The Yoke

Let us take a moment, if we might, for a bit of Wordsworth:

Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room;
And hermits are contented with their cells;
And students with their pensive citadels;
Maids at the wheel, the weaver at his loom,
Sit blithe and happy; bees that soar for bloom,
High as the highest Peak of Furness-fells,
Will murmur by the hour in foxglove bells;
In truth the prison, into which we doom
Ourselves, no prison is: and hence for me,
In sundry moods, ‘t was pastime to be bound
Within the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground;
Pleased if some Souls (for which there needs must be)
Who have felt the weight of too much liberty,
Should find brief solace there, as I have found. (1806)

“The weight of too much liberty” from which the poet was relieved by self-confinement to “the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground”—its invariable form--is a concept that has been banned from almost all levels of public discourse in our day, when there is no such thing as too much liberty. But it can be relied upon to rise again with power, since man can only be happy where he is contained according to his nature. The rising will send many to Christ, and many to Anti-Christ, both of whom offer relief from “the weight of too much liberty.”

Comments

[Beth]

I just finished Natan Sharansky's _Fear No Evil_. He writes in the final chapter about how difficult it was to be finally freed from prison. In prison, his choices were limited: cooperate with the KGB or not? eat or not? With so few choices, and much time in solitude and silence to reflect on each one, he could always be sure he was doing the best he could for the cause for which he was imprisoned. But once he was back outside, he found that the number of choices was overwhelming: just mundane choices (what vegetable to choose for dinner tonight or which shirt to wear today) were so many that they made time for the reflection that is necessary to make the important choices (who to help, how to help) extremely difficult to find.

I think we are so used to having so much "liberty" that we don't understand its cost, as Sharansky describes it -- but it can be assuredly too high. Contentment in the place God has set us and how to discern what duties He calls us to are not lessons we have learned well, and so we vacillate and worry instead of serving with peace. At least I speak for myself, and I seem to see the effects of the problem in others all about me.

[Fr. Bill]

I once served a congregation of diplomats, missionaries, and business executives in Vienna, back before the wall came down. South of town the Austrians had created a large camp for Eastern European escapees. These people were born and reared within Eastern Communist societies.

My first encounter with these escapees was in the Pam-Pam Grocery store, at the time Vienna's version of the grocery section of a Wal-Mart Super Center. Everyone else was busily scampering from aisle to aisle, placing what they were seeking in shopping carts. The escapees, however, would be standing with blank faces, often bewildered expressions, staring at a display of canned tomatoes or looking with dismay at the 50-foot long meat counter.

In a conversation where missionaries who ministered among them were present, I offered the idea that the vastly more expensive economy in the West was provoking the escapees' shock. The missionary said it was the choices. In an economy where only a handful of items were available on any given day, and only one exemplar of any of them at a time, the consumer was conditioned to expect no choice at all. One day you might find a bit of bacon (nothing else) at the butcher store. Another day you might find hog heads (nothing more). A vegetable vendor might have potatoes one day, turnips another day, carrots for one day only, every once in a while. A trip to a fully stocked grocery store in the West instantly froze their capacity to choose. A display of a dozen brands of bottled orange juice, or scores of brands of table wine – without someone to guide them, to advise them, they would walk away without choosing anything.

This phenomenon equipped local apologists for capitalism to indict Communist societies for their manifest inefficiencies. And, there are obvious parallels between the escapees from Eastern European Communism and Sharansky's release from prison. But, the escapees' confusion has often made me uneasy about the corresponding effects of Wordsworth's “weight of too much liberty,” especially when it does not feel heavy, when a gargantuan industrial-consumer complex tells me that 50 varieties of tea are much to be preferred to five varieties of tea.

Beth suggests one pernicious effect – a tendency toward vacillation and worry. Some, no doubt, have crafted their own personal strategies to traverse the jungle of choices. But others? Are they, perhaps, spending more and more time exactly as the escapees were spending theirs, not in bewilderment but in captivity to the burgeoning weight of liberty?

[firinnteine]

I ran across this passage from Sir Philip Sidney earlier today (as quoted by Dorothy Sayers):

Lead me, O Love, which reachest but to dust
And thou, my mind, aspire to higher things;
Grow rich in that which never taketh rust,
Whatever fades, but fading pleasures brings.
Draw in thy beams, and humble all thy might
To that sweet yoke where lasting freedoms be;
Which breaks the clouds, and opens forth the light
That doth both shine and give us sight to see.

[Stuart Koehl]

>>>when a gargantuan industrial-consumer complex tells me that 50 varieties of tea are much to be preferred to five varieties of tea.<<<

Unless, of course, your favorite is not one of those five.