Love to Live Freely

In how many relationships are we truly free?  Most relationships are superficial, constrained by manners and convention.  But that's a good thing because freedom in action for most of us leads to gaffes and embarrassment.  Formalities, at the cost of superficiality, keep us from "coloring outside the lines."  A little child, on the other hand, cares little for conforming, and seems free and spontaneous as a result.  We view the actions of a child as refreshingly "cute."  Jesus himself advises us to "become as little children."

Can we resolve the seeming conflict between conforming and being free?  According to Jean Vanier, relationships of love allow true freedom because in those relationships we are better able to "conform" to who we really are, which is what freedom really is.  Here is how Vanier, in Becoming Human (p.89), describes "communion":

When we are in communion with another, we become open and vulnerable to them.  We reveal our needs and our weaknesses to each other.  Power and cleverness call forth admiration but also a certain separation, a sense of distance; we are reminded of who we are not, of what we cannot do.  On the other hand, sharing weaknesses and needs calls us together into 'oneness.'  We welcome those who love us into our heart.  In this communion, we discover the deepest part of our being; the need to be loved and to have someone who trusts and appreciates us and who cares least of all about our capacity to work or to be clever and interesting.  When we discover we are loved in this way, the masks or barriers behind which we hide are dropped; new life flows.  We no longer have to prove our worth; we are free to be ourselves.  We find a new wholeness, a new inner unity.

These words ring true in my life, and I am sure in many others'.  How vulnerable and needy we are.  Only in loving communion can the vision of who we are be released and lived.  Loving friends see who we really are, who we can be (why God had to create me, in the words of Robert Spaemann), and those friends can guide, persuade and forgive us, as we stumble into that vision.  Conformance with that vision makes it possible for us to be, and be free.  And the source of the love (mercy, compassion, forgiveness, exhortation, encouragement, caring) in a communion of persons is divine: Christ, who is love, and the love that radiates from the Trinity of Persons, into whose embrace we are invited.