John 1:4, 5 --  "In Him was life, and that life was the light of men. That light shines in the darkness, yet the darkness did not overcome it."

True spiritual freedom, it has always seemed to me, must necessarily mean freedom to live lightly in His Light, confident that our Father is always, at every moment, sending protection and nurture and has a plan that none, not even the dark lord (who Brennan Manning calls "the merchant of mistrust") can defeat. Coming to this level of confident trust in God represents a firm step in moving toward and more deeply into that LIGHT.

When we first come to the Lord, He helps us to see His mercy in the goodness of His provision in the Law, warning us about what will bring us -- and others -- pain and distress and conflict and telling us what we might do (if we were only able) to relieve pain and personal distress and to create a peaceful world (inside and outside ourselves). 

After that, He begins to show us how to live no longer responding merely to a set of rules, but to His speaking, living, present Spirit.  We learn how to listen to Him, how to distinguish His voice from every other, how to rely on that Spirit for the will and the power to obey.   

Finally -- and I think this is the very brink of a spiritual adventure that deepens life experience even as it makes us more sensitive to the pain of the world we live in -- that very Spirit leads us into a free and joyful abandonment to the Father's will, to life as it is rather than to life as we wish it were. 

This abandonment has nothing in it of a wistful wishing for "what might have been" had circumstances been more to our liking, nor anything of grim resignation to a lesser fate, nor any part of an effort to try to manipulate events or people to get something more out of life.  It is a place marked by a lightness of heart because one is no longer particularly concerned about what others think or how one is measuring up to some behavioral standard.  (Think here of a happy child at play, thoughtless of onlookers, absorbed in the pleasure of the play-task of the moment.) It is a place of interior peace and strength and joy from which the most astonishing ministry to other people is possible.

Here, I enter into an obedience that requires a many-times-daily renunciation of my inherent human tendency to willfully manipulate people and events so that I can keep my small illusion of some sort of control. With this holy abandonment comes a sense that beyond what anyone thinks of me at any given moment -- whether they like me or don't, whether they reject or accept me, whether I am loved or made to suffer at another's hands -- is the freedom to choose ministry to each person rather than to play any sort of game. 

It is in my best, most fulfilling moments in this particular state that He has shown me how to minister authentically to the persistent legalist who hopes to someday, somehow please God by doing enough good things to make up for all the bad (not possible!), or to the discouraged of spirit and weary of mind, or to an unruly, disobedient heart.  It is not a place without dangers, but it is the place I feel Him calling me back to every day.  The one thing about living out of this abandonment, though, is that the freedom and the joy depend upon agreeing with Him that the only identity I really have is the one He has given me, the one I have in Christ. 

If I want to live in the Light, as HE is in the Light, I have to enter into It deeply and allow It claim my being.  My only hope and my only possibility for joy lie there.