True Your Course and Find Your Joy
Happiness is a gift of God. Not the isolated fruit of our endeavors.
‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.’ — Declaration of Independence
‘To Adam, [God] said, 'Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded you, "You must not eat from it," Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil, you will eat food from it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow, you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.’’ — Genesis 3:17-19
IT’S HARD NOT to be completely captivated by freedom.
Freedom, as most of us see it, is a glorious hope gifted to ourselves (in some cooperation with others) to amend the bitter tears of life’s difficulties that make us all slaves of one thing or another at one time or another.
Freedom, though rarely stated as such, means gaining the upper hand on the servitude & stupor of life in exchange for what we all want to believe is rightfully ours.
Like the American Dream, American Freedom implies a workaround in which we beat the system and enjoy the spoils. Working hard, we’re told, will get you over the hump and through the gates into this secular promised land where under so presumptuous a premise — man knows better than God after all — the end not only justifies the means, but anything goes where your own personal liberty is concerned, even if my pursuit of happiness destroys yours, and yours mine.
In fact, I would argue that freedom in its contemporary meaning is just a stand-in for success and excess, where getting takes first place in all things, which is also why I believe that for most of us this act of persistently taking changes us for the worse in the process.
For the rich, freedom looks exactly like what it appears to be: self-aggrandizement couched in beautiful dreams rooted in vainglory. For the poor, freedom is the desire for a life less difficult, at least in the beginning.
Under both auspices, regardless, freedom is just so temptably easy to get wrong. The pursuit of happiness — freedom’s active verb, so to speak — infects the world with the idea that our greatest desires are part of our personally manifested destiny; a distance waiting to be crossed by sustained effort and quick feet dancing over wet logs. It doesn’t really matter where you come from or what you start out with (the whole world is American in this regard), humanity is sick with anticipation for a better tomorrow consisting of everything we don’t have enough of right now, whether we need it or not.
American freedom may be a blessing for some who remain noble in their aspirations but as a human response designed to out-maneuver God’s curse yoked to Adam’s back (and ours by extension), is it any coincidence that as we get better at being free, we also find the way forward increasingly crowded with more competition and obstacles, less opportunity, and ever higher summits to scale? — that in reality, this ‘freedom’ of ours, however won, doesn’t so much change the spiritual blueprint of this inherited toil but just the furniture in the room?
Is it also any wonder then that our hunger to vanquish our daily frustrations to live in expansive comfort far from the sweaty hordes almost always leads to vice?
This freedom, the one we see enjoyed by the dumb apes on Netflix basking in their cosmetically altered reflections, is, for all its gaudy fascination, just another form of oppression, really — a hi-five! between those reckless enough to flaunt their privileges (the haves), and a condemnation of the millions watching at home who fail to measure up (the have-nots).
Take it all in. Just imagine for a moment a belief system that proclaims itself a paragon of human achievement yet whose dreamed-of reaches almost always necessitate the fundamental rejection of what it means to be properly and morally human in the first place.
Catholicism doesn’t struggle with any of this. We struggle with how to conform ourselves to God’s will, not how to bend and deform it to suit our own.
It’s interesting that Jesus came to set the captives free [Luke 4:18], while still leaving us subject to earthly thorns that remain planted in place waiting to be overcome by prayer, sacrifice, and helping grace, despite His Cross. In John 17: 15 - 23, Jesus said He didn’t come to take His disciples and followers out of the world …
I do not ask that you take them out of the world, but that you keep them from the evil one.[a] 16 They are not of the world, just as I am not of the world. 17 Sanctify them [b] in the truth; your word is truth. 18 As you sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world. 19 And for their sake I consecrate myself, [c] that they also may be sanctified [d] in truth.
What is freedom then?
Well, what it certainly is not is the greedy grab of fleshy rewards that keeps us spellbound in destructive thrall to miserable delights. Look closer, and you will see that freedom as popularly followed is really a wide road sloping downhill into a numbing stasis of spiritual impoverishment over time, that for all its radioactive buoyancy frequently separates the pursuer from the object of his inner most desires, including God and the people we love.
Hate to break it to you, but happiness the result of hard work meets lucky breaks is pure fiction, beloved.
Sustained happiness is a free gift supernaturally attained, and not the isolated fruit of our endeavors.
Clearly, God established immutable laws from the beginning that don't bow to man with exquisite Divine purpose for a reason: that we might arrive with finality at the realization that only Jesus’ Truth sets us free from our deepest human complaints and the mindful torpor that buries lost souls in the false hope that you can somehow ransom or remedy these timeless spiritual fixtures with nicer things and more money.
What does it profit a man?
.30.
Thank-you, friend :)))