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4 The Bonds of Freedom BRIAN O. McDERMOTT The search for meaning is carried on infreedom—the scope and goal of this freedom are characterized here as nothing less than the totality of our lives in union with God. In the process of trying to arrive at this goal, we are confronted with a fundamental option: a "yes" in openness to our shared humanity or a denial of ourselves. In this option, the power of original sin in us is dominated by God's own loving self-gift. WH 'HEN converts to Christianity recount the story of their passage from the old life to the new, the language they use can often be black and white. Whether it is Paul of Tarsus describing his slavery under the Law and freedom in Christ, or Thomas Merton in our own time narrating the days of sin at Columbia before his conversion and life of grace as a Trappist monk, the impression conveyed is unmistakable: then, sin and guilt and unfreedom, now, grace and light and freedom. Converts can be forgiven this language, for their conversion marks a watershed in their lives which is experienced as a total passage from death to life. But from the point of view of the gospel, which inspires Rahner's reflections on freedom and guilt, it is much more likely that there is no period of a person's life and no sector of human history which has been, or will be, simply graceless, untouched by the redemptive influence of Jesus Christ. Yet just as truly we can and must say that there has been no period of history which does not need redemption. Following Rahner's lead, our own reflections will trace the contours of human freedom in a world redeemed yet threatened by radical guilt, where that freedom, oriented to final fulfillment, hides within itself a dark possibility called original sin. 50 THE BONDS OF FREEDOM 51 History: Redeemed or Unredeemed? I remember once having a conversation with a Jewish acquaintance and coming finally to that most disturbing of topics: the Holocaust. My Jewish friend thought that the Holocaust was the greatest challenge to the truth claims of Christianity. He asked point-blank: ''What good has the cross and resurrection of Jesus done for history and human life, when such a thing as the Holocaust, and countless other atrocities, have occurred in human history?" The question is a profound one, and in a sense has no "answer" in the ordinary meaning of the word. I did not try to respond, but was stopped short by his anguish. Later, upon reflecting on our conversation, it occurred to me that no one is able to step out of human history and observe what history without redemption would look like compared with a redeemed history. We cannot presume —unless we simply choose to—that our history is unredeemed, just as we cannot suppose that our history would be empirically the same if not redeemed. The genuine humanity that has been achieved, the values nourished and fidelities lived out, all deeds of love and justice and generosity call for explanation, especially if one believes our world in no real sense redeemed. The large question which my friend raised is also the more personal question of the meaning of my own life. Talk about salvation and redemption is not foreign to most citizens of technological America. We are the most religious and secular people around! Cults from East and West promise their American initiates salvation from the meaninglessness of technopolis, while the human and natural sciences proceed apace in university and corporate research and development, uncovering the mechanisms which make us tick and giving us, so it appears, salvation in the form of control. If our parents are not responsible for our behavior , then our genes are, and with clever adjustment our destiny can be assured. But the very quest for meaning, whether through cults or through assuming the reins of technological control, signals an inalienable feature of being human. We are responsible for our lives, we are given over to ourselves, we yearn to understand as keenly as possible and to control as thoroughly as possible all the empirical aspects of our lives. We are summoned to know the conditions which affect our behavior and to uncover the causes of good and evil in society and personal life. This search for meaning about the objective, circumscribable features of our [3.21.231.245] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 04...

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