False freedoms

An ex-Church-member (not someone I know) commented on Twitter about the taste of coffee being freedom when you no longer go to church.

Reading that, I felt sad, incredulous, and a bit exasperated. Coffee! That’s the reward for leaving all the goodness of the Gospel behind? Of losing the Gift of the Holy Ghost and His peace? Of no longer progressing towards God and exaltation? Okay, it was just one comment. But it was a trend in their tweets and replies (not just coffee, of course, but easing of restrictions they felt they ‘had’ to keep while going to church). My feelings and thoughts are also a response to other situations, other remarks and attitudes from people who are less-active in the Church, or who have completely forsaken it and even religion altogether. This tweet was a trigger, because – coffee! What a thing to give up… everything… for.

To feel the easing of restrictions you’ve agreed to as conditions of membership in an organisation which offers, basically, everything, is a false freedom – and a tiny one. To talk about just coffee – it’s an addictive drug! That’s why the world talks about it constantly, writes about it, takes photos of it, pays exorbitant amounts for it, and exploits people who grow and harvest it. Why they must have it upon waking, to feel normal, and to stay awake. It’s like the ‘freedom’ to drink alcohol and to smoke. Sure, you can do those things by choice, but reformed alcoholics know it’s not freedom.

I think the real meaning of freedom is the power to become who you might be – who you’re destined to be, completely. Anything less than that is bondage and failure. There’s always an end that we’re moving towards, and it’s either wholeness and completion of our destiny – everything we might be – or something else. Any seeming freedom up to that point is meaningless if it leads to the second end.

True freedom, surely, is eternal freedom – the choices that lead you to be eternally and finally yourself, in all your possible glory. Any choice which takes you away from that is bondage, no matter how free it makes you feel.

Freedom isn’t a lack or loosening of restrictions. You can un-bind yourself from some things, like Church standards and Gospel commandments, but that unbinding takes with it the blessings attached to the restrictions – the freedoms they allow to exist. Whatever you choose next – like coffee, swearing, or dressing immodestly – binds you again, but to something less beneficial this time. You’re only exchanging one restriction for another. One of much lesser value and which brings negative consequences with it.  Now, instead of taking your cues from God, you’re taking them from your own limited understanding and human desires, and/or others’ deceptive and limited reasoning.

It’s like learning an instrument: you restrict yourself to practising regularly, missing other things to do it, going over and over the difficult sections until you have them, doing scales, going to orchestra practice, economising to afford the various things like resin, a better bow, an instrument to own, new strings, trips to play elsewhere, petrol, a good teacher…. There are a lot of restrictions in the whole process. You do it because you value the rewards – accomplishment, beautiful music, a skill, the ability to uplift others, the experience of being part of a whole in an orchestra, the friends you make, etc. You understand that there are sacrifices for the desired results – and you judge them well worth it. If you don’t, you don’t learn the instrument, or give it up. But in giving it up, or never starting, you also restrict yourself from ever having the benefits it brings.

So it’s not really about freedom from something, but choices about which results you want. Except that I think people often don’t see that, and instead make these choices thinking they’re freeing themselves from something, without seeing the exchange that’s actually occurring.