It’s bold and courageous to break free from the constraints that hold us back from living life to the full. But we must take wisdom with us and not let our zeal for freedom sever our connection with the ground of reality. Our souls cannot flourish when we’ve been uprooted.
For instance, cut flowers might look pretty for a while, and might even celebrate their apparent freedom from the confinement of the soil. But death quickly follows once they’ve been uprooted. And this is true throughout our life and relationships in big and small ways.
On the one hand, we want the freedom to grow and reach the sky – becoming all that God has called us to be. But this is not without limitations. There is a way life works and we must live with the grain of the universe. In short, this is simply keeping ourselves grounded in the truth. We’re left ultimately impotent when we attempt to step outside of our created order.
Said another way, we must keep ourselves in touch with reality. For example, while technology has many benefits, we become like trees in the autumn that are twice dead, bearing no fruit and pulled up by the roots, when our days are spent in a virtual world disconnected from the real. At the extreme, we lose our ability to forge meaningful relationships with each other because we’re no longer grounded in the soil of our being.
In a similar way, this is why our spiritual life cannot be merely intellectual or abstract knowledge divorced from our embodied realities. The Incarnation reminds us that the path to spiritual maturity demands we stay rooted in our physical reality, even as we don’t reduce ourselves to just bodies.
In the end, freedom cannot bring life and goodness when it’s uprooted from the truth. Stay grounded in God’s reality and allow your soul to thrive.
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