The gift of freedom we have been given offers us the opportunity to participate in God’s ongoing work of creation and to continue the mission of Jesus: to call all people, by our lives, to fundamentally change their way of seeing and acting; to believe in, and to build up God’s Kingdom now, where we are. Our freedom is awesome and, at the same time, so restricted. Our choices have vital significance, and are starkly limited – to the point where some people claim that because there is so much constantly shaping and conditioning us, we have no freedom at all. We can choose to focus on the awesome and do what we can, or get lost in the littleness of the impact of our decisions and choices, and court frustration and despair.
Discernment requires that we have the fullest measure of interior freedom as is humanly possible. In order to recognize and choose according to God’s loving preferences and desires, we need to remove distractions (physical, sensory, mental, emotional, as well as spiritual). Distractions are whatever pulls us away from being freely present in this moment.
There are conditions that make it next to impossible to make a free and loving decision: ignorance, attachments, passions, deep wounding, intense pain, brainwashing, addictions, physical or psychological threats, being reduced to basic survival, social and familial conditioning… Brainwashing can either be a psychological weapon wielded by an expert, or the creation of a dependency on a powerful or charismatic personality who serves as one’s auxiliary mind, conscience and will – a substitute god, or a divine parent.
Most of us, thank God, are not dealing with such heavy duty constraints. For us, the impediments to our freedom are usually simple, common and pervasive. I tend to lump them together as fear, ego, and expectations. If we are in fear, and to the extent we are afraid, we are not free to make good decisions. If we, because of some illusion of self-preservation, have set ourselves as the sole reference for orienting our life, ego rules – and ego is less concerned with freedom than with preserving its imaginary control over reality. Expectations are like a smiling giant with a cudgel, leaning down to us and suggesting what has to be right and good for us, and inviting us: “Now choose.” How free is that?
Since, I believe, we all are struggling with these challenges to making good, loving choices and decisions, how can we ever choose freely and well? The biggest factor is awareness – awareness of the influences that tend to restrict and inhibit our freedom to choose. If we know and can name these persuasive voices, they have less power over us. The secret is to know and name as many of these familiar “advisors” as possible and to see how they are bending our will. This is choosing with our eyes open. We can say, “Yes.” We can say, “No.”