Creation is not an event in the past but a relationship in the present. If God did not
It is not the task of Christianity to provide easy answers to every question, but to make us
The arduous, sacrificial character of freedom is evident equally in Dostoevsky’s parable “The Tale of the Grand Inquisitor” in The Brothers Karamazov. The inquisitor reproaches Christ for making humankind free, and thereby imposing on them a pain too sharp for them to endure. Out of pity for human anguish, so the inquisitor claims, he and his fellows have removed this cruel gift of freedom: “We have corrected your work,” he says to Christ. He is right: freedom is indeed a heavy burden, as Mary understood only too well when standing at the foot of the Cross. Yet without freedom there […]
Freedom involves sharing. Mary’s first action after the Annunciation is to share the good news with someone else: she goes with haste to the hill country, to the house of Zechariah, and greets her cousin Elizabeth.8 Here is an essential element in freedom: you cannot be free alone. Freedom is not solitary but social. It implies relationship, a “thou” [You] as well as an “I.” The one who is egocentric, who repudiates all responsibility towards others, possesses no more than a seeming and spurious freedom, but is in reality pitifully unfree.