This week, a colleague of mine picked up a discussion about freedom and the way that we others tended to base our concepts of freedom on the predetermination based on the hope in God, or providence as we call it. We are either free to do as we will, he said, or we are predestined or predetermined to do things by God, which means we are really not free at all! “You have it all wrong”, he kept insisting and smiling in his magnanimity, “it is either one or the other and you guys keep trying to get the best of both worlds” meaning that we are, in fact, irrational.

Being extremely busy, at first I made an effort to ignore him with a smile! By “we”, I suppose he meant we who believe in God, and after some thought I decided that it was too important a subject to be left un-debated and wittingly fell into his invitation for a discussion that left all my scheduled work undone!

I asked him nicely whether he thought that God (if he existed) was free. He replied that, being God, he should be. I asked whether he thought that being free for God meant that God could do all he wished, anytime, anywhere and any place. He replied in the affirmative. I asked if that meant that God could also do bad, if he really wanted to, or if circumstances warranted? He answered that, if he existed, God could do anything he wished, being the omnipotent being that he was supposed to be, even removing our freedom if he wished and becoming the imaginary despot that he most likely is for limiting our freedom.

I asked whether it was possible for God to have a will which essentially contradicted his own nature. No answer. I asked whether it was possible that God’s will was limited by his essential nature which was to be good. Again, no answer! I asked whether God’s nature and will could be separated. I suppose not, he said, God being a perfect being. I asked whether this limitation to freedom could also exist within us. In what way, he retorted.

I said maybe our freedom is not essentially the ability to do as we wish, but to choose between doing good and doing bad. In his providence, God could allow a choice for good but would he be able to sit by and accept a choice for bad that goes against his essential nature? Could it be that God hatches a different plan every time we make a choice in favour of evil, a new plan to lead us again to eventually choose good? There is no limitation on our freedom to choose between good and evil there! Our choices are respected but our options are reworked by God as we are constantly called to choose between good and evil. After all, being created in the image of God, we too are called to do good except that our compound nature with separate intellect and will also has inbuilt defects which cause us to choose evil over good until God reworks our options to invite us to choose again after respecting our original choices.

I may be wrong in this, but maybe this is where real poverty lies, in accepting the fallout of our good choices in daily life. Many of us think of poverty in strictly financial terms. That is surely one kind! However, we can all actually exhibit and live a spirit of poverty within the secular world we live in, by accepting the conditions and circumstances that come about when we choose good options over evil ones. This is real humility, real poverty – agreeing to be responsible for what the world will give us when we make good choices in the home, in the family, at work, at play, in politics, during sporting events, during friendly gatherings, on the streets, in all our day-to-day endeavours.

In choosing to do good in all our daily activities, we are maybe aligning ourselves and surely accepting the will of God and this is real humility and poverty. Do we hope and love in vain when we find ourselves in worldly difficulty after having made the right choices in life? Now the answer to that question is surely one based in faith alone!

[email protected]