The chant is freedom

As ever a cacophony of news and views greeted my morning foray in to the iPad. After streaming Mass from the Augustinians in O'Connell Street, Limerick and after deciding the celebrant was holy, eccentric and irritating ( he started early and during the services paused and fiddled about to obtain canned music for us) I turned to find out the state of the World. The priest however had nudged me to pondering idols. In the scriptural reading the peoples of Konya had sought to make Paul and Barnabas gods because of the miracle they worked. Paul berated them and told them of the true God and to demolish their idols. False gods, I wondered. How many have I and how many have our societies?

A film I had recently watched came to mind. In it an attractive woman had seduced and falsely befriended a man for information. The justification was that the information would save many. The next evening a television series had a similar scenario and then a third suchlike of a man seducing a woman with the same end in mind: to get what they wanted. Pretence, falsehoods perpetrated, fake friendship for a personal end. 

Too many of us, or do I speak purely for myself, are seduced by the outward appearance and the styles and mannerisms and flattery of another. It goes for objects also....dressed deliberately to entice. Overtime we do realise that the outward is less valuable than the inward. We therefore make real friends, buy objects that are real or foods that are good and nourishing or tasty. With friends we take them warts and all, which is exactly what defines what is real. They may also be outwardly beautiful and charming. I can name the faults, as I see them, of friends and they can name mine. We have a true knowledge of each other. 

My beloved Mama used so often to bemoan the fact that my Papa cut his toe nails in the bath and did not always wash the clippings away. When he died it was the very fact that she could find no clippings in the bath as she bathed that gutted her. The true cliche: ' I love him not in spite of but because of his faults'. The idol has feet of clay, the authentic has feet of love. We know the saying that beauty is skin deep, so we need to search for the beauty below the skin.  And what of freedom? Have we set this concept up as an idol in that we do not know what true freedom is but rather mouth a fantasy? Philip and James found their true freedom in sacrificing themselves for another: for you and me. For us and to us they preached a politically incorrect, a legally banned, a religiously heretical, criminally executed man's message.  In the USA I have seen demonstrations against the lock down. The chant is freedom. Yet is not the State authority trying to give them true freedom in the long term, freedom from a potentially killer virus? 

A bedridden, a wheel chair bound, a mentally challenged and physically handicapped person who needs 24 hour care....are they able to be free? How do we define it, see it, speak of it? We must look deeply at the concept and not at the false idols of it. My yardstick is authenticity. One of the people I most revere and whose writings I cherish is Dame Julian of Norwich about whom we know little. I recommend her study. Today a meditation came to me from USA and Veronica Mary Rolf had written of her: "She is totally vulnerable and transparently honest, without any guile. She is...down to earth, familiar and accessible. She is keenly aware of her spiritual brokenness and longs to be healed. She experiences great suffering of body, mind, and soul. She has moments of doubt. She seeks answers to age-old questions".

To me this is authentic and her writings or 'showings' as they are called are equally real: no idol, no pretences and although an anchorite truly free.