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| Lamp, in our house |
As counterintuitive and irrational as this sounds, the truth is that many people love their bondage. It has become their place of familiarity, their zone of comfort. They return to it like dogs to their vomit.
The abused wife divorces and marries another abuser. The incarcerated drug felon is released, only to return to heroin, and prison, again. The careless spender becomes financially free, only to return to economic bondage.
Thomas Merton wrote:
"How can I receive the seeds of freedom if I am in love with slavery and how can I cherish the desire of God if I am filled with another and an opposite desire? God cannot plant His liberty in me because I am a prisoner and I do not even desire to be free. I love my captivity and I imprison myself in the desire for the things that I hate, and I have hardened my heart against true love. (Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, p. 16)
To stay free one must hate bondage, and choose and act from this hatred. "I must learn therefore to let go of the familiar and the usual and consent to what is new and unknown to me." (Ib.)
Freedom is the place of unfamiliarity. When Jesus says ,"Behold, I make all things new," he inspires fear. (Think of the character Brooks in "The Shawshank Redemption.") Newness requires change and faith. Change means newness of being; faith is stepping into the new unknown.
Spiritual transformation is constant movement from familiarity to unfamiliarity, from bondage to freedom. The transformation is, among other things, the morphing of desire. The love/hate relationship between bondage and freedom inverts, slowly, to a hate/love relationship between the same. When this happens (I have seen it happen in many people) one never returns to the old, familiar chains.
Merton concludes: "If these seeds would take root in my liberty, and if His will would grow from my freedom, I would become the love that He is, and my harvest would be His glory and my own joy." (Ib., 17)
