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Father Len reveals the meaning of the salvation God seeks for all of us.
Highlights, Ideas, and Wisdom
- Salvation is about freedom and belonging and being saved from harm.
- Freedom doesn’t mean doing whatever selfish thing you want to do. That’s merely a form of slavery to the ego.
- Salvation is freedom to be with and for others. It’s a whole lot of dying to your ego.
- Salvation is not just about me being free. It’s about me and everybody else becoming free. I’m not free unless you’re free.
- There is an unease in human beings, an innate desire to escape from freedom. Sometimes being confined is less fearful than being loosed. Being restricted can feel better than being free because freedom means choices and choices and choices. And, choices can be difficult.
- Human beings really want freedom and structure. Structure that makes it possible for us to be free and at the same time feel safe.
- “The Fear of Freedom” by Erich Fromm
- Freedom without structure is just chaos. It’s emptiness.
- The Catholic Mass is a prayer for the order in the kingdom of God, not the order created by human structures or capricious living.
- There’s always this tug-of-war in the human heart between freedom and safety, between freedom and structure, between chaos and order.
- Salvation is just another word for freedom, but it’s freedom with structure.
- Totalitarian lifestyles and their appeal are created by the fear of freedom without structure.
- God gives us the law to grant us freedom with structure that liberates our spirit for the service of love and community.
- The ultimate place of freedom and order is heaven where everyone is completely free, but not self-absorbed.
- Jesus came to show us the way to salvation; freedom from our ultimate enemies of hate, injustice, selfishness, and ego.
- There is no such thing as personal salvation. Salvation is always tied to belonging to a family and community and everyone in the family and community being free.
- Salvation is a mix of freedom, structure, responsibility, and belonging.
- Catholics believe three things are needed for salvation.
- Repentance: leaving our old life and slavery to our sins behind.
- Trust and faith in God.
- Baptism and the new life it brings.
- Nowhere in the Bible does God save an individual. God always saves a community.