Fr Robert Hendrickson

Dear Friends in Christ,

I happened to be on a church discussion page online and someone brought up the notion of name tags at church. Someone else chimed in, “any church that tells me what to put on my body is not the church for me.”

Leaving aside the overheated response to a relatively innocuous topic the response also represents just how misguided and twisted our notion of freedom has become. The notion that being asked to wear a name tag is a gross violation of autonomy seems to exemplify just how we’ve conflated our comfort with our freedom.

Moreover we’ve just as dangerously put freedom or rights far ahead of obligations or duties. More and more I see people insist on their right to this, that, or the next and it really just becomes an excuse for increasingly selfish or boorish behavior.

The ramifications are not just about name tags though. We saw it with masks and, I’d argue, we see it with climate change and a host of other issues. The prioritization of our freedom to comfort or ease or the like has become the excuse to do nothing about life-threatening issues.

It’s not a one sided political challenge either — though all sides like to blame the others for being selfish. It’s an endemic issue in our human condition and seems to have become especially acute in western society.

I wonder how much our notion of individual salvation has driven this? Scripture is filled with the notion that our salvation is a community, a cosmic, act. Yes, Jesus came for us but/and he came for all. He came that we might find a way to follow him that lifts up the lowly and raises the poor and the oppressed.

He did not come that we might find an ever more isolated and frantic sense of freedom as we might define it. He came that we might find the freedom that comes of being one body, with one hope, and one call to serve one another and to seek the good of all.

That is our perfect freedom found in him alone.

Yours in Christ,

Fr Robert