Corporate Freedom

Someone recently suggested to me that I read the book The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz. Without going into a review or book report, one of the basic premises of the book is how we have learned overtime to sabotage ourselves from true joy and spiritual and mental health.

That's really an oversimplification I suppose, but the book covers four ways we can help get ourselves out of this self-sabotage, by making four agreements with ourselves: be impeccable with your word (tell the truth and use words wisely and kindly); don't take anything personally (something I know I am frequently guilty of); don't make assumptions (again, finger pointing to self!); and always do your best.

I suppose there's a lot of new age-y self help wisdom in these pages, but there is also a lot of Truth (with a capital T). I found myself nodding along until I got the chapter on how to transform by breaking our old habits (or, as the book calls them, our old "agreements").

In reaching these new agreements, Ruiz says that we must learn how to become truly free: free as a child is free. Again, I nodded at first (thinking how Jesus himself lifted up children as a model of faith).

But then Ruiz said something that gave me pause. What he meant by the freedom a child shows is doing what we want and being "completely wild." The real us is the child who doesn't grow up, and in healing ourselves, we are free to live our own personal dream; to live our own truth.

Now, again, there is some oversimplification here and I have not read the entire book yet to see how Ruiz reconciles this idea of freedom to the responsibilities we have to each other.

But this idea of individual freedom seems to me to be one that most of us do understand and know well. We live in a nation where personal and individual freedoms are lifted up as the ideal. In our faith as well, we tend to view the individual elements of it: a personal relationship with Christ; freedom to worship as we as an individual sees fit; private prayer; our individual salvation, etc.

Even in Lent we tend to focus on the individual need for repentance. We have private ways of living our Lenten disciplines.

Yet one of the most central themes of our faith is community. From the moment God told Abraham that in him all the families of the earth would be blessed, the communal nature of God's experience with us has been paramount. Salvation is not simply an individual event. God is out to save the world (or the cosmos as the Greek translation even more fully captures).

And as part of that, our true freedom is always wrapped up with that of our neighbor.

In the music Hamilton in the song My Shot, the character John Laurens puts it this way: "But we'll never be truly free until those in bondage have the same rights as you and me." 

We are not free unless we are all free.

That doesn't mean there is no individual component to our faith. And it doesn't mean that we don't have individual dreams and a need to let our "wild child" out from time to time.

But as Lent leads us into the wilderness, we remember that the journey is not one we take alone.

Genesis 12:2-3 

I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”

Matthew 22:36-40

“Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” He said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”