Relationship
In my day to day work I often see families where mothers and children suffer domestic violence and abuse from partners and parents. The abusive partner or parent of threatens others with violence if they wish to leave or talk about the relationship.
We as human begins often insist that ideal and healthy relationships can only exist between two free beings, who choose to stand in relationship to each other. We rightly look down on relationships between two people where one forces the other to remain in a relationship.
Those relationships we find most gratifying, motivating and positive are the ones where someone else chooses to love us, chooses to regard us as important. Therefore, for the other person’s love and affection to have any meaningful effect in our lives we prefer that they are free when they love us. It would just not be the same, or have as much meaning if the other person was forced to love you. Freedom is therefore an important part of true and meaningful relationship.
Freedom and the Ego
Freedom itself only comes about through separation and loss. A new born baby has no real ego, and does not distinguish between himself and others, or between himself and the world. When he moves his arm the world moves. He or she is still in blessed union with the world. There is no capacity for relationship yet, since there is no sense of separateness yet. We are born with a sense that we are the world and through growing pains and the tribulations of childhood we realise that we are not at the centre of the world, and that others often choose not to do what we want them to do. Gradually we become separate and the more separate we become the more capacity for freedom and relationship we develop.
Divine Freedom
Can we not imagine that God was once alone in the universe and that the only way that he/she could experience love, belonging, and meaning was to allow other free beings to develop who could love him/her. But how could we recognise him/her without being separate from him or her first. If we were born from God, like new babies we would not be able to distinguish between us and him / her, without first experiencing separation, or being in a state or place different from God. If God was all we knew, we would not be able to recognise God, for there would be nothing to compare him her to.
In order to stand in true relationship with God, God needed us to be free. To become free we needed to experience something other than God. We needed to experience separation. This world of opposites, out material world, is the place where we become free. It is here that we become free enough to be able to either choose or reject a meaningful relationship with each other, but also primarily God.
The Greatest Gift
I always think that the most meaningful act that Jesus did was not his death, as some Christians think, but rather his prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane before he was captured and crucified. In the garden Jesus asks God to let the ‘bitter cup of his death pass by him. Despite sweating blood, from fear of capture and death, he says; Not my will but Thy will be done. He gives the most precious gift one free being can give another, he freely gives his life. There is no more meaningful act or compliment than when a friend sacrifices his life for you freely. In this case Jesus, the friend of God, sacrificed his life freely for his best friend, the Divine Beloved.
Regards
A.V.O.
