Today is Birthday 48 for me.  Not quite as cool a number as 47, which is prime , or as 49, which only has three factors, but it is what it is.  I’m hopeful for a mostly normal day: early morning at the gym, a day of work, phone calls and messages from family and friends, and some time with the neighbors.  But as I write this, who knows what the day or the year ahead will bring?

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I’ve mentioned the work of Erik Varden often over the last few months.  The Bishop of Trondheim, Norway, he’s also a monk, which means he brings an interesting perspective to life and how it is lived.  In a recent homily, Varden tried to articulate something about freedom and the religious life that I thought was interesting.  He writes:

All of want to be free, naturally. But freedom may seem to us elusive. We’ve an understanding of freedom that is limited. For us, freedom is normally a matter of the absence of constraints. We think that a given circumstance, a given person, a given wound prevents us from being free. We spend our time moaning about that circumstance, that person, that wound.

He then mentions the three “stages” of what he calls the monastic pedagogy of freedom.  First, he says the monk must “make a preferential option for the real.”  This means accepting things the way they are given as an act of humility.  The second stage, then, is “to trust that God can do something wonderful with this particular reality.”  In this stage, humility is joined with a sense of self-abandonment that “gives God freedom to act.”  Finally,  we learn to practice a “readiness to wait.”  This brings patience into the mix.  As monks live into these three stages, Varden suggests, they will find themselves living in a kind of “perfect freedom.”

Which I think is also true for those of us not living the “religious life” but who are trying to “know ever more intimately Jesus Christ, the Truth who sets us free.”  That is a key aspect of life after Easter, of life through the end of the fifth act of God’s Story.  I would like to do my best to cultivate this perfect freedom with this next journey around the sun.  You can read the whole homily by Varden here.  It definitely a good way to continue to reflect on Easter.

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Something I’ve been practicing over the last few months has been putting thoughts and ideas into graphic form: timelines, something I call “line spectrums,” simple sketches (as I can do nothing better), and what Andy Crouch calls 2x2s.  I first encountered Crouch’s 2x2s in Strong and Weak, where he used the concepts of vulnerability and authority to think through questions of leadership and human flourishing.  Two boxes across, two boxes down, the axis in the middle.  I’m still working out how to do that easily with my simple word-processing program, but I think I’ve got something basic that I can use to some effect.  I thought I’d share some of them here over the next few weeks, if only to get a sense of my own current “location in life.”  My first “four square” (as I will call them from now on) is about the dynamic relationship between freedom and faithfulness.  Both of these are key aspects of living well in the Biblical Story.  But they are also often seen as being at odds with each other, and understandably so.  So I’ll put this right here to whet the appetite for later in the week:

There’s definitely a sense of connected between this “four square” and the ideas mentioned in the quotes from Varden above.  For now, it’s enough for me to put this “out there” and come back to it later, I think.

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It’s always good to celebrate with a song, I think.  So here’s a song from Steven Curtis Chapman about looking back and preparing for what’s ahead.  A good way to start a new year, I think.  This is “Remember to Remember.”