Draw me after you
The Christian concept of freedom is something very different from what modern man conceives freedom to be. We too often mistake freedom for license, thinking that freedom simply means being able to do whatever we want. This is not what is meant by Christian freedom at all, though. When St. Paul writes, "For freedom Christ has set us free" (Gal 5:1) he means something very different from license. If not, how could he not be contradicting himself when he says that when we are set free from sin we become slaves of God (Rom 6:22)? It is because the freedom which Christ achieved for us and which is available to us by grace through faith is the freedom to be righteous - which is to say, the freedom to be what we were created to be. Augustine writes in his Enchiridion, "For he is freely in bondage who does with pleasure the will of the master. Accordingly, he who is the servant of sin is free to sin. And hence he will not be free to do right, until, being freed from sin, he shall begin to be the servant of righteousness. And this is true liberty, for he has pleasure in the righteous deed; and it is at the same time a holy bondage, for he is obedient to the will of God" (Enchiridion, XXX, 1). This freedom to do what is right is only achieved in us by the redemption of Christ, which all of creation eagerly anticipates, and the hope of which is our very salvation (cf. Rom 8:23).
I often struggle with the concept of freedom because the truth is I very rarely feel free to do what is right. What I have to remember always is that the redemption of Christ frees me to do what it is right, but it does not force me. I am able to be righteous by the grace of God through my faith in Jesus Christ, but that choice still remains with me. I must use the grace given to me and choose to grow in holiness. I must seek always to be sanctified in the Holy Spirit, knowing that salvation is not completed in an instant of my acceptance of Christ, but rather that salvation is always ongoing, so that I must always "work out my own salvation in fear and trembling" (Phil 2:12). Until Christ returns and "the new Jerusalem comes down from God out of heaven" (Rev 3:12), sin will always be an option for me to choose, and the more I choose it, the more I become enslaved to it once again. Thus we have the Sacraments, strengthening us in our freedom to choose righteousness.
One thing I have recently learned about myself is that if I am ever to be victorious over sin - or rather, if I am ever to live fully in Christ's victory over sin - I must first be willing to admit how much I love my sin. I do. I love sin. To say anything else would be a lie. It is part of the disorder of my human condition. This is what lust ultimately is, a disordered desire, and I am full of many disordered desires. In those desires I grow attached to that which harms me, to those actions in my life which draw me away from God. These attachments are strong, and the bondage to sin, the love of sin, is difficult indeed to overcome. It is for this reason that St. John of the Cross recommends such a drastic medicine for those beginners seeking to become holy, when he writes:
Endeavor to be inclined always:
not to the easiest, but to the most difficult
not to the most delightful, but to the most distasteful;
not to the most gratifying, but to the less pleasant;
not to what means rest for you, but to hard work;
not to the consoling, but to the unconsoling;
not to the most, but to the least;
not to the highest and most precious, but to the lowest and most despised;
not to wanting something, but to wanting nothing.
Do not go about looking for the best of temporal things, but for the worst, and, for Christ, desire to enter into complete nakedness, emptiness, and poverty in everything in the world (Ascent of Mount Carmel, I.13.6).
St. John here is not encouraging some sort of joyless existence or some sort of masochistic view of mortification, but rather he is recognizing the effect of the momentum of the will towards sin when we are in fact in bondage to sin. The sort of extreme measures he exhorts here are means of reversing the momentum, emptying the soul of its disordered attachments to worldly pleasures and thus being freed to receive the true riches of beatitude that God has in store for us, even here in this life now. But I can never get to the point that I see this path as being necessary until I admit how much I love my sin. For in admitting how much I love it, I am recognizing the strength of its power over me, and thus I am able to invite the full power of God into my heart to liberate me and continuously draw me towards Him - this being the true freedom for which Christ died and was raised.
My prayer during these last two weeks of Lent is that I will in fact learn how much I love my sin, and that I will turn that disordered love over to God so that He will order me properly towards Him, that He will draw me after Him and bring me into His chambers (cf. Song 1:4), united to Him in love. This is the freedom that I seek.