As many of you may know, today the U.S. remembers the birthday of civil rights activist Martin Luther King, Jr.  Central to this commemoration is King's belief, a belief he shared with millions of others, that freedom, the ability to do what one chooses, when one chooses to do it, is one of humanity's greatest privileges and blessings.  We all deserve to be free.

    Freedom is wonderful, and freedom is intoxicating.  But freedom can be frightening.  We often do not know what to do with it.  We frequently do not know what its fullness really means.  We frequently miss the point.  We abuse it terribly.    

    King, however, grasped the larger point:  freedom is only meaningful if it is grounded in something bigger than itself.  It is more than a release from physical bondage, a slip of one material experience to another. 

     We are not free in an accidental universe, a cosmos without definition; we are free in a universe made real by truth itself.