Freedom From. Freedom To
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Every spring at Stonewall Farm in Keene, New Hampshire—and at other dairy farms throughout northern New England—there’s a festival to celebrate the season. It’s not an Easter celebration, or a Solstice celebration. It’s not Mother’s Day or May Day.
It has different names at different farms, but at Stonewall Farm it’s called “The Dancing of the Ladies.”
Sounds like some kind of pagan rite, doesn’t it? When I first heard it, I pictured middle-aged women prancing around with flowers in their hair. But that’s not what the Dancing of the Ladies is. Instead, it is the ceremonial release of the milking herd from the barn to the field for the first time in spring.
What makes this event so popular that crowds will stand eight or ten deep to witness it is the reaction of the cows to being set loose in the fields. When the cows are freed from the confines of their barns, they act like excited little children. These animals that can weigh close to a ton dance and prance and cavort all around the fields. Not only are they let loose, but they let loose themselves, literally kicking up their heels with pure, simple, unadulterated (I’m tempted to say “unpasteurized”) joy. You can almost see it on their faces.
The closest experience that I can relate this to was back in grade school, at the end of the school year, the last minute of the last hour of the last day, when the bell rings and suddenly you’d be set FREE, and you’d run out of the classroom screaming and singing. Do you remember that feeling? I don’t know whether the cows feel that way, but that’s the way they act when they get out into the fresh air and sunshine for the first time in spring.
I felt something like that same feeling when I discovered Unitarian Universalism. That same sense of freedom, of being released from bondage, of being able to breathe again. Perhaps you also experienced that feeling when you first discovered a religious community that doesn’t tell you what you have to believe to belong. Having been raised in the Catholic Church myself, I remember it distinctly.
I had left the Catholics as a teenager and entered the ranks of the “un-churched”—or maybe now I’d be called one of the “Nones.” That was until my wife and I moved to Maine and had our two children, and she sent me out to find a church where I’d be happy. The main street of our town was lined with churches of every stripe and color, with the Catholics located at one end of the street.
I decided to start my search geographically as far from that church as I could, and it just so happened that at the other end of the street were the Unitarian Universalists. I had never heard of them and had no idea what to expect. But I tried it out. And I was amazed by what I found that Sunday.
So I went back the following Sunday and then the next. And I felt like those cows set loose into the field and the sunshine. Free. Free to doubt. Free to find my own path. Free to explore. Free to question long-held beliefs from my childhood. Free to be myself with others like me. That was more than 25 years ago, and I still remember those feelings of freedom as strongly as I remember the feeling of the last day of school and the start of summer.
It is one of the great graces of our faith tradition—this freedom we’re given and that we claim. It lies at the very core of who we are as Unitarian Universalists. Because our liberal religious forebears fought and sometimes died for it, we are free from the constraints of orthodoxy and the commandments of the Catholic Church. We are free from the stain of Original Sin. We are free from the power of the priesthood to mediate our relationship with the Holy. We are free from the control of a central authority in Rome or even Boston.
Our scripture isn’t limited to one holy book. Religiously-speaking, the entire world is our oyster. Or, perhaps more accurately, it’s a rich and enticing smorgasbord. We have been granted the freedom to learn from Sufism, to investigate Taoism, to immerse ourselves in Emerson and the tasty Transcendentalists. And it feels GREAT! Am I right?
This freedom is one of the reasons—maybe the primary reason—we love our faith as we do. It’s why the boldest among us even tell our friends and neighbors about it and maybe, just maybe, invite them to come to church with us. We are unique among religious enterprises and experiments because of this freedom, and the independence it invites.
For those of us who have come from other faiths, the freedom from all that has bound us in our religious past draws us toward Unitarian Universalism. For those of us who have been marginalized or oppressed by religion in our personal pasts, the freedom from fear and judgment draws us toward Unitarian Universalism.
Ours is a faith in which we are allowed to be our true and authentic selves. And if we don’t know exactly who or what that is, this faith gives us the freedom to explore and discover and claim it. Our faith is nothing if not the sum total of all the “freedom froms,” such as freedom from authority, freedom from fear, freedom from orthodoxy.
But there is a shadow side to all these “freedom froms,” which can show up in unhealthy ways in our congregations and in ourselves. Just because we are free from authority doesn’t mean that we can do whatever we want. We have shared values and understandings about the world and our place in it, and there are limits that, if exceeded, would place you outside the admittedly wide bounds of our faith.
The fierce independence that our faith promotes can easily become corrupted into a narcissistic individualism that is both personally destructive and damaging to our communities. The Rev. Dr. Fred Muir, minister emeritus of our church in Annapolis, Maryland, called this the rise of the “iChurch,” where each individual believes and acts as though the institution is there to meet their own personal needs.
The danger, I think, stems from our getting stuck at “freedom from,” and not living into the “freedom to” of our faith, as when we come to treat our freedom as a birthright rather than as a precious gift. The “freedom from” mentality keeps us stuck in antagonism. It pits us against “them,” whether “they” are the faith of our family of origin, those who refuse to accept us as we are, or any other part of our past that we have rejected or want to hold at bay. “Freedom from” keeps us in a state of moving away, instead of moving toward; of disengaging, rather than engaging; of standing against instead of standing with.
It is the “freedom from” approach to church that enables toxic people to hold entire congregations hostage, and that keeps us from achieving the excellence we’re capable of, for fear of offending someone. “Freedom from” is a kind of lowest common denominator thinking, where we value keeping things calm and conflict-free more than risking depth and living into the power of our true potential.
Our faith is about gaining freedom from certain things, yes. But we can’t stop there. We must move beyond it to a “freedom to” attitude. “Freedom to” is about exploring rich possibilities in our lives and in our congregations. It calls us to ask and explore tough missional questions like “Why do we exist?” and “What are we called to be and to do in the world?” When we look at freedom not as the be-all and end-all, but rather as the jumping-off point—the place where we begin instead of the place where we end—we realize that our freedom is a rich resource from which we can draw strength and gather commitment.
“Freedom to” leads us to ask questions: “Freedom to be who?” “Freedom to do what?” It calls us not to spin around in our own little orbits as individual actors. Rather, it calls us to seek to grow into relationship with each other, both within our congregations and with the community around us. “Freedom from” keeps us looking back on our past. “Freedom to” is forward-looking, pulling us toward the future. “Freedom from” is about rejection, while “Freedom to” is about creation.
I want us—each and every one of us—to celebrate the simple joy of our freedom, just like cows that dance in the spring fields. But we can’t stop there. We can’t be satisfied with the freedoms that we’ve won, and that have been won on our behalf. We have been handed a precious and powerful gift. We must ask ourselves toward what ends we can use it, and then take steps to put it in motion, so that future generations may one day celebrate their own liberation, dancing in the joy of that freedom.
- Answering the Angels - December 1, 2019
- In Praise of Weeds - November 1, 2019
- Freedom From. Freedom To - May 1, 2018
