace. I said to him, “If I say that God is Love and that we are called to love God and to love one another, what would you find objectionable in that view of life?” He said that if this were true, then things are supposed to be getting better, and they don’t seem to be getting better. I said, “What do you mean by ‘supposed’? Who says they are supposed to be getting better? If we are free, then our free actions may be making matters worse rather than better. We can freely do what is wrong.”
Linking freedom to love, Pope Benedict writes the following: “It is not science that redeems man; man is redeemed by love. This applies even in terms of this present world. When someone has the experience of a great love in his life, this is a moment of ‘redemption,’ which gives a new meaning to his life. But soon he will also realize that the love bestowed upon him cannot by itself resolve the question of his life. It is a love that remains fragile. It can be destroyed by death. The human being needs unconditional love … If this absolute love exists with its absolute certainty, then — only then — is man ‘redeemed,’ whatever should happen to him in his particular circumstances. This is what it means to say Jesus Christ has ‘redeemed’ us. Through him we have become certain of God, a God who is not a remote ‘first cause’ of the world, because his only-begotten Son has become man and of Him everyone can say, ‘I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.’” (Gal 2:20)
Hope liberates us so that we can reach a new level of freedom. Because of our belief in God’s love for us, we can give ourselves away in service to others. Hope enables us to make a life commitment to gamble our lives on God’s love for us. The secret to human happiness and to human fulfillment is reaching out in love to others, our families, our friends, but also others, in various ways.

Father Lauder’s column will appear twice monthly in TLIC, in the second and fourth weeks of each month.