"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.
     Moreover, those who have freedom rarely understand what it is like to not have it. They're never known otherwise.
     Freedom is only real if it is responding to truth, if it is expressed in a structure of meaning.  Real freedom recognizes that 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.
     It is a freedom which those of us who enjoy it generally--and largely unwittingly--pursue.     As we remember King's birthday, we should therefore remember that the freedom he preached is ultimately, as Gandhi observed in his notion of satyagraha, the discovery of truth.  True freedom is the engagement with truth, the truth that because God is there, we all are to be free, in every way.  We all are made to enjoy the freedom of a universe, a universe not without point, but a universe created by God.
     Thanks, Dr. King, for showing us the deeper meaning of freedom:  in ways large and small, we cannot live without it.
     Oddly enough, neither can God.  But that's a much larger question.