We reach for a new law, often through the muck of an ever-present old one. And, as we do, we discover that the ‘new law’ is really the oldest one – the law of love, as so eloquently put in the now annually fading echo of the Christmas song, “Oh Holy Night”. The middle-law, the one we feel entrenched in now, is the law of independence. Its requirement is to ‘Be Independent’…do not put yourself at the risk of dependence on something else, much less others. The odd thing, and one that seems to take a while for us to detect, is that it comes guised in false wrapping – for by being ‘independent’, it instructs that we will have something we want, namely freedom. And in so doing, it attempts to subtly distort the freedom to ‘love’.
But, as we all come to know, this is not the way. Our dependence on God is what leads us to the older and more true law. The scent of ‘Be Independent’ is everywhere now, without and within. Help me learn to detect the real flavor of the ‘Be Dependent’, rather the false aroma of ‘Be Independent’, to know what real love is…through the freedom to do it.
