A talented musician can get so far just noodling away, say, on his violin or piano. He might think he's pretty good, and he gets a lot of support to reinforce his high opinion of himself from people who don't know much about music. And so he is not likely to realize the full potential of his talent unless he finds a teacher who can train him in proper technique and introduce him to the accomplishments of the ancestors. It's the same with any kind of spiritual development; most people are noodlers, and they are either to lazy or too egotistical to submit to a basic discipline. They think they are pretty good, or at least good enough.
But the goal of restricting one's freedom in the short run by submitting to training discipline has the longer-term objective to be able to perform at a greater level of freedom and creativity. The highly trained, disciplined musician is freer because she can play things that are impossible for the noodler. And she has the skills that give more scope that will enable her to respond to deep the inspiration from which all creativity flows. So the goal of submitting to a discipline is to obtain a higher level of freedom and capability--not endless submission as if 'meekness' were an end in itself. We must humbly absorb the what the ancestors have learned and created in their encounter with the "Future" in order that we may advance from their accomplishments further into it. This is what the word 'progress' means to me, and it's at the heart of what I mean when I call myself a "progressive". And it's also why I don't think of myself as a Liberal.
Now any spiritually serious person in our western consumer culture faces the problem that most of the religion that seems to be flourishing today has very little to do with developing spiritual freedom. There are people everywhere who are spiritually starving, and all they can find is spiritual junk food, which has an unwholesome, addictive effect. It provides short-term solution while at the same time creating a more serious long-term problem. And when the junk food offered identifies itself as Christian, it gives Christianity a bad name.
And then there's the Catholic way of framing freedom and obedience. I think the current Pope Francis understands something about Christians freedom that his predecessor did not. Or at least he's more willing to walk his talk. I don't know for sure what Pope Benedict would have said in response to what I'm saying here about the goal of Christian practice being a deeper level of freedom. I suspect he would agree in theory--his early writings show he understood and embraced the concept. But his persistent attempts to suppress, for instance, Liberation Theology in Brazil in the 80s was a pretty strong indicator that he was never very sympathetic to the idea that ordinary people were capable of much freedom or that its development was important for their spiritual lives. He probably would have argued that the goal of true spiritual freedom is rarely realized, and that too many people who think they are exercising real freedom are in fact deluded and more than likely really in the grip of compulsion, aka, sin. The road is narrow and the path steep toward the attainment of genuine freedom, he might say, and, Liberation Theology is not what it advertises itself to be. Maybe.
But I'd argue that nothing is more important in the life of the faith than the development of true Christian freedom. And maybe true Christian freedom is so rarely realized because the "authorities" are too fearful of people getting it wrong than hopeful that they'll get it right. It's the old Grand Inquisitor archetype from The Brothers Karamazov: the clergy has to keep those in its care in a childlike dependent state to keep them safe from harsh truths that they could not bear to know or cope with. Leave the politics to the grownups who sacrifice themselves to deal with the world's ugly truths so that you children might remain innocent. This is a classic subterfuge perpetrated by elites to justify their own fear-driven need for control.
So the question I would put to him then would be this: Is it really desirable that people should just be well-behaved children? Or is that as much a form of unfreedom as the compulsiveness of, say, the sexual libertine? Is it significantly better to be a prig than it is to be a debauchee. Is it better to be a Pharisee than a tax collector? Is it better to be the older son or the prodigal, younger son? It's not good to be either, but if you had to be one or the other, which would it be?
I'm pretty sure he'd say it's better to be the former in these pairs--the prig. It's safer, less messy. And as a parent I understand where he's coming from. Much less to worry about if your kid (or your priests and nuns) is well-behaved and repressed. Better he or she be a member of the party of the Superego rather than of the party of the Id. Better to be neither, but the second has a better chance of salvation, so the Gospels would indicate.
There's a reason why Jesus got a much warmer reception among those in the party of the Id who had morally scandalous reputations than the morally righteous who were the party of the Superego. The former were less smugly sure of themselves, more vulnerable, more open to the surprising and the new possibility. They were, for sure, in a state of unfreedom, but they were not locked up tight the way the Pharisees were in their whited sepulchers. The unrighteous were disposed toward freedom and recognized true liberation when it came to them. They had a capacity for discernment that the Pharisees did not, at least the ones depicted in the gospels. These Pharisees had highly developed superegos, but profoundly underdeveloped consciences. Conscience is one of those use-it-or-lose it kind of things. Better to use it and be occasionally wrong than not to use it at all.
Pharisaical moral conformism is the bias of the cultural right and leads to spiritual passivity and a defensive, fortress mentality. The Jesus of the Gospels came to subvert such fortress. But the strength of the fortress correlates with the intensity of the fear, and the intensity of the fear correlates with the intensity of violence needed to suppress the threat. And the threat they fear is true, genuine freedom because it is destabilizing.
Being well-behaved little children is not the goal of Obedience. Obedience in the spiritual sense is rather the submission of the will to the logic of grace. But you have to have some cognitive capacity to recognize it, and that's a function of conscience. Those of us who are parents have a duty to challenge the natural narcissism of our children, but we have the more important duty to nourish in them freedom and the development of their consciences. Because in the long run having a well-developed conscience is the only thing that matters. It is the cognitive capacity that must be developed in all mature Christians if they are to discern the movement of grace in their lives or distinguish truth from illusion.
We are all of us in our different ways in states of unfreedom. It's a given. It's what Christians mean when they talk about original sin. But in the final analysis it doesn't matter what the particular form our unfreedom takes. The more important issue is how well disposed we are to be free. Will we greet the Liberator if he should come to us, or violently suppress him out of fear because we care more deeply about stability and good order?
[Ed.: This is a revised version of an essay originally posted in May 2006. See also a related post, "Christian Liberty 1." See also "The Communion of Saints"]