#370 A Quietly Heroic Life

Sometimes a quiet man’s life exemplifies what our faith can mean. I delivered this tribute at my father’s funeral on September 24, 2012. My text does not distinguish between fact and folklore since, in my Dad’s case, I am perfectly content to print the legend.

For 3 years as an altar boy I was master of ceremonies for all funerals here at St. Margaret’s Church (in my hometown of Saugus, Massachusetts). Mostly it was a routine responsibility, but one day in 1960 the funeral was for a classmate’s mother, and I spent the entire ceremony imagining the loss of my own parents. I was terrified of being orphaned, and prayed from that day on that my folks would survive until I could take care of myself. My mother lived to 91, and my father to 94½, so I guess this means my prayers were answered. It also means that, in a sense, for the last 52 years I have been preparing for this day.

In fact, 1960 was the year my sense of my father became fixed in my mind. I remember the snowy Sunday in 1960 when I lost track of time playing in a friend’s house, then raced home along the dark, slippery street, so angry with myself I was in tears by the time I reach home. My father confirmed it: I had missed Leonard Bernstein’s “Young People’s Concert.” I cried inconsolably, while he tried to assure me: the show had been sub-prime, the music of no interest.  “Bartok,” he sneered—and forever after, “Bartok” became our blanket label for music we disliked.

That same 1960 I saw also my first Red Sox game.  Ted Williams homered, just inside the Pesky pole, off the bald head of a man two rows in front of me.  The hit came late in a losing cause against the Yankees, but it seemed ample reward for my long futile attempts to get Williams’ baseball card.

And when, in November of that same 1960, John Kennedy became president, I first began to picture Dad as part of a group of four men of the same place and generation: Bernstein, Williams, Kennedy, and my own father.

All had Boston ties: my father, born and raised in Boston’s north shore; Kennedy, heir apparent to two great Boston families’ legacies; Bernstein, trained at Latin school and Harvard College, protégé of the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s music director, Serge Koussivitsky; and Williams, the San Diego “kid” who dominated Boston sports scene during four decades.

All four were born within 12 months, during the last year of World War I.  All were children during prohibition, all adolescents during the Great Depression, all adults during World War II.

They belonged to the generation JFK spoke of in his inaugural address: “The torch has been passed,” he said, “to a new generation, born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace.” Of course, in Bernstein’s case the torch that was passed was actually a baton; in Williams’ case, a bat; in my father’s case, a gavel.

By 1960 my father had risen as far as possible in General Electric without crossing sides from labor to management. At age 42, he chose instead a second career in union leadership.  During the 1960s and into the 1970s, he served as vice president, and then president, of his union of technical engineers.

He also entered politics, becoming chairman of the Saugus School Committee.  My wife’s high school diploma bears his signature.  In 1980, after 40 years with GE and nearly 20 with his union, he retired.

By then, of course, his life journey had already followed many paths.  Born the first of  9 children, Joseph Francis Swain was baptized a parishioner of Blessed Sacrament Parish (also in Saugus) before Saint Margaret’s even existed as a mission church, but as a charter member of Saint Margaret’s he served many roles: head altar boy, Holy Name president, DJ for the Friday night junior high canteen, lector, Eucharistic minister, consulting electrician, parish councillor, and leader of the Charismatic prayer group. He was confirmed in this church, married in this church, brought all these children here for their Baptisms, First Communions, and Confirmations.

He began his schooling at the Ballard School, which still operates, and graduated in 1936 from Saint Mary’s Boys High School in Lynn, where he was violinist and concert master in the school orchestra. 

His next step was the first of many attempts to find his true vocation.  He joined the community of Trappist Monks at Our Lady of the Valley monastery in Cumberland, Rhode Island.  He became Brother Gabriel, and immersed himself in a life of prayer, contemplation, manual labor, and “perpetual silence.” Had he succeeded on this path, many of us would not be here today, because Brother Gabriel would’ve spent his life making the Trappist Jelly you can buy today in the supermarket. But he soon developed skin boils, and was sent home to recuperate.  A few weeks later he returned, but then so did the boils, and his superiors suggested that the Trappist life was not his true calling.

This was, of course, the answer to my mother’s prayers, for she had been taking the bus to Lynn twice a week for instructions in Catholicism (discreetly, lest her father find out) while praying for Dad’s expulsion from the Trappists.  Dad’s feelings about Mum no doubt also played a role.  And none of us offspring would be surprised if the boils showed he was allergic to a life of “perpetual silence.”

In any case, his search for true calling brought him back to my mother.  They married in this church in June 1940 and lived together for the next 71 years.

Dad and Mum

He began work at GE’s River Works plant in Lynn, and used GE’s apprentice program to become first an electrician, then a draftsman, finally a planner and technical engineer, remaining with GE for 39 years.  I suspect that for many years, GE was merely a means of supporting his true life work, which was his family. Indeed, he often moonlighted weekends to pay for our camping vacations in the White Mountains, installing us at a campsite one weekend, returning to work and commuting back weekends until his own vacation week finally arrived.  I recall serving as his electrician’s helper, including that summer of 1960 helping to wire a brand new house in Andover for 30¢ an hour and all the cheeseburgers I could eat.

During these years, family life was his true calling, and his devotion especially to my mother lasted his whole life, including a near-heroic visiting schedule during her time in a nursing home.

But once he embraced union leadership he found a new, additional calling.  My mother never saw the benefit of workers striking, but on this point my father would not compromise: justice in the workplace was a matter of principle to him, and he always admired Walter Reuther of the UAW for pushing beyond contract benefits to seek more managerial power for workers.  For similar reasons, my father was a great supporter of the Catholic Labor Guild and the Catholic Worker.  For him, faith and justice were always bound together.

Perhaps the worst strike of all came in 1969, when his union joined a company-wide strike by the International Union Electricians.  The strike lasted more than four months, including a major dispute over GE recruiters at Holy Cross that triggered the exodus of all African-American  students (including Clarence Thomas) from campus (see that story at CrossCurrents #346), and also left me telling the school’s vice president that I could not pay my last semester’s tuition.

By the 1970s, Dad was torn about labor policy.  The Vietnam War was finally winding down, so GE was losing defense contracts, and while this threatened his members’ jobs, he also believed deeply that the war’s end was a good thing.

Serving in Saugus town politics provided another path for his skills and convictions, but by the end of his career he was ready for early retirement.  Statistics showed, he said, that the earlier you retire the longer you live.  He then went on to prove the point, earning more pension in his 32 years of retirement than he ever earned on the job.

In retirement he busied himself around the house, so much so that my mother sought some personal space by becoming a belated red sox fan.  He also made time for social service, serving meals at Boston’s Pine Street Inn and leading nursing home sing-alongs from his new electric keyboard.  Many of us here will never forget the stunning image of Dad at the keyboard as we all sang old standards for his 90th birthday party.

His care for my mother remained a central focus of his later years, including his project to convert the family beach house in Marshfield (MA) to year-round living, with a second floor dormitory and wraparound deck.  He planned and consulted and completed blueprints and hired a contractor, but when my mother had a change of heart, declaring 24 hours before construction would begin that she could not leave Saugus, he immediately called off the contractor, and I never heard the subject raised again. Her wishes truly were his commands.

 Since his own journey showed a strong sense of vocation but also the struggle to find the right path, he kept open mind about the lives others chose for themselves.  He was never one to push a child or grandchild along any path, yet he took great pride in all their accomplishments. 

I was well into my 30s before discovering my parents had always hoped for (and even plotted for) my vocation to the priesthood--even naming me, their firstborn son, after Dad’s favorite priest.  But dad never failed to praise the alternate path I chose. 

Three first-born Sons

That sense that we each must find our true calling was his great legacy—not just for his children but for the generations beyond.  He had a gift for recognizing the value in each grandchild’s life path.  He was proud of them all, and they knew it. Many of them were inspired by his example, and he knew that too, and he took paternal pride seeing his life’s mission touch theirs. 

And when Mum died in April, his final mission was accomplished. At the end of her life, what my mother needed above all was to see Dad across the room. When he returned home from the hospital two years ago, they cuddled on the couch like two teenagers. It was an epically romantic image. 

Those four men of JFK’s “new generation,” all 30 years my senior, have left our world a richer, more complex, place.  For many, the bell ringing in a new age began tolling the moment Jack Kennedy was shot.  And the moment I heard Bernstein was gone in 1990, I suddenly felt the same sad alarm that young boy felt, 30 years before, racing in tears down a dark and slippery road, to the consoling comfort of his father’s home. Twelve years later, Williams was gone too. My father was the last survivor.

They were all larger than life, and Dad truly belonged in their company. Like them, he was an extraordinary man—but only he lived the kind of ordinary, quietly heroic life that still inspires me today. He fought the good fight, he ran the good race, and most of the time he made it look easy. Now he has finally arrived at his life’s finish in the sure hope of beginning yet another journey. Bon Voyage, Dad.

© Bernard F. Swain PhD 2012

#369 “Was Jesus Married?” 10 Facts

In the face of this week's ignorant media hype about a new discovery, let’s set the record straight…

Any talk of Jesus being married always stirs needless controversy, so this week’s news out of Harvard--about an ancient text in which Jesus speaks of “my wife”--poses the kind of teachable moment that calls for some serious fact checking.

Fact #1:  The belief that “Jesus never married” is not Catholic doctrine.  It is true that generations of Christians have assumed that Jesus was single, and passed on that assumption as a kind of pious tradition, part of our popular image of Jesus, like long hair and a beard.  But this popular belief is not in our creeds or our catechism; at most it is an informal, unofficial “teaching” commonly communicated to believers.  But Catholics are not required to believe this, and they never have been.

Fact #2: Believing that Jesus was married is not heresy.  The September 19 Boston Globe claimed that “The notion that Jesus may have been married” is “considered heretical by the Catholic Church.” This is just ignorant reporting.  To be heresy an idea must contradict an “orthodox” doctrine.  But since there is no official Catholic doctrine (one way or another) about Jesus’ marital status, then there is nothing to contradict. Hence heresy on this question is impossible.  Claiming Jesus married does clash with the popular tradition I mentioned above, but disagreeing with popular tradition is not heresy.

Fact #3: The Roman Catholic Church DOES allow married men to be priests.  That same Globe article claimed with similar ignorance that “These issues remain intensely relevant in Christianity today, particularly in the Roman Catholic Church, which allows only celibate men to be priests.” Not true!

Catholicism embraces five different “rites ” or worship styles, and four of the five (often refer to collectively as the “Eastern Rites”) ordain married man as priests.  Only the “Latin Rite” requires celibacy of all candidates for the priesthood--and even that is changing, since former Anglican priests may now be accepted as Latin Rite priests even if they are married. The confusion is based on numbers: more than 90% of all Catholic priests belong to the Latin Rite, so celibate priests do outnumber married priests. But the Catholic Church allows both.

Fact #4: Priestly celibacy is not a doctrine.  History rather than doctrine explains why Latin Rite priests must be celibate while Eastern Rite priests may marry in.  Long ago all priests (except members of all-male religious communities) could be married, but in the 11^th century a general rule of mandatory celibacy was adopted for Latin Rite priests. That rule was never adopted for the Eastern Rites.  So the fact here is simple: priestly celibacy is just a rule; there were married priests before this rule was adopted, they are still married priests outside that rule’s jurisdiction, and there will be married priests again whenever the rule is dropped.

Fact #5: We do not actually know if Jesus was married or single.  Our best source is the books of the New Testament, and these books are totally silent on the question.  In fact, they’re totally silent about Jesus from the age of 12 to the beginning of his public life at about 30.  We know virtually nothing of the adolescence and early adulthood of Jesus--the very period when his own culture would have expected him to marry.  If, as a hypothetical argument, Jesus had been widowed in his mid-twenties, his married life would be invisible. It would have fallen into that huge gap in the gospel narratives--a gap that no other source can fill.  The fact is, we just do not know.

Fact #6: We will probably never know.  Harvard’s Karen King, who announced the new fragment, told reporters “It’s not saying we got the smoking gun that Jesus was married.” After all, just because one person writing long after the death of Jesus puts the words “my wife” in the mouth of Jesus does not mean we have discovered a new fact, or even that many others believed it to be so.  And it certainly does not mean these were Jesus’ own words. It just means one person wrote it, true or not, for reasons we cannot know. 

The fragment probably dates from the late fourth century, and may be based on a text from the mid-too-late second century--that is, more than a century after Jesus’ death.  All of the New Testament books are closer to Jesus’ lifetime.  There is nothing in the new discovery that can penetrate the silence of the New Testament.  That silence is definitive, and I can think of no way anyone could penetrate that silence.

Fact #7: The old evidence trumps any new discoveries.  All of the other ancient texts and alternative “gospels” that have fueled books like The DaVinci Code are also further from Jesus time than the authentic Biblical texts.  Most of these alternative texts were specifically rejected as less than reliable during the process of forming the Christian Bible as we know it today.

We are often told history is written by the winners, and the simple fact is the winners are the texts that made it into the New Testament “canon,” which means literally the “yardstick” by which we measure the value of any text about Jesus.  All the alternative texts were the losers, simply because they failed to measure up.  As sources go, the New Testament trumps any other source we can realistically imagine

Fact #8: The New Testament evidence is not clear.  What does the New Testament’s silence mean?  Some argue it means Jesus was single, or his wife would have been mentioned along with his mother, father, and brothers.  Others argue the silence means Jesus had been married, since his culture saw a celibate adult male as abnormal, and we would expect the Gospels to mention someone challenging him, and Jesus offering a response and defense.

Both arguments are logically coherent, but neither one has much evidence to support it.

In other words, the Gospels’ silence cannot really settle the question.  We can speculate: what if, for example, Jesus were widowed before his public life began? His wife might not be mentioned simply because she was no longer present. But any such answer is just speculation.  We know the texts are silent, but we cannot tell for sure what that silence means.

Fact #9: If Jesus was married, our core Christian beliefs remain unchanged.  Nothing in our creeds, are catechisms or our theological principles about Jesus Christ is based on the premise of Jesus’ celibacy.  If Jesus was married, then the popular devotion about his single state would be inaccurate--but nothing else would change.  My Catholicism does not hang on this question, and yours should not either.  For me, the question of Jesus’ marital status is nothing more than idle curiosity.  It is not a deal breaker--or even a game-changer--for my faith. It clearly did not matter enough (one way or the other) to the authors of the Gospels, or to St. Paul, or to the other New Testament authors, to include any mention in their texts.

Fact #10: But it might change some attitudes.  Clearly much of Christian history has been ambivalent or even negative about marriage and sexuality (see CrossCurrents #359).  In the New Testament, St. Paul essentially regards marriage as a last resort so those who cannot hack celibacy do not fall into adultery.  And the assumption of Jesus as life-long celibate has often fueled the double standard by which celibates are superior to married people.  Many modern Christians would like to see that double standard fall, and see a golden opportunity in debunking the celibacy of Jesus.  More broadly, people who disparage the place of sexuality in Christian history might love the opportunity, with the leverage of a new “revelation,” to reboot Christianity over again and get it right this time.  Controversy over minor matters advances the cause and makes good newspaper copy--but such controversy does not fit the facts.

On this score, ironically, our Christian faith is rooted much more firmly in fact than most of the media coverage.

© Bernard F. Swain PhD 2012

#368 Summer’s End

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven...

As Labor Day brought the “official” end to the summer season, I sensed within me that same feeling millions have at this time of year: sadness at the prospect of summer’s end.

And I don’t even like summer!

For years summer meant some menial job (usually factory work) at low pay to earn meager sums of money I would never see anyway. This was called “paying your way through school,” and it reduced my summers to debt-reduction drudgery.

Once I entered the workforce full-time, summer often meant shifting my activities from day-to-day deadlines to advance planning for the coming parish year. But then I discovered how little I like warm weather (working in heat lacked the appeal of a childhood spent camping at the lake). As I’ve aged, I gradually developed a new rhythm: as spring ends I resign myself to the heat ahead, enduring it as creatively and comfortably as possible, and I wait for the arrival of “sweater weather.”

With this outlook, why in the world does summer’s end nonetheless make me sad? The answer, I suspect, lies on several levels.

On the surface, my sadness is about lost opportunities. In a four-season climate, summer promises options unavailable the rest of the year: cookouts, picnics, outdoor concerts, lazy outdoor meals and gatherings, beach and boats and swimming and biking and reading on the deck. Inevitably the possibilities cannot be squeezed into the 8 weeks between the Fourth of July and Labor Day, so at summer’s end my hindsight focuses on all the things that happened without me. I never fail to feel that summer’s bounty has somehow slipped through my fingers.

Of course, the sense of summer’s missed opportunities naturally resonates on a deeper level—it inevitably reminds me of my life’s missed opportunities. Relationships I neglected, skills never learned, books unread, trips bypassed, careers I never explored---all these come to mind and compound the feeling of unfulfilled potential and lost time.

Our life’s time passes so swiftly, summer reminds us—especially in places like New England where summer is so brief.

And then, of course, summer’s end brings autumn. In New England as elsewhere, autumn brings bright colors that reveal another side of creation’s glory.

But autumn also brings longer nights and shorter days, colder weather and harvest time as the growing season ends. And, of course, even those brilliant leaves are merely blazing briefly before falling to earth, dead.

Summer’s end thus holds before us the prospect of a world ending its productive growth and returning to the seasons when many things die and lie dormant in the ground. It reminds us that no earthly life lasts forever. It reminds us that we all live lives that begin in spring, blossom in summer, blaze in brief glory during autumn and finally arrive at winter. It reminds us, finally, that if we have missed some of life’s opportunities, we will not get to replay our lives, and we cannot rewind them.

In short, summer’s end is sad because it reminds us of our own mortality. Summer itself may be, as Scott Turow writes, “The season of ripeness and promise”—but summer’s end is the beginning of the end, and it reminds us of our own end.

So our sadness combines regret for what might have been, and anxiety about what will come.

But this feeling is not, of course, the same for every person. It’s true, as Dick Francis wrote, that we are all dying at the same rate—one day at a time. But for each of us, those days depend on the season our life has reached.

 

When my mother died in April, at 91, she had clearly reached the deep winter of her life. On my last visit I raised the window blinds so she could turn her head to gaze out at the blooming dogwoods. Her eyes glowed and she smiled, grateful for one last glimpse of new life on her last full day.

Some weeks later my great-niece Nora celebrated her third birthday, blooming pink much like those dogwoods, still early in the spring of her life.

My youngest son turns 30 next month, and now all three of my children live in the full summer of their lives.

The pills on my kitchen table, the cane at my side, the white in my beard all suggest that my life passed summer’s end some years ago. Autumn has always been my favorite season, October my favorite month, Thanksgiving my favorite holiday—and now I am deep in the autumn of my life, perhaps still blazing brilliant colors but still moving to winter.

My father, at 94, has entered hospice care at home, embracing the winter solstice of his life with remarkable serenity.

As our lives pass summer, the beginning of the end comes in many forms. For many, it is forgetfulness, or stiffened joints, or the progressive loss of muscle, or deafness, or just the decision to finally invest in a pair of reading glasses. Accepting our life’s seasons with grace is one of the prime challenges of all our lives.

It is easy to overlook the simple fact: all summer long, the days are already getting shorter and the nights longer. And the summer of our lives is already moving us to our autumn.

I am reminded of the musical version of Les Miserables. The show is in two acts, and both acts end with the same rousing song “Do You Hear the People Sing?” The tune remains the same, but the lyrics and singers do not. In Act I, the song is a political battle cry sung by rebels mounting the barricades of revolution. In Act II, the song becomes the hymn of all those fallen in battle, singing not of revolution but of salvation.

The show's imagery and language is drenched in the Catholic notion of two communities linked by divine Providence. The first is the earthly communion (once called the “Church militant”) of all who struggle in faith to transform a fallen world. The second is the “Communion of Saints” (once called the “Church triumphant”) who support our earthly struggles from beyond the grave.

In Les Miserables, both communions share a common tune with different lyrics. And both march forward toward tomorrow.

As summer 2012 ends, we all march too. Regrets and fears may have their place, but we know that however sad or eager we are, however much we focus on what might have been or what may come, we know one thing is true, one thing is our constant condition: no matter what, we march into tomorrow.

  Bernard F. Swain PhD 2010

# 83 Freedom’s Façade is Not Enough

A Selection From CrossCurrents Archives to Prepare for Election Day...

We’ve all been duped, from time to time, by Hollywood’s magic. We sit mesmerized by palaces and monuments, spaceships and ships at sea, ancient villages and frontier towns, and even places that exist only on another planet. Sometimes they’re only background pictures, or miniature models—but often they’re full-size sets, mere facades of buildings propped up from behind, beautiful balconies that beckon the hero through an elaborate doorway leading nowhere.

Falling for such facades is part of the make-believe pleasure movies give us, but real life is different. In life, we need to know if an attractive image has any inner life beyond the entryway.

Lately we’ve been hearing “freedom” ringing over our airwaves as repeatedly and rhythmically as the “Hail Mary” at a Rosary meeting. For Americans the word has the sound of sacred truth—who can be against freedom? And when “freedom” is linked to "democracy,” another sacred sound, the call to arms can be irresistible.

So maybe it’s time for some straight talk about freedom. It is an idea that was at the core of Christian faith from the very start. Its meaning and importance have evolved and expanded enormously over the course of Christian history. That history involves Christian theology, ancient and Christian and modern philosophy, varied moral theories, as well as a wide range of political philosophies emerging in recent centuries. That’s all too much to sort through here, but several key points should help get past the rhetoric to the reality:

Freedom is Not an Absolute Value. If everyone does whatever they want, they may be free—but chaos and anarchy are the result. As the old saying goes, my freedom to swing my arms ends at the tip of your nose. Total freedom may be impossible if people are to live together, so restraints are always needed. Iraq offers the perfect current example: until native police can ensure civil order, the freedom people have to commit mayhem and murder will collide with other values: the security and stability Iraq needs.

Freedom is not the Only Value. The American tradition links freedom to the Bill of Rights. But our founders aimed at more than freedom: their slogan “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” reminds us that securing the rights of all is a balancing act among several sacred values.

The French Revolution touted freedom too, which is why the Statue of Liberty stands in New York Harbor as our oldest ally’s gift to us. But the French balanced “Liberté” with “Egalité” and "Fraternité,” and for more than 200 years the world has acknowledged that all of these, not just liberty, are the “passwords to democracy.” And sometimes those passwords conflict, and then freedom must be compromised. That’s why the pro-life movement knows “freedom to choose” cannot be the only value, if life is thereby jeopardized.

Elections do not produce Freedom. People choosing their own leaders is a good thing, but freedom requires more than that. After all, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union and Iraq under Saddam all had elections too. If democratic freedom lies in “the consent of the governed,” then people are free only to the extent that they have a voice in all the decisions that govern them: in public policy, in corporate decisions, in the workplace and schools and social organizations and the family and even in the Church.

Choosing which leaders to hire is only a first step toward a real voice in all these areas. Even in America, we have a long way to go before we extend freedom to all areas of our lives—and we’ve been choosing our leaders for a long time (though male landowners have been voting much longer than other males, or females, or blacks).

“Freedom” Can Isolate Us. Often our modern secular culture has redefined “freedom” as a synonym for individual autonomy. To be “free” in this sense means to be left alone, to be unrestrained, to be independent of any obligations, to be subject to no authority except my own. To be “free” means to escape all outside interference—it’s what people mean when they talk about “getting government off our backs.” Carried to the extreme, of course, a “free world” would be a world full of unencumbered individuals who submit to no outside authority and owe each other nothing. This may be “rugged individualism” in its purest form, but it is a far cry from the Christian vision of a world where the golden rule binds us all together as our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers.

Freedom is not just a right.  The rise of modern democratic politics (since England’s Glorious Revolution in 1689) has tended to reduce “Freedom” down to the idea of a human right—the right not to be oppressed. Such “freedom” is merely an external condition that can be legislated by public declarations, and constitutions, and Bills of Rights. In Christian history, this external condition has often been called “formal freedom.”

But Christians have traditionally believed in another kind of freedom, often called “real freedom.” Real freedom isn’t just an external condition or right that can be formally declared, it is a capacity we find within us. Specifically, it is the power to act for the good—not only our own good, but also the good of others.

This goes way beyond freedom from oppression to define a freedom for facing up to life’s tough choices. The very idea of “sin” depends on the recognition that we don’t always make the right choices, even though we are free to do so. Christians have generally believed, in fact, that we humans are incapable of consistently doing the right thing without the help of God. On our own, we haven’t the power, the “freedom for” the choices we should make. But God’s grace is, in Christian faith, the force in our lives that supplies the power we need to do good. That’s why St. Paul says, “For freedom Christ has set us free,” and “where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.”

All this means two things. First, true freedom is much more than we’re led to believe by public leaders. It’s not just something you can produce, like a rabbit from a hat, simply by holding an election or writing a constitution or winning a war. Freedom is not merely a social and political condition we humans create by public acts. It is a moral and spiritual capacity that god creates within each of us.

Second, as people of faith, we cannot sell freedom short, even if others do. Our first instincts are right—freedom is a sacred truth. But God doesn’t offer us freedom for nothing, or just so we can be independent from others. God expects us to respond to his grace, to cooperate with the power he’s given us, to use our power to do his will. If we treat freedom as mere independence or autonomy, we squander that gift and insult its divine giver.

How do we honor the giver? By seeing past the political facade of freedom to its spiritual interior. Popes Leo XIII and Pius XII taught that our mission to re-form the world according to God's plan relies on three spiritual forces: truth, justice, and love. In the early 1960s, John XXIII added a fourth spiritual force: freedom.

So, as Americans we should see freedom as the partner of “Life” and “The Pursuit of Happiness.” As democratic people, we should set Freedom alongside “Equality” and “Fraternity.” And as people of faith, we should embrace freedom as one of the forces the world needs—along with Truth, Justice, and above all Love—if we are to make our world the kind of place God wills it to become. Then we’ve found the fullness of freedom, well beyond its façade.

© Bernard F. Swain PhD 2005