LIBERTY TO CAPTIVES

LIBERTY TO CAPTIVES

Stone walls do not a prison make,

nor iron bars a cage …

If I have freedom in my love

And in my soul am free,

angels alone, that soar above,

enjoy such liberty.

When Richard Lovelace wrote these words in prison – he backed the wrong side in the English Civil War – he was graphically expressing a truth we can easily understand: I can be free even though I am locked up.  Freedom does not ultimately depend on my physical circumstances, though of course to be in prison severely restricts my choices. There can be a freedom deep down in a person which no regime can touch.

Viktor Frankl was stumbling to work one icy morning in Auschwitz, the notorious prison camp run by the Nazis in World War II, when suddenly his wife (who was in another camp) entered his mind. He later wrote:

Real or not, her look was then more luminous than the sun which was beginning to rise.  A thought transfixed me; for the first time on my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers; that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart; the salvation of man is through love and in love.

I understood how a man who has nothing left in the world may still know bliss … In utter desolation, when man cannot express himself in positive action when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way, man can achieve fulfilment. For the first time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of the words, ‘The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory’.

I have met people in prison in Zambia and Zimbabwe who were freer than many outside who have wealth and power but are imprisoned by them.  This is the liberty of which Jesus speaks; to be free and not attached to what really fetters the spirit of a person.

We can choose to be free no matter what our circumstances are.  Freedom is a quality of the spirit of a person and a gift from the One who meets us in our search for it.  I try to understand, to be patient, kind and forgiving.  I try to be tolerant and respectful.  All this helps but freedom may still elude me because I am ultimately incomplete.  I cannot become free on my own.  I need to share in the life of the One who comes to meet me and set me free. Jesus plainly told them in the synagogue in Nazareth (Luke 4) that he had come to do this.

12 January 2012          The Baptism of Jesus

Isaiah 42:1-7                Acts 10:34-38              Matt 3:13-17