Citizen Columns

Citizen Columns >> Answer (December 14th, 2007)

Question

What spiritual gift would you most like to give this year and to whom? What would you like to receive?

Answer

I would like to give the gift of courage to religious leaders. Courage to follow the most generous streams of their tradition rather than the most cautious and frightened.

I just saw The Golden Compass. There is some anti-religious prejudice there, but on the whole I found myself agreeing with its central premise. And that is that ideologies—and religions can become that—are afraid of generosity and the freedom that inspires it. Freedom by definition resists the controls and limits that ideologies require to keep order.

Christians are about to celebrate the birth of Christ, and it was precisely his freedom that got him into trouble with religious authorities and eventually crucified. No, Christ was not a radical free thinker. He sought above all to follow the will and commandments of his Father, and he said we would also find life in so doing. But he refused to accept the imprisoning of that divine will into a little religious box. Indeed, some of the most poignant lessons of the New Testament come from Jesus' encounters with the Samaritans, people outside the "acceptable" religious ideology of his day.

The tension between freedom of spirit and maintaining community order collide in every religion and in every age. Both are needed if communities are to survive in the long run, but freedom is usually the loser. So it must be all the more closely guarded by religious leaders, even in the face of community pressures to back away.

The Christian claim is that God himself resisted his own internal pressures to remain alone and isolated in his divine perfection. He decided to share himself with the universe, to let others share in his life, love and freedom. The paradox here is that he emptied himself of his glory and in the process lost none of it.

That kind of courage is what I would like to receive as well.

Father John Jillions