"Freedom," the Who sang many years ago, "tastes of reality."  As many of you may know, yesterday the U.S. remembered the birthday of civil rights activist Martin Luther King, Jr.  Central to the day is the belief that freedom, the ability to do what one chooses, when one chooses to do it is surely one of humanity's greatest blessings.  Those who have it treasure it immensely; those who do not, long for it deeply.
     Is freedom reality?  If being free is the ability to find oneself as oneself is in this world, then freedom is indeed reality.  It offers people opportunity to find what is most real and true about them, their lives, and the world in which they live them.  It is a path to ultimate discovery.
     Maybe that's why, as John records it in chapter eight of his gospel, Jesus told his audience that, "You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free."  Freedom is only meaningful if it is grounded in something bigger than itself.  It's only real if it is responding to truth, if it is expressed in a structure of form and meaning.  Freedom recognizes that unless there is abiding truth, unless there is something within which to be free, being free is no more than the ability to engage in the authenticating acts of existentialism:  here today, gone tomorrow, never a point to be made.
     As we remember King's birthday, we also remember that the freedom he preached is ultimately, as Gandhi observed in his notion of satyagraha, the discovery of truth.  We do not discover truth in an accidental universe without definition; we discover truth in a universe made real by truth itself.
     Thanks, Dr. King, for showing us the importance, and imperative, of freedom:  in ways large and small, we cannot live without it.
     Oddly enough, neither can God.  But that's a much larger question.