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I am Free

To be free, oh, to be free.  Freedom has always been a major theme of American culture.  Indeed, this country was rooted in a political and religious quest for freedom.  Any of us with any age hears the resonant voice of Martin Luther King, Jr. and others in the turbulent 1960s calling for freedom to ring out.
           
But freedom is a much older concept than these North American colonies, now global super-state.  And freedom certainly is not an American concept alone.  Freedom goes back to those Jews who experienced liberation from Egyptian bondage.  It is as old as those Greek philosophers, like Plato and Aristotle.  Freedom has been an issue on the national scale as well as on the individual scale.
           
Freedom is always the opposite of bondage and slavery. In many ways I would claim never to have experienced bondage and slavery.  But it can be an issue even for me and others like me who are politically free, who are not bound by the bondage of poverty, etc.  Ironically, we can be free and, yet, bound.  We can be stuck in psychological and spiritual bondage.  Often these are not visible, but they are nevertheless very real.
           
I thought about all this as I read a few words from Wendell Berry.  Berry is a Kentucky farmer, poet, ecologist, and kingdom-liver.  I have never met him except through his words.  I know people who know him.  When they talk about Wendell, they begin to glow as they remember their encounter, as if they had stepped into a sacred space with a saint!  Apparently, there is a quiet charisma about the guy.  I would love to meet him and let him mentor me.
           
In a poem by Wendell Berry we encounter these words.  “When despair for the world grows in me, and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be---I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, where the great heron feeds.”  Berry is not talking metaphorically.  I firmly believe he actually goes outside to be with nature.  There is a spirituality within nature that can calm fears and induce peace. 
           
He puts it so much more poetically.  “I come into the presence of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought and grief.”  When I read this, I want to cry, “and who would not want to come into the presence of wild things!”  But I know most of us would not.  We could not dare go into the presence of wild things.  Our lives put fences, walls, and all sorts of guards to prevent any contact with wild things.
           
So we choose to stay with our incredible ability with forethought to imagine almost anything.  We see things in our future that scare us, that intimidate us, that make us shy away from any kind of real living.  And when we don’t get what we want, we grieve.  And especially when things we are attached to are taken away from us, the grief goes deep. 
           
Berry continues with this line: “I come into the presence of still water.”  Of course, this reminds me of the Twenty-Third Psalm, “The Lord is my Shepherd…”  Somehow for me still water should be deep water.  Still water has the connotation of peace and security.  Still water is the opposite of turbulent waters, tumultuous waters, and chaotic waters.  Who wants to live in those kinds of water?  And yet, so many of us do live lives in chaotic waters.  Paradoxically, we may even think we are free, but if we are caught in those kinds of water, we are not really free.
           
Berry’s experience and his vision offer an alternative…and it is actually a spiritual alternative.  And he articulates this with words of freedom, which reveal the spiritual, if we but listen closely.  He concludes, “For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.”  This is great.  “I rest in the grace of the world.”  If we are in the chaotic waters of life, we are not even sure there is grace in the world.
           
Berry’s words comfort me with the thought that grace is always there.  Even if I do not sense it or see it, grace is always there.  It is always a gift ready to be given.  The problem is that I often want a particular kind of grace.  Too often, I want to dictate how I will be graced…how I should be gifted.  I want to get to that place where I am free enough to allow God to offer the grace God wants me to have.
           
When we are stuck or trapped in some kind of chaos or tumult, we fear we are stuck in the tumult forever.  We are in prison!  I want to remember that there is grace.  By God there is grace.  By the grace of God we shall be free.  As Wendell Berry says, I am free.  I want that kind of freedom, too.      
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