Saturday, March 24, 2012
What to read for today.
Chapter 27:What Is Liberty?
Questions for your personal reflection.
Do you have any experience of the kind of liberty that Merton writes about?
Sharing with others: What caught your attention or provoked your thinking today?
The freedom that Merton talks seems familiar. It is like writing a sonnet or a short story. Each literary form imposes certain limitations, but within those forms you can write about anything you like and say whatever you want to say. On a relational level Merton’s freedom also sounds like marriage. One takes on certain obligations, connections, demands and so forth as part of the commitment to another person, while at the same time remaining free to be oneself.
I do not know if Merton would equate these things with “the ability to do the will of God” which is how he defines freedom in this chapter.
Posted by Genevieve
Posted by Genevieve
I think Merton has it wrong here. I think Liberty is always having to choose.
ReplyDeleteThat's what makes it so precious and so often elusive. Because we're not perfect- we don't always choose either wisely or necessarily correctly. From his perspective I would argue it's only when you recognize evil that you are then able to make a (correct) choice.
I do agree with some of his concluding comments about the importance of liberty and it's defence. though
I would not describe spiritual freedom as the inability to make evil or bad choices ,but rather possessing the knowledge to choose correctly
because of your spiritual connection-
post by william
Posted by Second Thoughts
ReplyDeleteI had trouble relating to this chapter. I kept trying to figure out what this kind of freedom might look like because it does not sound like it's about choosing between right and wrong. So what I came up with is that maybe it's the kind of freedom we can look forward to when we become what we are intended to be, e.g. when we let go of our facades. If we don't have to keep up a false front, we would be free. We would just be ourselves and if you follow Merton's logic, there's nothing to choose because you don't care what the world thinks of you. It would be kind of like giving up trying to impress someone. That can be very freeing.
More from Second Thoughts
DeleteThe later chapter on Detachment seems to confirm my hunch about Merton's idea of freedom (liberty) as being the result of letting go of our false self (the one we try to keep up in the outer world) because he says: The mystic lives in emptiness, in freedom, as if he had no longer a limited and exclusive "self" that distinguishes him from God and other men.