…how extremely difficult it is to set another wholly free – and, harder still, to let go of the chains we wind around ourselves. We can only approach it through a growing understanding of what letting go really is. To find it, our way lies paradoxically through the acceptance of fully responsible bonds and boundaries; for without these, love is merely the desire to possess, whether it is lustful or so-called “spiritual”. We have to experience bondage on many levels and with great suffering before we can begin to know the meaning of freedom. For freedom is not license to do what we want to do on any level, or to take what we imagine we need, however “good” in our eyes, condemning the ways of others. We are free only when our fundamental motives are transformed….
It is wonderful to discover that the root of the word “free” is “fri,” meaning quite simply “love”; “fri” is also the origin of our word “friend”, of the name of the Nordic goddess of love, “Frigg,” and of her day Friday – which has been for Christians through the centuries the day of the darkness, of the “nailing” in a total bondage, from which freedom is born.
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