This speech was delivered at the church of the Cappuchin Fathers in Batroun on Friday February 21st, 1975.
A common false image of Christianity
A widespread perception of Christianity, even among Christians themselves, considers it as a religion in which the human being must limit his freedom and restrains his vitality in order to be worthy of the eternal life after death. This looks pretty much like an exchange process, in which God takes from the human being the most precious thing he owns in order to give him, in return, the goods of an unknown world. Or as if the human being is compelled and has no other choice but to accept a horrible blackmailing: being an ephemeral creature, he sacrifices the most precious thing he owns in this earthly existence in order to win the everlasting eternal life. This is a very common picture that might have been implanted in us by the education we were given. Nonetheless, it seems incompatible both with the message of the Gospel (as we know the word Gospel means actually the Glad Tidings) and with the authentic tradition we received and that our Fathers founded on the basis of the Gospel.
On the contrary, it seems to me that the Christian message is an urgent call and a disturbing one in as much as it urgently calls for freedom and life, to the fullness of freedom and the fullness of life, starting now and here and not only after death. In fact, Christianity is a call for freedom.
Christianity is entirely freedom. It emerges from freedom and ends in it. Didn’t the apostle Paul write to the Christians in Galatia: ‘You, my brothers, were called to be free’ (Gal 5: 13)? Doesn’t he also write: ‘It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand free, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery’ (Gal 5: 1)? Didn’t he also write, in another epistle: ‘Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom’ (2Cor 3: 17)?
The Freedom of Choice
The God of Jesus-Christ is not a God who imposes Himself on his creatures. He is a love offered freely to the humans so that they react freely to it, enter his festive banquet and become alive. Love can by no means be a ‘violation’; this is why, when our Lord decided, because of his great love for us, to live in our world, He did not impose His love on the humans neither by force nor by power and not by sweeping arguments. Instead, He addressed their depth, solicited their freedom and accepted to be refused by many, to be refused to the extent of Crucifixion. The Lord in his Gospel addresses the will of the humans and waits for their free answer. Thus the following expressions: ‘If anyone wants to follow me… If you want to enter life… If you want to believe… If you want to be perfect…’. The Lord disturbs us by insisting on our freedom. We would rather like that He spares us the difficulty of choice, that He relieves us from the burden of determining our fate by ourselves. We would have liked that He imposes Himself on us through clear proofs and signs, not leaving any space for hesitation, so we would follow Him submissively. Freedom is difficult but God doesn’t want to spare us this freedom because it is the condition of our dignity as we have been created in His image and invited to the communion of love with Him. Jesus said: ‘I no longer call you servants (…) I have called you friends’ (John 15: 15). This is also what we notice in the Book of Revelations where Jesus stands calling: ‘Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with me’ (Rev. 3: 20). The creator of our hearts doesn’t enter them by force. He is standing at the door knocking like the beggar; if these hearts hear and open He would come in, not to occupy and possess them but to pour His light, joy and strength on them so they may live, transfigure, and become complete.
The freedom of Release
This is how the meaning of freedom becomes complete in the Gospel. Freedom in the Gospel is not just a freedom of choice although this is its starting point. True freedom doesn’t stop at the choice limit. Freedom, which Christ calls me to, is not only to choose God with freedom –like He chose me-- but to become, through God, liberated from my bonds, to cross, with the help of His light, the limits of my horizon, to overcome, with His power, everything that ties up my being, limits my power and prevents me from realizing the fullness of my existence. This is the ‘great freedom‘, the ‘glorious freedom of the children of God’ as the apostle Paul calls it (Rom 8: 21). The ‘glory’ is nothing but the enlightening of the being once God becomes present in it. This is the freedom about which Jesus said: ‘You will know the truth and the truth will set you free’ (John 8: 32). The ‘truth’ is Jesus Christ, the incarnated God who said: ‘I am the way, the truth and the life’ (John 14: 6). In its turn, knowledge doesn’t mean the cognitive knowledge but the experience. Thus, ‘knowing the truth’ is experiencing Christ; it is the experience of living with Him in that intimate communion which is the original meaning of the word ‘faith’. This experience sets me free because it liberates my being from its restraints with the power of the One whom I willingly surrender my being in order for Him to spread His life into it, as the apostle said: ‘I no longer live, but Christ lives in me’ (Gal 2: 20).
Christianity as a call for life
It seems to us that the freedom which Jesus calls us to cannot be separated from life. It is life in its fullness. This is what the Gospel calls ‘eternal life’. The expression ‘eternal life’ doesn’t mean exclusively life after death. It is rather the life of God that penetrates into our being through Jesus Christ. It stems from experiencing God or knowing Him after accepting His incarnated Son: ‘Now this is the eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent’ (John 17: 3).
We receive this life from now, even if death was only an inevitable phase in the way of its fulfillment in us. God wants us to live here first, to start from now to enjoy the taste of the fullness of life. God wants us to live and to reach, while we are on this earth, the fully open door of eternal life. This is the reason Jesus came: ‘I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full’ (John 10: 10). The God of Jesus Christ doesn’t rejoice in taking our life away but in offering us His life and that we enjoy it from now. He doesn’t build His glory on the ruins of our existence but is glorified through the richness of this existence. In the past, the books of Christian religious education (catechism) have taught that the aim of the human being’s existence is to glorify the Lord. But how is God glorified? St. Irenaeus of Lyon answered this question in the II. Century by writing: ‘The glory of God is man fully alive’.
How is the image of Christianity being distorted?
If the Christian message is a message of freedom and life, why do many imagine it to be the opposite? Why does it seem for them like a strangling of freedom and smashing of life? To a great extent, we might be responsible about the development of such a distorted picture. We, who carry a responsibility in the religious education whether we were pastors, parents or teachers. This is because we often seem, through our teachings and positions (positions, in this respect, play a more important role than teachings), to present Christianity as a set of laws aiming to limit the surge of life and to restrict it to secure and well-defined limits. We often mix between the Christian person and the ‘polite’ or ‘good-mannered’ person who respects the social customs and laws, forgetting that Christ goes far beyond that and even challenges these customs, traditions and laws. Christ challenged the “good-mannered people” of his time, the Pharisees, who wanted to confine God within their narrow traditions. In the face of those Jesus declared: ‘The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath’, i.e. every law was put in order to make man live and to liberate him, not to smash him and enslave him. In other words, law is not an aim by itself; it is only a means, a sign drawn to refer to the way, the way of freedom and life extending to eternity. We, the educators, behave Very often as people of the ‘law’ and not as Christians because we unconsciously fear freedom and life and forget the teaching of the apostle telling us that love is ‘the fulfillment of the law’ (Rom 13: 10). The law’s aim is that love in which the human being finds his freedom and life. About this specifically, St. Augustine, echoing the words of the Bible, said his famous daring words: ‘love, and do as you will’.
The Ambiguity of human love
Concerning the notion of love there is an ambiguity that drives a lot of people away from Christ. This ambiguity has also contributed in spreading confusion, contradiction and disinterest, even in the souls of those who want to be faithful to the Lord. Sometimes, Christianity is made to seem like an enemy of love, and therefore an enemy of life. In fact, we often imagine Christianity as follows: the human being loves life and would like to explore all its dimensions, to ingest it as much as possible, to drink from its sources and enjoy all its beautiful aspects, whereas Christianity seizes this energy of love, which is the essence of the human being, diverts its natural course and directs it to a God who claims His exclusive possession of it.
This is a wrong picture because it doesn’t pose the problem on its real level. The issue basically is not a fight between the human love and the divine love; it is rather an issue of duality and struggle within the human love itself. Let us look into what we mean by love. If I say I love food, this means, in fact, that I love the pleasure food grants me. This means I love my pleasure. And if I say I love money, this means that through money I enjoy the pleasure that possession and power give me. Through money, I love my ability to possess and to exert power. This is true even in my relation to others. Very often, what I mean by saying I love a certain person that I find in him or her a certain pleasure, an interest, or protection, security and self-affirmation. In all these situations, we can say that what I mean by love is my love for myself, my pleasures, properties and interests. Through this kind of love, I am not overcoming the limits of my ego, I do not start a real communication with the universe and the others; on the contrary, I attract everything to me, let it melt in me: I consume it. I don’t care about the existence of the others unless in as much as I can profit from this existence. Consequently, I behave as if I were the center of the universe and as if everything else were an extension of me, existing only as an addition to my needs. I think that, by behaving like this, I live, become happy, and fulfill my existence to the maximum. But is this true?
Egocentrism creates emptiness
A fixed view to the self proves the contrary: if I loved the universe and the others only for the sake of my ego, I don’t only cancel their existence, I also cancel myself and condemn it to weakness and emptiness. The deep desire of man is to overcome himself through communication and sharing because his real and greater ego is only realized through the fact of sharing. This is well expressed by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry who wrote: “and I exist in as much as I share”. If I center myself on my pleasures, interest and possessions, I become a prisoner of my emptiness. The goods I possess, the pleasures and gains I collect, don’t save me from this emptiness they only cover it, like garments cover a naked body. Thus I find myself empty, hollow amid my goods and pleasures, and this emptiness awakes in me a feeling of boredom and worrying that I try to still by running after the pleasures of this world. I think I am only able to satisfy them when I still the hunger of my being --as if being haunted by seeking them turns my attention from getting back to myself and becoming aware of its emptiness. But my effort mostly fails: it looks like trying to fill up a bottomless pot.
As a result, I suffer in the labyrinth of emptiness without any hope of exit. And when I turn to myself, I find that I am possessed by the things I thought I possessed. Unfortunately, they deviated my attention from the goal of my existence. The idea of death comes to my mind, like it came to that rich man, of whom the Bible says he lived in luxury every day. It reveals my intimate nakedness because it reminds me that everything I enjoy, win and collect is only added to me for it will be taken away from me. This makes me face my emptiness. And it seems to me that death is the end of everything; that death spoils my life and pleasures.
This is all I gain if my love turns into that blocked direction, the road of one’s occupation with oneself. I try to win myself but I lose it because I judge it as silly and empty so I try to possess the earthly goods. As a result, I forget my basic need: my need to exist in the true sense of the word and to fulfill the meaning of my existence. This is what the Lord reminded us of in this short yet deep expression: “What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, yet forfeit his soul? Or what can a man give in exchange for his soul” (Marc 8: 36-37).
This is what we see in the “consumption society”
Dear brothers, if you want to get a collective and not an individual picture of what I am talking about, look at the consumption society realized (first) by some industrially developed countries (and it is now invading the whole world). The concern of that society is that the human being gains and consumes, that he gains in order to consume and that he consumes in order to keep the profit -production wheel permanently running. The human being’s concern in that society is to eagerly satisfy the needs stimulated in him by a systematic advertising process including all the aspects of life. As a result, he bursts with excessive greediness towards these various and attractive things prepared to stimulate his desire for consumption. He consumes pictures and songs, means of entertainment (that appear to him as urgent things) such as cars produced yearly in new designs, refrigerators and household electronic devices, as well as food and beverage, all very attractively presented. He thinks these are all indispensable and that he must have them all. He even consumes sex, which becomes devoid of its emotional dimension and transformed into a product sold on the pages of magazines, in the cinema, on television and video films. Sex becomes a product sold and used as a bait to sell out commercial goods through using them as tools for excitement and stimulation in advertisements.
Such a society transforms the human being into a permanently swallowing mouth, turns his loving capacities into possessive and dominative ones and promises him he would become happy. This makes him think that happiness is at his command and all he has to do is consume the goods prepared for him by the civilization of things.
The question is: will the consumption society fulfill its promise? On the contrary! Researches tell us that in this society humans suffer from boredom, anxiety and violence. They suffer from neediness amid their luxury, isolation amid overcrowded cities and emptiness amid their surfeit. They suffocate from thirst amidst the springs of goods flowing in the industrial civilization surrounding them. Consequently, currents of absurdity and nonsense spread in philosophy, literature and art, and the young generation refuses a civilization that condemns them to suffocate. They run away or revolt, denying a society that grants them luxury but prevents them of the meaning of existence. We see them affirming, on their own way, the word of the Lord: ‘Man does not live on bread alone’ (Mat 4: 4) for example through one of the graffiti of the 1968 students’ revolution: ‘We don’t want a world where the guarantee of not dying of starvation brings the risk of dying of boredom’. Many of them started to search for a small opening through which they can see beyond this strangling society, seek a spiritual experience that saves them from superficiality and leads to the depth of existence. Some of them seek it in drugs and others turn to Asian religions and spiritualism. Many of them discover Christ like those young crowds in America, who named their movement ‘The Jesus Revolution’ or those tens of thousands of young men and women who come every year to Taizé monastery in France to enjoy its atmosphere through prayer, meditation and sharing.
My acceptance of the Lord liberates me
If I accept God in my life, He liberates me from the isolation and emptiness that kill me. Through God I lose myself in order to find it; I give up the illusion of possession and domination to find real wealth: the wealth of the life of God flowing within me. I refuse to seek self-sufficiency so I become able to accept the great gift of God and to understand the meaning of the apostle’s words: ‘poor, yet making many rich; having nothing, and yet possessing everything’ (2 Cor 6: 10).
And truly opens me to the richness of the universe
Nonetheless, accepting God doesn’t separate me from the universe. On the contrary, what separates me from the universe is my seclusion and when I consider all what exists as a means to realize my narrowest goals. On the other hand, God liberates my love from its imprisonment and re-grants it the authenticity of its original outburst, makes it a movement through which I overcome the limits of my ‘ego’ to meet the other creatures. This way I find myself looking at the universe with new eyes not with the eyes of a profiteer using the nature for his own purposes, ready to pollute the environment like the modern industrial societies do. These societies, obsessed by production, become victims of their own obsession that turns against them and threatens their safety and their future. But the tenderness and admiration with which the saints, in the East and the West, look at all the creatures, are marvelously expressed by St. Francis of Assisi in his “Canticle of the Creatures”. In its turn, my view to the others changes and becomes clearer. Thus, I don’t consider them anymore as merely serving my passions but as partners and beloved ones. This way, my life becomes larger to accept them in their joys, sufferings, problems, struggles and hopes. I become their partner, struggle for them and with them, whether in my individual relations or in my social attitudes. It is somehow as if Christ, when he timidly knocked on the door of my heart and I opened him the door, he didn’t enter alone but all the people with whom he united himself entered with Him. Therefore, I give up for him and for them the property of my existence and become overwhelmed by the fullness of existence.
Fasting is a struggle to release life not to kill it
Dear brothers, in this blessed Lent, we mention very often austerity and mortification. However, we ought to realize very well that this mortification by no means puts an end to our life or reduces it. On the contrary, it is a struggle to release life and not to kill it. Fasting is meant to kill the spirit of seclusion, possession and greed that disturb the flow of energies of love aby:nd life within us.
What the Lord Jesus awaits from us is to help Him (not by killing ourselves that He loves much more than we do) but by killing the death within us and release a flowing and victorious life within us instead. This is the meaning of Crucifix. In our faith, Crucifix cannot be separated from resurrection lest it loses its meaning. We pray that the Lord enables us, with His Holy Grace, to participate from now in his life-giving Crucifix and Resurrection, Amen!
*Translated into English by Catherine Srour Kolundzic