When God made you, when He made the new, unique, human person that you are, an ensouled body, an embodied soul, He made everything that you are. He made you in His image and likeness and He gave you an intellect and a will. His gift to you of will is the gift of a free will.
Free Will
Each person can exercise his or her will in determining what actions to do and, if there are multiple possibilities, choose which action to do, or not to do. An all-powerful God, who could have made each person to always do what is aligned with His will, each such creature without a free will – and there are millions of such creatures in God’s creation – but none of them are human beings.
God willed that man should be left in the hand of his own counsel (cf. Sir 15:14), so that he might of his own accord seek his creator and freely attain his full and blessed perfection by cleaving to him” (Gaudium et Spes, Joy and Hope, 17 § 1; Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World. Second Vatican Council) (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1743; “Catechism”). (“cleave:” to glue, to adhere, to join, to stick, to cling, to adhere, to abide fast together, to follow).
This Is Not The Freedom To Do Whatever One Wants To Do
Freedom is the power to act or not to act, and so to perform deliberate acts of one’s own. Freedom attains perfection in its acts when directed toward God, the sovereign Good. (Catechism 1744)
Jesus did not redeem us so that we could go about our lives pursuing whatever we wished – we were not redeemed so we would be free to sin. Jesus did not tell the woman brought to him and accused of adultery to “Go and sin on more.”
The right to the exercise of freedom, especially in religious and moral matters, is an inalienable requirement of the dignity of man. But the exercise of freedom does not entail the putative right to say or do anything. (Catechism 1747)
The Divine Gift of Free Will Includes the Gift of Responsibility
Freedom characterizes properly human acts. It makes the human being responsible for acts of which he is the voluntary agent. His deliberate acts properly belong to him.26 GS 17; Sir 15:14. . . . Freedom is the power, rooted in reason and will, to act or not to act, to do this or that, and so to perform deliberate actions on one’s own responsibility. By free will one shapes one’s own life. Human freedom is a force for growth and maturity in truth and goodness; it attains its perfection when directed toward God, our beatitude. (Catechism, 1745; 1731; emphasis added).
Having responsibility for one’s actions and their consequences is not a burden. It truly is a gift that, when one does an act of virtue, when one chooses freely to align one’s will with God’s will, one can say, “I did that, no one else.” One can also see the good consequences that flow from one’s free choice.
When one does such acts again and again, when one has responsibility for one’s good actions, they become habit, virtue, and then one becomes what one does.
The more one does what is good, the freer one becomes. (Catechism 1733)
Without God’s gift of free will, no one would be responsible for any action, and we would not become the heaven-seeking and then heaven-dwelling person God wants us to be.
We Are So Free We Can Choose Hell, Forever
The Catholic Church permits a range of views on the subject of predestination, but there are certain points on which it is firm: “God predestines no one to go to hell; for this, a willful turning away from God (a mortal sin) is necessary, and persistence in it until the end” (Catechism 1037).
Free Will & Conscience
God gives us everything we need, all the information, details and facts, to make the correct free choice.
He gives us grace, His “ favour, the free and undeserved help that God gives us to respond to his call to become children of God, adoptive sons, partakers of the divine nature and of eternal life. Grace is the participation in the life of God. (Catechism 1996-1997 ).
“Everything we need” also includes Him speaking lovingly to us in His voice of conscience.
Conscience does not compel someone or force them to act-this is how a loving God tells us what is good, what is in accord with His will. Conscience is a guide and a judge. For an individual, conscience says to the person, before a choice is made, this is good, this is evil, this is right, this is wrong, this is virtue, this is sin. Our conscience tells us God approves or disapproves of a choice about to be made.
With His almighty power and infinite love, grace coupled with His voice are as far as God can go without compelling us to do an action.
Choose to Glorify God, and Seek Glory for Ourselves. Anyone Else?
Glorify God
One action we can freely choose is to give glory God. We do this often. We pray:
Glory to God in the highest . . . We Glorify You.
Glory be to the Father, to the Son and to the Holy Spirit.
Heaven and earth are full of your glory.
Glorify Ourselves
We also want to be glorified, to live in eternal glory with God, and we can freely choose our actions so that one day we will enjoy this divine glory. C.S. Lewis puts it this way:
It is written that we shall “stand before” Him, shall appear, shall be inspected. The promise of glory is the promise, almost incredible and only possible by the work of Christ, that some of us, that any of us who really chooses, shall actually survive that examination, shall find approval, shall please God. To please God…to be a real ingredient in the divine happiness…to be loved by God, not merely pitied, but impossible, a weight or burden of glory which our thoughts can hardly sustain. But so it is.(Lewis, “The Weight of Glory”; emphasis added).
One day we can partake of His divine glory, which is what St. Peter speaks of when he says:
“By whom he hath given us most great and precious promises: that by these you may be made partakers of the divine nature: flying the corruption of that concupiscence which is in the world.”(2 Peter 4; emphasis added).
Glorify Anybody Else?
For the Catholic, seeking heaven, there is more than God’s glory and seeking to be part of that glory for oneself. Lewis describes the difference between a believer, alone, glorifying God and a believer who realizes the role one should play in furthering the glory of everyone God gifts into our lives.
It may be possible for each to think too much of his own potential glory hereafter; it is hardly possible for him to think too often or too deeply about that of his neighbour. The load, or weight, or burden of my neighbour’s glory should be laid daily on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken.(Lewis, Id.).
The “neighbor” whose glory is our burden is not only family and friends, and those we love and care for. Our neighbors are everyone in our lives:
It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may oone day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilization—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendours. . . . . Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbour is the holiest object presented to your senses. If he is your Christian neighbour he is holy in almost the same way, for in him also Christ vere latitat—the glorifier and the glorified, Glory Himself, is truly hidden. (Lewis, Id.).
The real “weight of glory” for Lewis is the burden – and the gift – for each of us to realize we can freely choose to take on the responsibility of helping our neighbor partake in divine glory. For most of us, most days, regarding most people in our lives, no one else can do for them what God wants done then and there to assist one of his children to be with him in his glory.
And if we do not freely choose to do so, there will be no one else to do it.
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Author: Guy McClung
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