Living in Freedom
To live in the light of the Lord’s resurrection is to believe that light has won its permanent victory over death, and that in Jesus Christ, my sin and shame have been conquered. It is to believe that the crosses in my life are not the end of my story, for God can do the impossible. As St. Paul writes in Romans 8:11, “if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit who dwells in you”. The resurrection is not merely an event we celebrate at Easter, but a newness of life which we are invited to enter into.
In my own life, I experienced this freedom more deeply at a time when I had an existing relationship with God and sincerely desired to discover His plans for my future. In tension with this desire was a gnawing feeling that I could never be worthy of the good things that God might call me to, because the sins and wounds of my past had somehow disqualified me from receiving them. Although I had sought forgiveness and reconciliation with God through the sacraments, I struggled to believe that I was truly free from these experiences that shaped me. Deep down, I felt that there had to be some enduring mark of sin on my life that I had to bear.
One image, that was shared with me during prayer ministry, captured my struggle powerfully – I was like a tree that had grown and shed its leaves and was so eager to have all those fallen leaves swept away. But the Lord, in His great compassion, wanted to bring every leaf of mine into the light of His love.
During a retreat, we were invited into a time of prayer centred on the Gospel passage of the healing of the hemorrhaging woman. As the Blessed Sacrament was brought around in the monstrance, we were invited to touch the humeral veil, just as the hemorrhaging woman touched the cloak of Jesus, and to articulate our desire for healing. As the monstrance passed me, I received an image of a hand firmly uprooting a weed from my heart, with its deep roots and dirt. The Lord was firmly removing the guilt and shame that had quietly suffocated my heart. He desired to put an end to my self-condemnation and remove with finality the root of this guilt and shame. God was not a Father who condemned me or recoiled from the darkest parts of my life, but a Father who wanted to restore and re-establish the sovereignty of His truth over the lies about my identity that had crept in and taken root.
The following day during another prayer exercise, another image was shared with me. It was of Jesus clothing me in a beautiful dress, crowning me and extending His hands toward me as He led me to dance with Him. In that image, I gazed at Him with eyes full of devotion, held in a deep sense of ease and safety.
In that moment I felt a release from the condemnation and fear that gripped my heart. I was free to love the Lord, to meet His gaze of love and to receive the fullness of joy that came from being intimately known and loved by Him. For the Lord had clothed me in His righteousness and conferred upon me my identity as His beloved, full of dignity and worth, made spotless and pure. He had reminded me of His unchanging love for me that was patient and enduring. What I believed I had lost was slowly being restored in Christ, for truly nothing is impossible with God.
After experiencing this freedom, I came to grow in the conviction that my heart was made good and it was worthy of being loved. Rooted in this quiet certainty that the Lord knew me fully and loved me, I found myself less afraid to let others into my life, and I was able to live with greater openness and joy.
Many of us may carry hidden feelings of shame, fear, resentment, or despair that we have quietly learnt to accept as a part of ourselves. Yet the Lord desires to enter precisely into these places of need and self-reliance, to call us out of our tombs and into freedom. As CCC 635 quotes, “I order you, O sleeper, to awake. I did not create you to be a prisoner in hell. Rise from the dead, for I am the life of the dead”. Pope Leo reflected in a recent homily this Eastertide that “even today there are tombs to be opened, and often the stones sealing them are so heavy and so closely guarded that they seem to be immovable.” Yet, no stone, no sin that separates us from God, is too heavy for the Lord to roll away.
Brothers and sisters, the Lord labours to set you free. He pursues you, for He desires so much for you to remain in His love. Be not afraid of letting yourself be fully known and loved by the Lord, for it is this belonging to the Lord that frees our hearts to discover who we were created to be.