Do you have real freedom?

I  recently worked with a group of volunteers who look after the spiritual and emotional needs of prison inmates. Their task is to visit the inmates, to be with them and to listen to them with a non-judgmental ear.

Nelson Mandela was not at liberty, but he was free, Judith Turner writes.

They also assist the inmates to face their situations and to come to terms with their lives. The inmates struggle with difficult emotions, such as anger and resentment. The spiritual workers assist the inmates with how to deal with these emotions which imprison them in another way, in order for them to be free within themselves.

The experience of that inner freedom is so empowering to the inmates that they soon realise that although they are behind bars, they are free.

We often do not realise what freedom means. That is because we confuse freedom with liberty.

An easy way to distinguish between the two: liberty is a condition of the environment and freedom is a condition of the person. When we are not at liberty, it means that there are normally some rules or regulations that prevent us from doing certain things.

For example, young people might say, “I want my freedom”, when their parents have put a curfew to them. What the young person really means is, “I want to be at liberty to come home when I want to.” Our freedom, on the other hand, lies in the way we understand, accept and respond to these situations where our liberties have been taken away.

When we understand the difference between liberty and freedom, and we realise that freedom is the human ability that we have to choose our responses to situations, then we can become very powerful in our actions.

This means that no matter what happens and no matter what people do to us, they cannot make us respond to a situation in a particular way. They may take away all our liberties, but they cannot get into our minds and make us respond to a situation in a certain way.

Many saints and other great people have over the years shown to the world how they have lived their freedom.

In our own country we have the example of Nelson Mandela who was jailed for 27 years. His liberties were taken away. He had to stay behind the prison walls. He was not at liberty to go anywhere, or to eat, sleep or work at hours of his choice, he could not just see his family when he wanted to or relax in the ways he wanted to with the people he wanted to—all of those liberties were taken away.

But he was a free man all the time because his mind was free. He did not come out of jail a bitter, broken man who wanted revenge. He came out of jail a leader who was able to guide us to our first democratic elections. He chose how he was going to respond to the situation he found himself in. This was his freedom, which no one could take away from him.

Very often we are imprisoned and enslaved by our anger, our bitterness, our resentment. At those times we are not truly free. Whether we are in prison or outside of prison, these emotions make it difficult for us to live our God given freedom if we become slaves to them.

We have to seek ways to free ourselves internally, because, as St Paul reminds us in his letter to the Galatians: “For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery” (5:1).