World Freedom is a Context, an Available Space
2011 March 8
Your letters continue to roll in about what you did on World Freedom Day and the results of that event are also becoming clearer to me.
Perhaps the greatest result of any event of that kind is that it creates a context or a space that may not have been there previously. I don’t want to say that it definitely wasn’t there previously because it may have been and probably was. But it wasn’t there for me and is now.
What am I talking about?
Well, you’ve all heard stories about people showing newspaper photographs to certain primitive peoples who had never seen a newspaper photograph. All they saw were black dots and white spaces. Or heard about how European ships showed up the first time in Hawaii and how the natives, unused to seeing them, did not recognize them at first as ships.
Surely that’s happened to you as well. You’ve seen something on the horizon and, for one reason or another, you didn’t recognize it for what it was, perhaps because you hadn’t seen anything like it before.
Even trying to ride a bike for the first time is an example of this. The first time we go crashing over. The second, third or fourth time, we don’t.
Similarly, in getting together and getting behind World Freedom Day we have created a context that may not have been there before – at last not for us.
Now we can talk about the context: “world freedom.” Now, as we look over things we have seen and heard before, all of a sudden, their relationship to this new context becomes apparent. So The Little Dictator‘s speech becomes something we hear as it relates to world freedom. Or the situation of the populations of China and North Korea now become evaluated by us in terms of world freedom.
We can conceive of something now called “world freedom” where we might not have before. It has become a topic of conversation, but more so a topic of our own investigation and contemplation. We are at work with it. And that will only grow with us and hopefully with others.
Certainly for me, everything I see these days I estimate in terms of “world freedom.” That the world could be free is much more real to me now than it was even a week ago. Hey, I get it. We could really be free as a world. That is a possibility. That has been created as a space, just like a frame, once built, becomes an invitation to paint a picture.
So World Freedom Day being over is not the end of world freedom. To use Jesus’s words, let it be a measure of meal that leavens the whole loaf. Let it be a mustard seed that grows into a great tree in which the birds of heaven may nest some day. Let it be a great Pearl a treasure in a field, which, we having seen it, we sell all we have and purchase the pearl, the field.
If it becomes that, then the people of Libya become members of our family who want to be free. The people of North Korea, the same. The Chinese, the Burmese, the Congolese, everybody. Why should not everyone be as free as we are, and not much, more, including us?
World freedom is achievable. It is coming. It will be ours to enjoy and not just world freedom, but individual sovereignty and not just individual sovereignty, but liberation from fear, anxiety, worry. You and I are, here and now, building an edifice from the ground up that will offer to all its residents freedom, sovereignty, liberation.
As we enter the Ninth Wave of the Mayan Calendar, build well. Build on rock. Build for eternity.
Source:
Comments