WE LIVE IN A WORLD AWASH IN FANTASIES of freedom. We spend enormous sums of money and immense amounts of psychic energy on these fantasies. We fantasize a free life based variously on power, on sex, on fame, on leisure. Whole industries develop out of these fantasies. Careers are shaped by them. Political movements are launched and fueled by them. But the world we live in is conspicuously and sadly lacking in the experience of freedom. The fantasies are barren: they give birth to nothing in word or deed. For all our elaborate and expensive fantasies, the actual lives that most people live are filled with impotence, boredom, obscurity, and hassle.

Living in the land of the free has not made us free; we are a nation of addicts and complainers. Being provided with freedom of religion has not made us free; coercive cults and enslaving superstitions continue to proliferate.

Assembling with people in church and listening to ringing proclamations of freedom—“He whom the Son sets free is free indeed!”—has not made us free. Our churches are attended regularly by the inhibited, the obsessive-compulsive, the fearfully defensive—enough of them to provide outside observers with a stereotype.

But not everything that has to do with freedom is fantasy. There are also realities of freedom. They are not, perhaps, as conspicuous, but they are there, at least for people of faith. These people believe that God is free. He created the world and the people in it freely and not out of necessity. Since a free God is at the center of all existence, and all creation and every creature issues from a free act, freedom and not necessity is always the deeper and more lasting reality. At the center of that belief is the story of Jesus, the freest person who ever lived. And there is recurrent witness of the Spirit who is free, like the wind that “blows where it wills.” In every culture and land there is abundant testimony that persons who trust in God participate in this freedom. My own experience supports the testimony: when I live in faith I live freely. When I set God at the center of my life, I realize vast freedoms and surprising spontaneities. When I center life in my own will, my freedom diminishes markedly. I live constricted and anxious.

I live in a vortex where these fantasies and realities mingle. The life I live in the world cannot escape the fantasies, but neither can it avoid the realities. Like so many others who have chosen to live by faith, I find that it is a daily task to discriminate between the fantasies and the realities. And I need all the help I can get.