Glancing Thoughts

Freedom

The Second Reading says that Christ  freed those who through fear of death had been subject to slavery all their lives. But what is that slavery? And how does fear of death produce it? For that matter, what is it to be free?

Well, if I lock you in the basement, you aren’t free to go where you want to go. Freedom is a matter of doing what you yourself want to do.

But then there has to be just one of you if you are to be free. If you want desperately to stop smoking and you also really want to smoke, then whether you smoke or don’t smoke, you aren’t doing what you want to do. There are two of you, we might say, when you are divided against yourself in this way.

Fear can make a person divide against himself in this way. When Franz Stangl was first assigned to oversee a euthanasia clinic for the Nazis, he didn’t want to be involved in the killing. But he was afraid of what he would lose if he didn’t do as he was told. So he took the job and tried to hide from himself what he was doing. Out of fear, he willed to do what he himself didn’t want to do.

Fear of death can get a person to do even worse things than putting the ill and disabled to death. Stangl wound up as the commandant of the notorious death camp Treblinka, where he oversaw the killing of many thousands of men, women, and children, because he was afraid that the Nazis would kill him if he didn’t.

The horrors of that job left Stangl severely alienated from himself. At Treblinka, Stangl had to suppress a large part of his true self. If we ask ourselves whether, at Treblinka, Stangl was doing what he himself wanted to do, there seems to be no answer to the question. He did and he did not want to do what he was doing then. And so at Treblinka Stangl lost his freedom totally.  He was enslaved to himself and his own fear of death.

This is the slavery that Christ saves us from. To be united to Christ is to become your own true self. That is why, if we come to Christ, we will know the Truth, and he will set us free. (John 8:32).

Eleonore Stump

**From Saint Louis University