FREEDOM AND FENCES
by James Dillett Freeman
FREEDOM! The word rings like a bell, doesn't it? It lifts the heart and stirs the passions. But just what is freedom? How free is free? How free can I be? How free can anyone be?
I have a dog, a saluki, a large, beautiful, extremely active dog. I live in a house with a large yard, almost a couple of acres. My dog has free access to the yard at all times through her own swinging door, and in house and yard she lives a very free life, for the most part doing only what she wants to do, as my wife and I make few demands on her, probably fewer than she makes on us. She flies from one end of the yard to the other, chasing anything that happens to be going by on the street, or any squirrel, cat, rabbit, or bird that ventures into the yard and she takes it into her head to chase.
My yard is fenced, but much of it is not a high fence, mainly ornamental. The fence is more a mental limit than a physical obstacle. Any time she wished she could be over it like the wind and off across the city. Not the fence, but only her own acceptance of the fence keeps her in the yard.
My dog and her fence have made me think about what freedom really is in very different terms than I had ever thought about it before. I have come to realize that the fence does not keep her in bondage, it keeps her free!
For suppose she did jump the fence and go wandering off? Would she be free? Freer than she now is? Out in the streets is a world of laws against unleashed dogs, angry neighbors, unfriendly dogs, dogcatchers, and speeding cars. How free would she be skittering frightened and bewildered through the unfamiliar maze of the city's streets? Have you ever seen a lost dog?
In the world that lies beyond the fence, there is no way she could remaln free for long; at best, she would be taken into the house of some kind person; at worst, she would be locked up in the dog pound or even run over. The fence does not limit her freedom as much as it guarantees it. It does not keep her freedom from her. On the contrary, it marks how far she can go and not lose her freedom-relative freedom, it is true, but which of us has any other kind?
What limits my dog's freedom is not that fence, but the fact that she is a saluki who has to live in Lee's Summit, Missouri, U.S.A. on the continent of North America and the planet Earth, in 1979. Similar limitations determine the freedom of us all.
Freedom is and always must be a relative matter. If I am wise, I do not insist on flying just because I would like to have wings. I walk when I have to. I may be free to step out of a window, but the moment I do, I lose my freedom. I am made captive and plummeted to earth by forces over which I have no control. I have asserted my freedom beyond my power to maintain it. I have gone beyond my fence.
I built my dog's fence. In the case of human beings, they themselves may have to build their fences. Not all, of course. Many of our fences have been built by wise and loving people who lived before us, examined the world as I have for my dog and realized where fences were needed if they were to preserve, and not lose, their liberty. If we are wise, we accept the fences raised for us by laws, by tradition, by religious belief, by the moral code, by good manners and consideration.
For if we go too far beyond the fences of reasonable restraint, we may find we have not extended our freedom, we have lost what freedom we had. To go too far is to come up short.
I wonder if we as a nation are still here after two hundred years because the founding fathers were as aware of fences as they were of freedom when they wrote the Declaration of Independence? For they set up a very fenced-in freedom, but it was one within which they could unite to get the country started, and within which we have been able, in spite of all the persisting inequities, to be the freest people the human race has so far managed to produce.
In our time many people insist on acting as if there are no fences. "I must be free!" they assert, and they think this means they have the right to act, say, or think as they please.
You have only to think about it to see that if everyone were free to do whatever he wished to do, it would result not in freedom but in chaos. The world would become a hodgepodge, impossible work of infinite whim.
We are created to be free. The newborn child becomes enraged if you pinion him, and we never happily submit to domination, even our own. We are not puppets, no, not even God's! He made us to be free, for He made us in His image. That is why in the heart of every person stirs the desire freely to express his God-potential. That is why we feel this discontent with anything less than freedom. But we misinterpret it when we feel that it tells us to throw off every restraint, every limitation.
There are two kinds of freedom in the world. We have to be free from and free to. But sometimes we try to be free from what we should be free to, and free to what we should be free from. Then, in the name of freedom, we enslave ourselves.
For to be free means to be free from everything that keeps us from achieving our maximum potential; everything that weakens us; everything that tends to make us less than the most we are capable of being. And it means to be free to grow, to achieve dominion over our self and all the forces at work in us, to develop and express our creative powers.
The freedom that is God's free child's is not an easy freedom. It comes only with growth. It comes only with strength. It comes only with the power to stand firm. It comes only with mastery. And mastery comes only out of discipline.
Without discipline there is no freedom. My dog has helped me to learn this, too. For us to enjoy a free walk together on a country afternoon, she must have learned to heel, come, and stay when I tell her to. When she was a puppy, we both went to obedience school and there I learned that if I was to become the master, I had first to master myself. Getting her to obey was not hard once I had learned to obey. Her discipline depended almost entirely on how disciplined I was. We are, all of us, freest when we have the maximum control over ourself and our life, when we can say to ourself, "Go!" and we may go, and when we can say, "Stay!" and we stay.
The undisciplined life, the unrestrained life, is not the freest life; it is the least free. The undisciplined are imprisoned by their own lack of strength and skill. Instead of mounting on their limitations and learning to ride them to triumph, they let their limitations ride them.
The skater flying across the ice, how effortlessly she weaves through what fantastic patterns! The musician improvising at the piano, how freely his spirit ranges over the keys, fountains of music cascading from his fingertips! The basketball player, how carelessly he flicks the ball over his shoulder that it should fall so cleanly through the net! And the football player, with what unpremeditated art he spins through the field of tacklers!
How free! How beautiful! we exclaim. But we know that this beautiful freedom can come only after how many months, how many years of the hardest, most persistent practice. The power to be free had to be first of all the will to submit.
Where there are no fences, there is no freedom. Not for long. Sometimes I think no one must know the meaning of the value of freedom better than the man or woman in Alcoholics Anonymous. They have met their challenge and made it their conquest. They have taken the measure of their limitations, and made it the measure of their freedom. They have learned how to live freely within their fences. The peaks of freedom never have been scaled except by those who had the courage and the will to submit to the necessities of the endeavor.
"Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty." And the Spirit of the Lord is wisdom, is strength, is self-control. Even more, it is control by the highest forces and highest elements in our being.