"It may be true that a rich man can better afford to throw money out the window than a poor man: but neither the spending nor the waste of money is what makes a man rich. He is rich y virtue of what he has, and his riches are valuable to him for what he can do with them.
As for freedom, according to this analogy, it grows no greater by being wasted, or spent, but it is given to us as a telent to be traded with until the coming of Christ. In this trading we part with what is ours only to recover it with interest. We do not destroy it or throw it away. We dedicate it to some purpose, and this dedication makes us freer than we were before. Because we are freer, we are happier. We not only have more than we had but we bocome more than we were. This having and being come to us in a deepening of our union with the will of God. Our will is strengtheneed in obedience to the demands of objective reality. Our conscience is enlighteneed and it looks out upon a vastly widened horizon. We are able to see far nobler possibilities for the exercise of our freedom because we have grown in charity, and because we are enriched in divine grace we find in ourselves the power to attain ends that had been beyond us before.
All these fruits are meant to be gathered by our freedom when we do the will of God. It is for this that we account ourselves happy when we know His will and do it, and realize that the greatest unhappiness is to have no sense of His purposes or His designs either for ourselves or fort he rest of the world. 'I walked at large,' says the Psalmist, "because I have sought after thy commandments" (Psalm 118:45). "I have been delighted in the way of thy testimonies as in all riches.'"
What this is teaching me is a little about the moral application of the Data Sets lesson of the external world i was discussing in the previous post. In short, we see options, but are often blind to the best option. In this case, the best way to find happiness might actually be to rein in our many desires to one which resounds with a story of purpose. It makes me think about the greatest artists, who were almost always a mixture between recklessly absurd experimental genius and refined practiced precise conventions (left them be their predecessors). This is how we make meaning of our lives and leave meaning behind us. To create as people created. To accept that we are co-creaters in a story that both confines us and liberates us. (For in-fact no-one of us is truly independent, but are part of a greater functioning community without which all of our lives would have less meaning)
Surely, I left religion behind because it was killing my soul. Now I see the Christ who stood against judgmentality, elitism, dogmatism, psuedeo-intellectual-culture war-othering, and the politics of control through the use of fear, and I see God revealed. Now when I think about what true missionaries do, I realize that it isn't culture upraisal or the replacing of one metaphysical worldview for another, but uprooting these systematic-evils (if it isn't a misnomer to call them that) with a possibility to see God as transcending all of them, and his grace as razing the last. It is a mission to liberate.
But these evils aren't the only thing that keep us in bondage. Just like there are many options for a career or place or way to live, so there are many activities (that might be defined as moral or a-moral) that one can choose, and they may choose to try the full plethora of having left the obsessively legalistic control of organized religion. I know that I began to try and considered to try many more things, especially before I returned to the possibility of Christ as liberator as defining my Christianity instead of Church as captivator.
But Merton seems to say that the greater horizon is beyond this surface domain.
"Our conscience is enlighteneed and it looks out upon a vastly widened horizon."
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