Unless you are living in a cave, you have probably heard about what has been going on in the Ukraine lately.  For those who study such things, historians and the like, it is a stunning modern day picture of the capacity and ability of people to challenge and overthrow their rulers and, they hope, create a new order.  It is a twenty-first century variant of the British philosopher John Locke's dictums that one, a government should rule with the consent of the people; and two, if the people have reason to believe the government is unjust, they have the right to overthrow it.  Americans invoked Locke when they cast off the yoke of the British Empire in the late eighteenth century, and the French did the same when they overturned and abolished the monarchy of their country several years later.  Many other people in various parts of the world have done the same in subsequent years.  Locke's legacy is vast.
     Yet Locke would be the first to say that the challenge any revolution faces is balancing freedom and order.  Freedom without order becomes chaos, but order without freedom becomes oppression.  The spell of freedom is an intoxicating one; no human is entirely immune from it.  And why not?  As human beings, we are the most "free" creatures on the planet.  Unlike the other animals, we know we are.
     Therein is a puzzle.  Did Adam and Eve, they of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil fame in Genesis 3, know they were free?  Or did they not realize it until they had freed themselves, in a manner of speaking, of the commandments of God?
     Sometimes we don't know we're free until we bump into the contours of our humanness, that puzzling yet marvelous humanness that binds and enlightens us all.  I wish the Ukrainian people well:  people are made to be, in every way, free.