Today is Oct. 14, Monday of the Twenty-eighth Week in Ordinary Time.
In the readings at today’s Mass, we hear St. Paul declare, “For freedom Christ set us free; so stand firm and do not submit again to the yoke of slavery” (Gal 5:1).
What if it was your Christian duty to be happy? What if the path to joy is also the path of selflessness? What if true freedom is not the ability to pursue whatever fleeting desires present themselves, but the opportunity to be transformed by what is good, true and beautiful?
The Dominican moral theologian Father Servais Pinckaers, OP, calls authentic freedom “freedom for excellence.” It is not a freedom of indifference, where the only aim is to fulfill our whims or check off moral boxes, but a freedom to grow in virtue, a freedom to live fully in accord with our nature, created in the image of God. This freedom is not merely the absence of constraints, but the presence of grace — the grace to pursue the good, to act in love, and to find true joy in doing so.
When St. Paul says that “for freedom Christ has set us free,” he is calling us to this deeper reality. Christ has freed us from the bondage of sin and death so that we might pursue what is objectively good — not because we are coerced to do so, but because it is the source of our true happiness. Father Pinckaers writes, “The desire for happiness is itself a spark of the divine image within us.” In Christ, we no longer have to choose between doing what is right and what will make us happy, for the two are one and the same.
Consider for a moment how Christ lived his freedom. He was free in the truest sense; free to love without limit, free to lay down his life for us, free to fulfill the Father’s will perfectly. And yet, his freedom was never self-serving. He did not seek his own pleasure or comfort. This is the paradox of Christian freedom: by giving ourselves to God and to others, we find our truest joy and deepest fulfillment.
A prayer for grace to help us follow the Lord’s will:
May your grace, O lord, we pray, at all times go before us and follow after and make us always determined to carry out good works. Through our lord Jesus Christ, your son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the holy spirit, God, for ever and ever. Amen.
My Daily Visitor spiritual reflections are a dose of daily Catholic inspiration from Our Sunday Visitor magazine.
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