Inner Freedom #2

It is my continuing pleasure to share with you some thoughts and ponderings from other companions in our Selah community.  This month we continue to hear from Troy Fenlason.  Thanks for sharing with us again, Troy!

As a dispersed community of contemplative companions, we share a common set of values and commitments as we live into the way of Jesus through this common purpose:  To invite all people to pause and to nurture contemplative living with Jesus, leading to inner freedom and loving service.

I am reminded of the words of Saint Paul who said, “it is precisely for freedom that Christ has set you free.”  The journey to inner-freedom seems to imply that we are imprisoned, trapped, and seeking a way out.  It also suggests to me that inner-freedom is something to be found since maybe it is something we had at one time but lost.  I think Paul is saying that our contemplative journey begins and ends with freedom.  It begins with God offering us freedom and ends with us fully living into that freedom.  I feel invited to live into that journey.

Inner-freedom is about freedom-from and freedom-to.  It is a freedom-from my preoccupations, my compulsions, my addictions, and the broken record that keeps playing in my head.  It is freedom-from my egocentric self.  It is freedom-to embrace the truth; the black and the white, and all the colors; the light and the dark, and all the shadows and contrast; the flesh and the spirit, and all that is real, natural, and living; the human and the godly, and the mystery of incarnation in all of its forms; the divine and the depraved, and all that comes between — It is the freedom-to belong to it all.