M. Hellinger Community, Literature, Reflection

That Glorious Freedom Pt. 4

This is the final installment of a series which began here.

Jesus Christ rose from the dead. Creation has been redeemed in His blood. And the Holy Spirit is fighting tooth and nail to bring the power of that redemption into your life and the life of each and every person who has ever lived and ever will live.

What really motivated me to reflect on this idea was a conversation I had with a friend over the dinner table in which we were discussing miracles and healings. What came up in the conversation is just how complex they are. Here I do not offer a definitive explanation of all things miracles, or even a novice understanding. Rather, something has struck me about the beauty and mystery of miracles and I want to reflect on it.

In his commentary on C.S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces (which is right above Orthodoxy on my list of books that every person should have to read) Peter Kreeft tells the story of Bertrand Russell near the time of his death. Russell was a militant atheist. Someone asked him what he would do when he died if there was a God and he had to face him. Russell apparently replied by saying, “[I] would say, Sir, I see now that you clearly do exist, so I ask, why didn’t you give us enough evidence?” To this Kreeft points out the age-old answer, that God gives just enough evidence so that those who wish to see Him do and those who do not, don’t.

Well, this got me thinking about how beautiful God is, especially in the way He treats us. At the heart of an answer to Russell and, I suspect, many modern people, is the Glorious Freedom of the Sons of God. Love is what God desires so much that He is willing to do everything He can to draw us to Himself, but since freedom is a necessary foundation for any actual love to exist, everything He does in the world is marked by the need to never compel anyone to lose that freedom.

This really means that every action of God is marked by authentic love in that it cannot force anyone into a relationship with Him. In some ways, it cannot even force someone to believe in Him. Something is lacking in love if you are forced into it. Why does God work miracles for some and not for others? Why does He or His Mother appear to some and not to others? I think that one way we can make sense of these confusing issues is to realize that every miracle, every appearance, every action, is aimed to draw every person to Himself while never violating anyone’s freedom in the process.

I’ve never been satisfied with the idea that God leaves any prayer “unanswered.” I know that we don’t think we mean that God doesn’t hear all our prayers and answer each one when we say that word to describe an unfulfilled request of ours, but I think that we are slowly conditioned to a dangerous premise by using language like that. (All I can think of is that country song that goes, “sometimes I thank God for unanswered prayers…some of God’s greatest gifts are unanswered prayers.” And come to think of it, now you are probably singing it in your head…sorry.)

The truth is that God answers every one of our prayers. What limits our perception of His answer and its power in the world is our lack of freedom to accept it, to let it change us. God’s work in this world is mind-numbingly complex, but every action He takes is to draw each one of us into an intimate relationship with Him.

What Jane and Mark seem to be looking for throughout THS is happiness on their own terms, with their own vision being played out as they will it. Ultimately, what Lewis seems to be drawing us to through this work is seeing that our freedom has a purpose and that the paradox of our freedom is that the more it is submitted to the will of God, the freer we become.

May we all grow in courage and freedom as we try to allow God to work more freely in our lives. And may we be ready for change, especially when it requires us to step outside of our own narrow view of the world and God and into the mystery of God’s love and the glorious freedom of the sons of God.

M. Hellinger Community, Literature, Reflection

That Glorious Freedom Pt. 3

“I am the Director,” said Ransom, smiling. “Do you think I would claim the authority I do if the relation between us depended either on your choice or mine? You never chose me. I never chose you. Even the great Oyeresu whom I serve never chose me. I came into their worlds by what seemed, at first, a chance; as you came to me- as the very animals in this house first came to it. You and I have not started or devised this: it has descended on us — sucked us into itself, if you like. It is, no doubt, an organisation: but we are not the organisers. And that is why I have no authority to give any one of you permission to leave my household.”

This a series of posts that begins here.

Warning: Spoilers ahead. If you want to know the whole story first, read The Space Trilogy by C.S. Lewis.

Now we turn to Jane and see an entirely different story. Jane begins the story just like Mark, with an improper view of Freedom. She is regretting her Marriage to him, her being tied down in a regrettable situation which isn’t what she thought it would be. Her vision of Marriage is wrong, but her vision of what freedom looks like within Marriage is really what’s driving this problem. She wanted to remain herself, not get lost in the other. Since both her and Mark have this attitude, they are both failing to give themselves wholly to the other, both failing to freely empty themselves to love the other.

In the midst of this, she finds herself troubled by an incredible gift she has: the ability to see past her own experience. In this way, Jane really becomes the center of the novel, because both sides desperately need her. It is this skill and how it is sought after that I think best tells us Lewis’s view of the workings of the Devil and God.

I am struck by the laxity of Ransom’s approach to the whole situation of convincing Jane to join his rag-tag team. The attitude he presents is one that communicates the truth – they could really use her as part of the team, but ultimately his trust is in something more powerful and therefore she is totally free to choose. If she comes, great. If she joins Belbury, well, its certainly a setback, but the crux of the fight really doesn’t rest on her in the way the reader would expect.

The same is true for us in a way. God has won the victory over sin and death. In reality, He doesn’t need us to help Him in that, in fact, He is fine without us. Therefore, His concern is not trying to build a more powerful army, with the gifts and abilities he needs to win. Rather, God is concerned with building a community of beloved Sons and Daughters who live in intimate and unceasing union with Him and each other. The only way that happens is when we willing submit ourselves to His Fatherly Love.

In the same way, Ransom certainly sees the use that Jane’s gift brings, but he is in no way interested in forcing her to join them because in forcing her he would remove any meaning her being on the team gives. It would limit her free gift of herself which is the prerequisite for love. He would gain nothing because the person is what matters, not the skill. This is seen in Mark’s case as the opposite by him being so concerned about how they will use his abilities and where he fits in in Belbury. Jane knows she brings a useful skill, and Ransom knows how it will be helpful, but she has to give herself over in freedom before that skill is any use to him.

“There you are,” said Camilla.“Oh, Mrs. Studdock, you must come in. You must, you must. That means we’re right on top of it now. Don’t you see? We’ve been wondering all this time exactly where the trouble is going to begin, and now your dream gives us a clue. You’ve seen something within a few miles of Edgestow. In fact, we are apparently in the thick of it already — whatever it is. And we can’t move an inch without your help. You are our secret service, our eyes. It’s all been arranged long before we were born. Don’t spoil everything. Do join us.”
“No, Cam, don’t,” said Denniston. “The Pendragon — the Head, I mean, wouldn’t like us to do that. Mrs. Studdock must come in freely.” “But,” said Jane, “I don’t know anything about all this. Do I? I don’t
want to take sides in something I don’t understand.”
“But don’t you see,” broke in Camilla, “that you can’t be neutral? If
you don’t give yourself to us, the enemy will use you.”
The words, “give yourself to us,” were ill-chosen. The very muscles of Jane’s body stiffened a little: if the speaker had been anyone who attracted her less than Camilla she would have become like stone to
any further appeal. Denniston laid a hand on his wife’s arm.

The appeal is for her to give herself over. The reason she is so hesitant at the suggestion is that she has yet to build trust with the person to whom she is giving herself over; in this case, Maleldil, in our case, God. The reality is that the goodness of Maleldil leaves no room for a half-hearted gift. In our response to God, as was mentioned in the first post, He doesn’t want our ability to write, or cook, or whatever. He has no use for them. The only thing he wants is the entirety of our being, all of our love. That is something that is incomprehensibly great, something that doesn’t happen at once, but through conversion and constant growth. Jane’s process is not an inside/outside of the circle process like Mark’s. It’s a slow integration into the community that happens to the extent that she is willing to give yourself to us.

Jane’s freedom is never violated. In fact, her freedom is constantly maintained by Ransom, who understands what love is and what it demands. This is the trusting love made possible through an authentically free gift of self to God that will conquer That Hideous Strength.

“I am not speaking of the wraiths,” said Ransom.“I have stood before Mars himself in the sphere of Mars and before Venus herself in the sphere of Venus. It is their strength, and the strength of some greater than they, which will destroy our enemies.”

Mars and Venus, the Masculine and Feminine, are for us the most understandable symbols of the Love that conquers darkness. They are the representatives of that time, in Original Justice, when Man and Woman loved each other in perfect freedom and God had possession of their entire selves as a free gift. It is this love, which points to the very mystery of God’s love which is possible by the pure exercise of free will that conquers. It is what drove the Incarnation and what allows us, here and now, to be wrapped up in God as his beloved Sons and Daughters.

Freedom, then, is seen not for what we think it is. Freedom is not license for us to do what pleases us. Rather, freedom is the underlying necessity for love. Once we are caught up in love, in a sense, we lose our freedom. Why is this? Because the free assent to love, to respond to the other, is what allows us to see the other as a part of us, and us a part of them. Once we realize that we are part of that Lover, obeying the wishes of a Lover is really an exercise of freedom rather than a limit on it. The paradox is that the more we love, the freer to love we become because disobeying the pure wishes of our Lover –specifically God who made us– is to go against our nature, to attempt to be something more than a creature, to attempt to be God.

Next time, we will conclude this little reflection with some thoughts about how freedom is maintained at all times by God.

M. Hellinger Community, Literature, Reflection

That Gloriou​​​s Freedom Pt. 2

Last time, I set the basis for this discussion in presenting some aspects of freedom and how important it is as a basis for Love. This time, we are going to dive into the ways in which the experience of the two main characters of C.S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength demonstrate how God works versus how Satan works, especially when it comes to freedom.

This is the second part of a series that begins here.

I once again note this series is going to, by necessity, contain some spoilers. You’ve been warned.

Let’s start with Mark. Poor chap.

“Making things clear is the one thing the D.D. can’t stand,” replied Miss Hardcastle.“That’s not how he runs the place. And mind you, he knows what he’s about. It works, Sonny. You’ve no idea yet how well it works. As for leaving, you’re not superstitious, are you? I am. I don’t think it’s lucky to leave the N.I.C.E.You needn’t bother your head about all the Steeles and Cossers. That’s part of your apprenticeship. You’re being put through it at the moment, but if you hold on you’ll come out above them. All you’ve got to do is to sit tight. Not one of them is going to be left when we get going.”

Throughout this tale, Mark’s driving motivation is to be part of a circle, a community. It display’s itself from the beginning with his involvement in the “Progressive Element,” and turns out to be his demise as he falls into the trap of the NICE. And that’s just the point, Mark is controlled by this need to fit in, to belong, and it is this un-met need that the evil forces use for their own ends.

His whole situation screams of manipulation. He is essentially preyed upon by the NICE in an attempt to get to his wife. Once brought in, he is convinced that he cannot leave (although as the story develops it is clear that he has strong reason to believe that he cannot leave as anyone who tries to is murdered). Even when he is eventually given some “freedom” it is again only used as a tool to manipulate him into doing something for the evil power, be it trying to convince his wife to come to Belbury or watching over the Tramp.

The point here is this: Mark was never free. In many ways, he is convinced he is free, especially as regards the way in which he views his marriage. But the whole time, his mistaken perception of the world and freedom are being used to draw him into the heart of evil in the world. He starts convincing himself that he is disconnected from what is happening by just being the guy writing up the lies for the papers, not the one making them, etc. He is trapped in a false view of freedom that only serves to manipulate him and keep him stuck in his own small self, not open to Reality.

It’s also important to note that he is in pursuit of a good, namely, belonging. He cannot get that feeling with his wife, because they both refuse to subordinate their wills and lives to the other, instead choosing to try to live the lie that they can maintain total freedom and yet have an intimate and meaningful relationship, and so he searches for it elsewhere, to no avail.

By way of a brief, but related aside: I think it is important to note here how freedom plays into our vocations. In every vocation, we live out a call to intimacy with God if we live it rightly. This requires us to submit freely to the will of the other, in Matrimony it’s the spouse, in Religious Life and Priesthood, it’s Jesus and His Church. Our freedom is not limited when we give it away like this, because every day we must renew our free offering of self. Things go awry when we stop giving ourselves completely to the other, this is when marriages and religious life start falling apart—because we start keeping some of ourselves for our own (like Mark and Jane do).

Another way in which this takes place explicitly is in the process he goes through as his “initiation” into the inner circle. This endless pursuit of the “objective” is nothing more than a repression of his freedom. In a world that only looks for “objectivity,” one becomes a slave to data (which can be skewed quite un-“objectively,” mind you). What is removed is the whole Affective sphere of Man’s experience, which is ultimately dehumanizing. Without the ability to exercise the affect, man is hardly capable of being anything more than a slightly more apt robot, subject to the whims of commands of someone else guised as “reason” instead of the unique person who is capable of encountering Truth with his whole being and learning to respond to it.

What happens to Mark in this story is what happens to us as we fall into sin. We slowly convince ourselves that our “freedom” is really a license to do what benefits us while we pursue our own vision of what life is and confine any “supernatural” power acting in the world to our narrow worldview. As we find company in this endless pursuit for meaning apart from what we were made for, we slowly find ourselves deeper and deeper inside an existence that has no meaning, that seems to draw life out of us and leave us less than ourselves with doubt, anxiety, confusion, etc.

The whole time our experience of the Devil is revealed: he is someone who will do anything to convince us to join him, even fooling us about the good. Further, once we join him, he convinces us that the only way to survive in his hopeless world is to go deeper, to find the secrets that God doesn’t want us to know, to exercise “freedom” by not being limited by any rules that we don’t like. That is what the title of this work refers to, That Hideous Strength of Satan. What is the answer to such a sad reality? To the pressure exerted on us with what seems like overwhelming strength? For an answer, we must assess Jane’s situation.

M. Hellinger Community, Literature, Reflection

That Gloriou​​s Freedom Pt. 1

“Not that way either,” said Ransom, hesitating like a man who is reluctant to come to the point.“No power that is merely earthly,” he continued at last, “will serve against the Hideous Strength.”

Recently I finally finished reading another great work by C.S. Lewis: The Space Trilogy. More specifically, I finished That Hideous Strength having finished the other two in September of 2018 (yes, to my shame, it took me that long to get around to finishing the Trilogy). The reality is, I wasn’t very motivated to finish because I wasn’t enjoying the beginning of the third book. After the spiritual high that ensues from reading Perelandra, the beginning of That Hideous Strength (from here, THS) is, well, just not that interesting. It’s also kind of weird. Just putting that out there.

It wasn’t until forcing myself to finish that I realized the immense beauty of the series as a whole. One thing has been stuck in my mind since and that is a reflection on a motif that I think dominates both the series and the Christian life: Freedom.

Warning: What follows is a multi-part reflection that requires some plot points to be discussed. If you haven’t read the book and are planning on it in the near future, read them and then come back to this. You’ve been warned. Also, I do not claim to have a perfect understanding of the book, I simply present some simple thoughts about one way to view it.

There is one thing God wants, and surprisingly, it is the one thing He cannot take. What’s God after? What has He been waiting for, working for, for all eternity? Your heart.

God is omnipotent, but it would be an absurdity to think that God can contradict Himself due to His all-powerful nature (the question of whether God can make a stone too large for Him to lift falls into this kind of category, but I digress). Therefore, if God creates each one of us in His image and likeness, He creates us with a free will that He cannot manipulate, because that would mean its, eh, well, not actually free.

John tells us in his first letter that, “Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love.” Without going into the distinctions of love and its complex nature, it suffices here to simply say that without freedom there can be no love. That is why God must give us free will if we are made in His image and likeness.

That we might not is precisely what makes that we do meaningful (that is why the phrase, “you didn’t have to”, or “you shouldn’t have” sneaks into our vocabulary as a way of expressing gratitude for a surprise act of love). Therefore if we are made to love, our freedom can never be interrupted or manipulated in any way in authentic love. One way we experience this is in every Sacrament there is some aspect of the expression of consent.

When you present yourself for Confession or Anointing you come by your own free will. When you come to the Church to be married, you are asked before all if you come “without coercion, freely and wholeheartedly (Rite of Matrimony).” When a man petitions his bishop for Holy Orders, at the end of the letter he must assert that he will “receive the sacred order of his own accord and freely (Can. 1036).” In Baptism you are asked what you desire from the Church (or your parents are asked for you). In Confirmation, you ask your sponsor to present you to the Bishop.

Lastly, at the Eucharist, you freely come forward to receive communion. However, I would contend that your assent to receive actually is made during the preface. In the dialogue with the priest before the Eucharistic Prayer begins, he says to the people: “Lift up your hearts” to which the people respond, “we lift them up to the Lord.” One can only imagine how long God has waited to hear you say those words freely and without reservation.

It is the freedom of all of these encounters that makes love possible. If we are in any way coerced into a relationship, it loses its meaning because part of us is missing, namely, our free will which is essential to who we are as humans.

In the next part, we will go into the ways in which THS shows how God invites us into His love and how Satan creates roadblocks of all kinds to do his best to prevent our freedom from being exercised.