S1 E23: The Freedom to Love is a Daily Choice

Transcript

Carol Vassar:

From SS. Isidore and Maria Parish in Glastonbury, Connecticut, I'm Carol Vassar, and this is Living in Faith, Hope, and Love. Each week, our Pastor, Father Mark Suslenko, delves into Scripture, shares insights from the saints, prophets, and theologians, and discusses practical ways to cultivate faith, strengthen hope, and embody love in the world around us. Through his reflections and spiritual encouragement, this podcast aims to inspire you to live your Catholic faith with joy and purpose. Welcome. 

To be truly free is to be unbound by sin and the weight of the world. To truly love is an act beyond emotion. To choose again and again to serve one another in love. Sounds easy, right? Well, in this encore reflection from Father Mark, we're reminded that true freedom and true love are conscious daily decisions, ways of living that mirror the life of Christ. His message is an invitation to live with purpose, to respond to life's messiness with grace, and to embrace Christ's call to love as that path to real freedom and real love.

Here's Father Mark. 

“The Freedom to Love is a Daily Choice,” by Father Mark S. Suslenko, Pastor, SS. Isidore and Maria Parish, Glastonbury, Connecticut

Father Mark Suslenko:

Listen very carefully to these words: do not use this freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, rather serve one another through love.

As you hear those words, I'm sure two in particular, stand out: freedom and love. Both of those words, freedom and love, are probably two of the most misunderstood words in our English language. We tend to equate freedom with liberty, with the ability to choose whatever we want to choose, and we tend to equate love with an emotion of affection. While there are elements of truth in both of those definitions, they are both very limited in scope, and miss the greater dimensions of what both of those words really signify: freedom and love.

While God has blessed us with the wonderful gift of free will, we can choose to do whatever we want, and it's one of the things that we hold dear to our hearts, the ability to have liberties, to be able to exercise our free will in the context of how we wish to do so,\: to choose this over that, one preference over another, this direction for my life over that direction for my life. But yet, at the end of the day, liberty is not really what freedom is all about. Freedom goes much deeper. Freedom is a gift that we have been given in Jesus Christ. He has given us freedom over two things, over the power of sin and over the power of this world. So we are not tied to either one of those very dire realities: sin and the power of the world. We are freed from them because of what he has accomplished.

If we look at ourselves as who we are, and we look at this relationship between freedom and with love, we see something very different. We see that, in order to truly be free and understand what freedom is all about, I have to understand what love really is first. And to realize that to both, love and to be free, require a choice on my part. Our romantic notions of love and associating it just with an affection or an emotion brings us away from where God really intended this to be. We need to understand love at the beginning of things, at the beginning of who we are. Both understanding freedom and understanding love requires that I truly understand myself and where I have come from, the God who has created me and connecting, in a very real and true way, with the source of all life and love, which is God himself. I cannot love unless God loves through me. I cannot live unless God lives through me. He is responsible for the life force that flows through my veins, through what is active and alive in all of creation and in my brothers and sisters. It's when I internalize that reality and begin to see it as having a claim on who I am, directing my thoughts and my actions, that I begin to really understand a bit this love, which goes beyond emotion, goes beyond emotion. And is more a matter of choice. To be free in Christ needs to be free from the cares and the concerns of our world, and to be free from the bondage of sin that can ensnare us and keep us tethered and weighed down.

And so as we begin to live and move and act in our world, we have a choice. And the choice is whether to love or not to love. You see, we truly understand our freedom when we understand our call to love, not to simply just choose one thing over another, one preference over another. To be free means to understand that is a choice, and when I begin to love, I choose freedom.

Think for a moment about how we negotiate our lives. Sometimes we look at our preferences and our options in terms of our comfort zones. We surround ourselves with people who think like us, act like us, live like us. If we put the romantic notion of love in our definition of love, we seek out those who are going to then love us back in return, which is the essence of married life, isn't it? And while that is one dimension of love, it is not the full Gospel dimension of love of what we're called to do if we truly understand our freedom in Christ. Look at how Jesus approached things much differently. Jesus put himself outside of his comfort zones. He went where he wasn't supposed to go. If action required that he put aside religious etiquette and law and went into places where he wasn't welcome, where the religious leaders said you shouldn't be. He did things on days that he shouldn't have done them, but he did them anyway because of something compelling, him drawing him from within: this true essence of love. And he did it because of the freedom that God desires us to share. To be free from all of those bondages, to be able to act in accord with how God desires us to act.

Where do we see this playing out in life? Well, I can think of several examples of this type of love chosen in freedom that is embraced every day. Think for example, of a parent who has a sick child. A child who is up at 11, at 12, at two, at three, that requires the parent to respond and be present and assist. This love is present in a child who is then forced to deal with an aging parent, an ailing parent, who has to then rearrange schedules and respond to crises simply because it's what's required and what is necessary. It's a response from within that's freely given for the betterment of the person that's in front of me. It's a response from within that's freely given in response to the situation that is presenting itself to me at that time. It's found in the friend who's dealing with someone who is facing a terminal illness who just needs somebody to sit to put aside their agenda and listen. It's found in the person who stretches their comfort zones, who doesn't just associate with those who love them back in return, but puts themselves out there, who risk going to the shelter to serve the needy, who risk opening the door to the alien or the stranger who requires a home, who truly takes the Gospel message of justice and peace and lives it out fully in their lives. It's when we begin to step outside of ourselves and respond to the very stuff of our life that we begin to understand what freedom and love are truly all about.

You see, part of the problem is, is that we have in the back of our heads this desire for utopia. If we look at our life, our life isn't the mess that it is right now. Our life is that day when all of this is different. That day when I don't have to get up to respond to the kids, and I can find peace. That day when I don't have to get up and deal with the messiness of my new job and I can be at peace. That day when my relationship with my sibling no longer is filled with conflict and we can be at peace. That day when I get up and I go to work and I don't have to deal with the personalities that tug at me so intricately all the time.

You see, we equate our lives with trying to establish this harmonic sense of wellbeing. You know, those who grew up in the sixties and the seventies or were exposed to that will understand this when I say that we look for this "kumbaya" moment of life, you know, where we're kind of arm in arm and all this harmony and everything is wonderful and I'm feeling this sense of goodness and wellbeing and peacefulness. And when we never achieve that, we think that what we're living is something askew or wrong. Well, we look to God in other places other than the stuff that's right in front of our face. Whereas if we encounter life as it presents itself, with all of its messiness and with all of its intricacies, maybe God in that messiness is saying, hello, there's something here you need to pay attention to. I am revealing myself to you in this mess, in the complicated relationship, in the stressful job employment, in the new changes that we're going through, in all of the anxiety, in all of the turmoil, in all of the nuts and bolts of who I am as a human being as I pick up and respond each day. So see, if we really understand that we're meant to live in freedom, then this is going to be a conscious act that we do every moment. We are going to readjust and rethink and re-present ourselves to life, and we're going to allow ourselves to be stretched. We're going to allow ourselves to be challenged. We're gonna allow ourselves to open the doors of our lives and allow others in, and we're gonna see in Jesus and the values of the Gospel a model for my own way of approaching the stuff of who I am.

And so at the end of the day, we truly begin to understand freedom when we take up the task of love, when we allow ourselves to embrace life fully, all of what is before us, to respond to the moments of the day, the moments of the day, and whatever they entail with all of their messiness, with all of their misunderstanding, always looking for the presence of God and his message contained within. In doing so, then we'll find ourselves more centered, less concerned about the liberties that can so easily be taken away from us, but possessing a deeper sense of wellbeing and peace that can come only from what Jesus Christ has accomplished for us. 

Carol Vassar:

Father Mark Suslenko is the pastor of SS. Isidore and Maria Parish in Glastonbury, Connecticut. If you like what you've heard today, please subscribe to Living in Faith, Hope, and Love on your favorite podcast app, and take a moment to leave a review.

SS. Isidore and Maria is an active parish community, so whether you’re a long-time parishioner or are just getting to know us through this podcast, we welcome you to join us at Masses or any of our other community events and services. Visit our parish website - isidoreandmaria.org - for a full schedule of Masses, services and other happenings. That's isidoreandmaria.org. We're also active on Facebook and Instagram.

On behalf of Father Mark, I'm Carol Vassar, and we thank you for listening to this episode of Living in Faith, Hope, and Love.