‘Quest for Freedom’

 

The life story of Frederick Douglas remains a definitive work on slavery in pre-civil war America, because he was a slave, an eye witness, writing from experience. He secretly taught himself to read and freed his mind and the rest of him followed in due course.

Everything about slavery was designed to prevent any thought or hope of freedom; the slaveholders knew their craft well. The brutality required to subjugate their slaves and turn them into brutes, turned the slaveholders themselves into something much worse. One could say that to be a slave was to be possessed by the possessed.

It makes all the more understandable the condition of being a slave to sin, to be beholden to the cruellest taskmaster of all.

For Frederick, even though he was learned and articulate, there were so many obstacles and dangers in obtaining freedom, discouragements and temptations to resignation and settling for the certainties of slavery rather than the risk and uncertainty of freedom.  Many ensnared in sin suffer the same malaise. Freedom, whilst desirable, will make demands also.

The slave to sin initially gives reasons to sin because of the pleasure derived from it, then justifies it as not being sinful at all as the heart becomes calloused. Eventually there will come a point where the slave to sin has an emptiness that is so great that it can either lead to despair and self destruction or by God’s grace to liberation and salvation.

Eventually the yearning to be free overwhelmed Frederick.  Standing over a harbour looking at the sailing ships he prayed “You are loosed from your moorings and are free, I am fast in my chains and am a slave. You move merrily before the gentle gale, and I sadly before the bloody whip. You are freedom’s swift winged angels. I am confined in bands of iron...It cannot be that I shall live and die a slave.” Then he escaped.

For those entrenched in lives of bondage to sin, of whatever varieties, time will come when the heart cries out in a similar way. Freedom is only a step away, a decision and a prayer for mercy and forgiveness; then freedom is given by the Lord in an instant. That’s the miracle of the Divine Mercy.

Fierce, but without power

I have noticed lately that in movies there is an increasing fascination with the supernatural and of the eternal  battle between good and evil with a multitude of special effects to add to the drama and portray the horror of the evil one. It’s usually depicted as being a close run thing though, as if there is something close to equality between the two sides, but nothing could be further from the truth.

I had a peculiar illustration of this recently following the long awaited opening of our parish’s adoration chapel. I try to visit most days and from that first day, each time I went, I was set upon by a vicious stray dog that came hurtling across the park snarling and barking stopping just short of the range of my umbrella.

This may sound trivial but it was every day, sometimes accompanied by a few other dogs that surrounded me as I approached the chapel. As days turned to weeks I was getting quite weary of this daily ritual, I even prayed for Moriarty (that’s the dog’s name).

During this time I was also reading a book about the life of St Anthony, the Egyptian hermit, and this was very insightful as being attacked by the devil in various guises, from packs of dogs, to serpents and insects was his bus ride to work. However he soon discovered one important fact …they had no power. The devil even had to ask permission from God before he could do anything as in the trials of Job. In reality he was very much afraid of Anthony.

So one morning, approaching the chapel from a different road, I caught Moriarty unawares as he sat in the alley. He immediately recognized me and started barking and snarling but I just walked towards him and he started to run, turning occasionally to growl, but in retreat and I realized that it was all a ruse, that really he was afraid of me.

As the darkness of our world seems to be ever increasing it’s worth noting that compared to God, the devil and his fallen angels are mere creatures, already a defeated enemy. The only way they have any power over us is if we give it to them, yielding to them usually through sin or fear. But as praying Christians, in a state of grace, we have nothing to fear, quite the contrary, we are conquerors and can apply Christ’s victory with every moment or subject of prayer, ushering in the Kingdom of God and dispelling the darkness of evil.

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