Last Sunday we spent with friends at a lake and during a morning boat ride, our friends' son did some neat tricks on a slalom ski. As he crossed the boat wake he used the up side of the wake to get enough momentum to do a side flip and land again on his skis on the other side of the wake. He looked like an acrobat on water! Later he told us that he learned this as a high schooler (he is in his upper 20s now) and it took a lot of tries and spills. He said the key was to use the ski line attached to the boat as a pivot point as it pulled him forward. The flexible nylon ski line tethering him to the boat was what enabled him to perform his pretty amazing acrobatic feat!
I thought of that when I read a reference to "the Nietzschean dream of a 'free spirit' coupled with a 'tethered heart'" in "The Regime of Separatism" in Human Rights, Virtue, and the Common Good, by Earnest L. Fortin (at p.10).
Here's what Nietzsche said in Aphorism 87 in Beyond Good and Evil: "Tethered heart, free spirit -- If one tethers one's heart severely and imprisons it, one can give one's spirit many liberties: I have said that once before. But one does not believe me, unless one already knows it --"
What a nice image the water skier is of the freedom that comes from our religion. By linking ourselves to our Lord and our God we find the tether we need to perform amazing acrobatics in life, to truly become"free spirits."
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