FREEDOM IS MY NAME

Below is Thomas Merton at his best from his journal book, The Signs of Jonas.

God, Who owns all things, leaves them all to themselves. He never takes them for His own, the way we take them for our own and destroy them. He leaves them to themselves. He keeps giving them all that they are, asking no thanks of them save that they should receive from Him and be loved and nurtured by Him, and that they should increase and multiply, and so praise Him.

He saw that all things were good, and He did not enjoy them. He saw that all things were beautiful and He did not want them. His love is not like ours. His love is unpossessive. His love is pure because it needs nothing.

God is His own law and the law of all things is in His freedom. Therefore the stars serve Him freely and the sun rises with a song of joy and the clean gentle speechless moon gets down to her bed without protest.

Every wave of the sea is free. Every river on earth proclaims its own liberty. . . (pgs. 346-347)

Earlier in the book, Merton captures a vintage Mertonism. I lifted the phrase below “free as the sky” as my blog name.

To belong to God I have to belong to myself. I have to be alone—at least interiorly alone. This means the constant renewal of a decision. I cannot belong to people. None of me belongs to anybody but God. Absolute loneliness of the imagination, the memory, the will. My love for everybody is equal, neutral and clean. No exclusiveness. Simple and free as the sky because I love everybody and am possessed by nobody, not held, not bound. (253, The Sign of Jonas)

Freedom (small letter f) is my name. Freedom is at the core of who I am and how I foundationally express my love as love can be expressed in so many colorful ways. My thoughts, actions (or reactions) come out of this place of freedom. When exercised right, freedom is my gift to the world. The greatest freedom is freedom to be as Merton alluded above. To be how God created every creature to be without comparison and judgment. I am me and cannot be someone else, not even my false self (which disguises as real me). And I cannot force, coax, subversively encourage others to be like me. I praise God that “the law of all things is in His freedom.” Stars are what they are. Moon is what it is. Every wave of the sea is what it is. Nothing else. God Who possesses everything chooses not to be possessive. God’s love is never possessive!  Ironically, we as His creatures constantly struggle with possessiveness and control. No wonder God’s love Is not like ours. No wonder we can ultimately and purely depend on His self-emptying love!

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What many call Jesus’ mission statement is found in Luke 4:18-19 (which He is quoting from Isaiah 61:1-2, omitting the latter half of verse 2).

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

I love the wholistic emphasis Jesus captures based on liberty. In John 8:32, Jesus says, “and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” The truth in this context refers to Jesus Himself. It is only in Him we experience freedom. As Michael Card sings, there is “freedom for those who obey” Jesus.

Back to Merton

he ends his journal book with this paragraph…

O children of men! Don’t you know that God refuses to be seen? If you only could see how unlike our glory is His glory, you would die for love of Him. But how can we believe who seek glory one from another? If we only knew that God seeks glory by giving glory. He does not ask us to give Him any glory we have not received from Him. . . And where can we find Him to give Him back what we have received from Him? The moment we have found Him, He is already gone! (348, The Sign of Jonas)

Someone has said that God refuses to be known by our intellectual pursuit of knowledge. God is ultimately shy because He doesn’t need anything from us to be validated as God. He is I am Who I am.

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REFLECTION QUESTION

What does it mean, to be who you freely are, reflecting the very image of God? What does that look like?

HELLO

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In my first entry, I wanted to share the heart and inspiration behind the name of my blog and what inspired me to create it.

I decided to name my blog free as the sky, because freedom is at the core of who I am. I deeply desire all humanity to experience freedom, the freedom to be who we each are as who God created each of us to be.

I have come to this point in my journey, having traveled through intimate involvement with the evangelical missions movement for more than 30 years. This experience has been both a blessing and a baggage for me. I am who I am because of how evangelicalism has shaped me over the years. At the same time, it also blinded me to other realities of faith traditions (that were outside of my own) and eventually reached its capacity to offer me answers that I was looking for (really more about questions than answers—It’s not even to say I have questions in life. It’s the realization that I [or my existence] am a question that only God can answer). I didn’t know there were other “deep wells” to drink from.

What I discovered

out of desperation more than anything else…having run out of options to turn to…

is the contemplative or mystical traditions of writing, which then began to speak to me in ways that finally gave my soul the language and words to describe my life’s journey.

I am not an ex-evangelical (some coined the term exvangelical), although I have left certain facets of evangelicalism behind and thus am profoundly sympathetic to ex-evangelicals. I don’t really want to be labeled (true to a free nature).

Naturally, I have been filtering the evangelical stream (including more narrowly the evangelical missions stream) through the contemplative lens and seeing significant limitations and honestly how suffocating it is to navigate life within it. My language now is more of God’s Kingdom reigning in all facets of God’s creation globally. Action without contemplation is too damaging (whatever we happen to be doing)—violating the foundational premise that we are human beings, not merely doings—which inevitably leads to creation and management of hectic and superficial religion all over the world. In the end (perhaps penultimate) from my vantage point, I desire all (peoples, languages, tribes, and nations) to be who God created them to be without someone (or something) forcing them to be who they are not.

This to me is a true reflection of God’s Kingdom (The Big Reality) coming on this earth!

There are two perspectives from which I write my blog. One will be to voice my critiques, questions, offerings, and ways forward in missions, integrating the contemplative stream. This undoubtedly will seep through in my writings both explicitly and implicitly. More foundationally and passionately, however, this is my personal faith journey riddled with dark valleys and high peaks and uneasy questions and answers and ultimately the shedding of my false self and discovering my true self that I think will speak to pockets of people who are seeking how to live this life as God’s Kingdom citizens.

-Chong Kim