Last week I spoke of sin, so this week I want to talk about freedom! The Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner had an axiom that can be summed as “God and humans don’t compete.” In other words, we do not lose our freedom when we surrender to the love of God, but rather we become fully free precisely in that surrender. Another way Rahner puts it is to say that dependence on God and human freedom are in direct proportion to one another, i.e. when one increases, the other also increases. They are not in a relationship of inverse proportion (in which if one increases, the other decreases).

From the time of St. Augustine, the Catholic tradition has made a distinction between freedom and freedom of choice. Freedom is our ability to love God above all things. It is our ability to be the people God created us to be. It is this freedom that we lost in the fall. To put it another way, not having this freedom is part of what we mean when we talk about having original sin. We are born incapable of actually loving God above all else. We can only love God in such a way because of God’s grace.

So if we have some understanding of freedom, what is freedom of choice? Freedom of choice is exactly what it sounds like, the ability to make choices, to decide or choose between this and that. Without God’s grace, human choice tends toward the things of this world. It is God’s grace that gives us the ability to love God, allowing good choices to flow from that love.

According to St. Augustine, who quotes St. Paul, grace is primarily “the love of God . . . poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us (Rom. 5:5).” Scripture tells us that “we love because God first loved us (1 Jn. 4:19).” God reaches out to us, but we must accept God’s offer. Of course, we are only capable of accepting the offer because of God’s grace; but nonetheless, as one of my teachers used to say, God won’t save us without our ‘yes’. God wants to share his love with all people, but at the same time, God allows us to choose whether or not to accept that love. God liberates us by giving us grace which frees us from sin and empowers us to do what is good. Yet even with God’s grace we are subject to the temptations of sin. We still have freedom of choice and can choose to do good or evil. However, in surrendering to God’s love and in choosing the good, our freedom, that is our ability to love God above all else, increases; and we continue to choose what is good because it is part of who we are and who we were created to be.

In each and every moment of our lives, we get to choose who we are, who we are going to be. Are we going to live up to all of the potential, all of the gifts with which God created us? Are we going to choose to close ourselves off from God, from love, from all that we could be? We don't always make the right choices, but we also have the incredible gift of God's mercy, love, and forgiveness that picks us up when we fall and empowers us to start again. Each day, each moment, can be a moment of new life, of better choices, of resurrection.