Hello, my name is Father Gregory Pine, and I'm a Dominican friar of the province of St. Joseph, and this is Pines of the Quines.

This past weekend, I was in Nashville, Tennessee at White.

Well, because I went to visit the Dominican Sisters of St. Cecilia, because they were hosting a retreat for young women, a kind of come and see weekend.

And so they had me in to preach some of the conferences, which was awesome.

And the topic or the theme for the retreat was Freedom, which is an awesome theme, especially in this setting.

Because I think that often enough, we feel our freedom to be a burden, or we don't know how to make sense of our freedom, and then default on it, thinking that we have to optimize or maximize inside some kind of like crass robotic way.

But it turns out, our freedom is a great gift, a great responsibility, sure, but a great gift, which ultimately helps us to partake of God's own freedom, which is wild.

So let's talk a little bit about freedom. Here we go.

Okay. So sometimes when people describe freedom, they describe human freedom as in conflict or competition with divine freedom.

But I want to submit to you that this is not the case.

So I would say it's more so true that our freedom is a sharing or participation in the divine freedom.

St. John Paul II talks about this a little bit in the encyclical, which goes by the name of Veritatis Splendor.

And he says that because of certain philosophical developments of like the 17th, 18th, 19th centuries, people get it in their mind, right, that either I am autonomous, which is to say, I am a rule to myself or a law to myself, or I suffer heteronymous imposition, right, or I suffer the effects of heteronomy, which just means like other law.

And we think about it in terms of something that is violent or something that is oppressive or something that represents a curb to my freedom or a limitation on my freedom.

But St. John Paul II proposes a kind of middle way, which he describes as participated theonomy.

That is to say that when we abide by God's law, we partake of his very freedom, and we come to discover that it enriches and actually emboldens our own freedom.

Why? Well, because God is the giver of our freedom and the giver of our freedom on the pattern of his own.

God works more interior to us than we work within ourselves, okay?

So God is able to act more naturally in our own nature than we ourselves are.

Because when you think about it, what it means for something to be free or for it to be voluntary is in part for it to issue from us, like to genuinely be from us.

And when God acts in us, you know, prompting us as it were to consent to and cooperate with his movement, he makes it to be genuinely from us, not because he's the great puppeteer in the sky, but because he's the giver of our nature and the giver of our agency.

And he sustains our nature and our agency and being throughout the whole course of our life, seeking to heal and to grow it with the gift of grace and ultimately to stabilize it in glory.

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