Minister’s Hot Takes

Freedom: The Gift We Give Ourselves

There is a lyric that has haunted American consciousness for generations: "Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose." Kris Kristofferson wrote it. Janis Joplin made it ache. And somewhere beneath the beauty of that line lives a question we rarely ask out loud: Do we only give ourselves permission to be free when nothing is at risk?

If that is true — if freedom requires the absence of consequence — then most of us will never know it. We are embedded in relationship, in community, in care. We have things to lose. And yet something in us knows that freedom is not the same as emptiness.

If not emptiness, what?

Wisdom traditions remind us that communities are the very ground in which our values take root — that justice and compassion are not abstract ideals but living practices nurtured by people in proximity to one another. Community gives us identity. It gives us a sense of place in the larger story. To belong is not to diminish our individuality. It is to be held. It is to be a valued voice in the choir of togetherness.

And yet belonging can become a cage if we are not careful. The approval of others, the image we maintain, the roles we perform — these can quietly colonize us until we mistake the performance for our true self. We begin to confuse belonging with conformity.

This is where freedom lives — not in having nothing to lose, but in loosening our attachment to what we fear losing. We no longer allow our lives to be shaped by the expectations or demands of others. Instead, we live from the truth of who we are and what we value most deeply. This is not the freedom of the empty-handed. It is the freedom of the open-handed — trusting life, trusting Spirit, and trusting ourselves.

In Science of Mind, we understand this as an alignment with the One Life moving through all things. We are always free at the level of Spirit. The work is not to earn that freedom but to remember it — to release the layers of learned consequence, inherited fear, and social performance that convince us we are less than we are.

What would it mean to live that way — not someday, but today? Not when the risk is gone, but now, with everything still at stake? This is the invitation: to awaken to who we have always been — eternal spiritual beings, one with Spirit, unconditionally loved, and inherently free.

Rev. John W. Adams

Senior Minister | CSLN