April 8, 2021
Life Means Freedom
Liberty means Choice.
“We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden; but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.”
And they ate… both Eve and Adam. And they died. And we have been dying ever since.
But that is what it means to be alive: to choose! and to die. For you cannot die without having been alive.
As for choosing, we choose all our life long; as for dying, we die but once. Yet without choices, without options, life is impossible, life is no longer life, for there would then be neither sorrow nor the Happiness of the choice rightly made!
For Life means and presupposes liberty, and liberty presupposes choice.
See, I have begun with the very conclusion of the text. If you already understand this, there is no point in reading the few lines below.
God, the Divinity — however the faithful of any rite or confession in this World may call it; the Absolute — as the metaphysicians, the philosophers and even the agnostics would call it, is Perfect, Immutable, Unchanging, Unconditioned, without beginning and without end. But, in His Perfection, He is (or seems to be) without choice, for there is no other than He.
Besides His boundless love and generosity, besides His unending mercy, Liberty — the necessity that Liberty should exist within the manifested possibilities of His manifestation — was necessary to the perfection of His Perfection; in other words, paradoxically, in order to be Absolute, God, the Absolute, had to make Himself relative, to enter into “relation” with Himself and through Himself, by way of Liberty, by way of Choice.
In brief, Liberty was, I believe, the very reason why the World could not but exist.
Now, Liberty presupposes choice.
There is no Liberty without choice.
There is no Life without choice.
There is no Life without Liberty.
And Liberty presupposes even (or above all) the right to choose wrongly.
That is why, to return to the concrete problems of our days, I do not urge you to be vaccinated or not to be vaccinated, to wear a mask or not to wear a mask, to stay at home or to go out into the street, to protect yourselves or not to protect yourselves, to “believe” in the virus or not to “believe” in the virus…
I urge you only to remain Free! I urge you to choose how and what you think fit, whether or not you come sooner or later to the conclusion that you chose wrongly.
At least you will find that you chose! That you lived as you thought right!
And I urge you further not to condemn those who make a choice other than yours, who hold an option other than yours — whatever the springs of that option may be!
In conclusion: do not let others decide for you!
If God did not decide to choose the Good in Eve’s or Adam’s stead, who are these “experts” and by what right do they tell us that they choose “the good” for us — just so that we may be well?
If God gave us Liberty, who are the “experts” and by what right do they tell us that we must give up Liberty so as to be sure we do not choose wrongly — and how do they know it is wrong?
Choice means Life, the absence of choice means death — that is what I urge you to understand.
For my part I accept even the risk of choosing wrongly (again!), if only for the sake of the right and the privilege God gave me of being alive and… free!
Be free and you will be alive!
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Post scriptum: in other words, choice and the right to choose lie beyond the dichotomy Democracy — Dictatorship.
It is a matter of the very difference between Life and Death!
That is why I urge you:
Choose Life!
Choose Liberty!
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