Friends

Bob was emaciated. His body was slowly melting away in the final stages of an AIDS related condition known as wasting syndrome. Bob looked me in the eye and said, “I think I know the exact moment when I was infected. I was shooting up cocaine and sharing a needle with this woman. I had just loaded the syringe when I looked up at her. Her face was covered with lesions and I thought, ‘Wow, I could get sick!’ But then I looked at the needle and thought, ‘But I really want this drug!’ and shot it into my vein. That’s when I shot up HIV.”

In On Spiritual Knowledge, St. Diadochos of Photiki wrote, “Free will is the power of a deiform soul to direct itself by deliberate choice towards whatever it decides.” However, we often make choices much like Bob made choices, laboring under the illusion of freedom while really under the influence of addiction, ego, compulsion, or obsession in varying degrees. Are we really free? Can we be free?

Jesus points out the only way to freedom when he told us, “Know the Truth and it will set you free.” True freedom calls for the courage to commit oneself to the task of change. The quest of Truth is an adventure that means change. It also means looking deep into the heart, mind, and soul with an honesty that will raze all denial. Truth takes no prisoners and cuts a clean swath through the heart. Truth reveals all the dark places to the glaring light of God’s grace. Truth will, indeed, set you free.

Bob made a deliberate choice when he shot that syringe full of cocaine and HIV into his vein. It was a choice that ended in disastrous consequences for him physically. Before he died, however, he began the quest for Truth and opened himself to the glaring and cleansing light of God’s grace. Before the end of his short life he knew Truth and he knew what it meant to be free.

Freedom is as simple as a choice of direction: the way of denial or the way of Truth. “Free will is the power of a deiform soul to direct itself by deliberate choice towards whatever it decides.” God has left it up to you and me to decide which way to go.

Joel t