Love Is Freedom

Two silhouetted figures jumping in joy against a vibrant sunset over the ocean.

Love is a creative power. It is the unseen symmetry that formed chaos into structure, brought life out of the indeterminate, and summoned consciousness from ether. The generative power of love is the reason living things are found in every nook and crevice of the Earth. Humans can’t live 30,000 feet below the surface of the sea, but tube worms can. While we don’t ascribe conscious thought to tube worms, it took a spark of creativity to pull that off.

Creativity is an expression of freedom, the freedom to change course, to do something new, to grow. Freedom is an expression of love. As a creation born of love, life also has freedom to create.

Being a tale about increasing degrees of freedom, evolution chronicles an increasing capacity for both creativity and love. The process has culminated, at this point in time, in you and me. We’re the creatures who always have a choice about how we behave, which means we always have a choice to act creatively and lovingly. It may not seem like we do, but we do. When we’re scared of something, we like to pretend it isn’t there.

Being physical creatures, our freedom comes with limitations. We live in a body that regularly provokes pain and revulsion, along with a corresponding desire to replace our flesh with machinery. But even machinery requires maintenance and will eventually die. We can’t escape our creatureliness. In some ways, we’re no different than lizards.

A close-up of a green lizard perched on a green leaf, surrounded by blurred foliage.

Our freedom also comes with one instruction from the Creator who gave us what freedom we possess. Use your freedom with love. Humans don’t appear to like that limitation, either, judging from the state of the world. Unfortunately, hard as we try, we haven’t found a successful artificial substitute for love.

Ironically, as much as we don’t like limitations, we also don’t like being free. We avoid making choices in deference to learned patterns of thought and behavior that get us through the day. It’s why so many people are bored. Sartre called this acting in bad faith. Humans squander the one thing that makes us different.

Two individuals, a woman in a light blue shirt and a man in a green shirt, are pointing in opposite directions against a plain white background.

As you might expect, abdicating our freedom has negative ramifications. As Sartre put it, people are condemned to being free. We view it as something to escape. We let others tell us what to do, and then blame others for our choices, in a karmic thread that stretches back to the beginning. Adam blamed Eve and Eve blamed a snake. It is possible that human annihilation will be no one’s fault.

Escaping from freedom is driven by fear, just as avoiding our fears is a false way of feeling more free. As a result, we get trapped in our fears, fleeing responsibility for our own creations. Humans frequently think in circles.

The only true antidote for fear is love. We can try different ways to deal with what frightens us, but we cannot eliminate feeling unsafe, humanity’s underlying anxiety, always present like background radiation. Only God, the source of Love, can lead us past the threat of impermanence.

There is no fear in love, which is why love is the source of freedom. God has given us the grace to make choices. Use your freedom with love.