When I was a child, I loved school, but even more, I looked forward to the start of summer vacation. As a teacher, I have been lucky enough to continue to have a taste of it. Although I work quite a bit in the summer—on research that gets pushed out of my schedule by my many school-year commitments or on changing something for my next year’s teaching—the schedule is much slower, and I can enjoy a good deal of time outdoors. The summer schedule gives me freedom to garden, freedom to cook, freedom to go visit my mom for a week, or the like.
Culturally, we tend to think about freedom as being able to do whatever we want, but St. Ignatius has a more nuanced understanding of desire and its relationship to freedom. For him, freedom is best expressed by the Principle and Foundation. He says that we are created to praise, reverence, and serve God, and by means of this to save our souls. Everything else in the world is to be used in reference to this larger good. For me, since God is love, then freedom is about living our lives in relation to this greatest Love. I experience God through many relationships, from my husband and kids to friends and the wider community. But none of them is the whole of love itself.
Freedom means holding things in perspective. It’s not that honor or money or health are bad; they are goods that can allow me to do what God calls me to do. For example, I need money to be able to buy a flight to visit my mother, as I feel called to spend more time with her as we are both getting older. And it’s not that Ignatius does not want us to have desires like the desire to spend time with our loved ones. But there is a bigger picture here: we can care for our families, but Jesus also calls us to care for the stranger, the outsider, and the marginalized person.
The Principle and Foundation also means recognizing that the people around me are made in God’s image and yet only creatures, not God or gods. I can love my family better when I recognize that they, and I, are only human. We each have our own gifts and limits. I can enjoy my community at work more when I remember the same about my friends and colleagues there. As I wrote about in my book on forgiveness, remembering our creatureliness and that of others helps us to live more gently with others.
While the end of summer means the return to the classroom, I am not giving up my freedom at all, even if I have less time in the garden or to write. It’s a different kind of freedom I hold, the freedom to love and to care for the people where I am and to engage in meaningful work as I continue to discern God’s call to me. Love in the everyday ordinariness of life, in every season of life: that’s the foundation to which Ignatius calls us all.
