Why are Hermits Known for Their Freedom? Part 1: Foundational Freedom

[[ Sister, why are hermits known for their freedom?  Is it because they can do whatever they like? I mean they can go off and leave their families and live alone and do whatever they love to do, right? Were you looking for freedom when you decided to become a hermit? What about the ones who were shut away in a cell next to a church? They weren't free in living that way were they? Are they also hermits who would be known for their freedom?]]

Thanks for your questions. Hermits are indeed known for their freedom, and this includes not only "freedom from" a lot of truly good stuff, but also "freedom for" in really significant ways. The most important and characteristically Christian form of freedom is the power to be the persons we are called to be, and hermits are free in this way especially. Human beings are themselves free when and to whatever extent they are in a heart-level dialogue with God. This means allowing God to call us to wholeness, to humanness, and learning and being empowered to love ourselves and one another in light of that. It also means allowing God (Love-in-act) to reside at the center of our lives and letting all else fall into place in light of that theocentric way of relating to reality.  

For the hermit (and for every authentic Christian), everything is relativized in light of one's life with God, but this does not mean the hermit is free to forget or neglect "everything else" as one focuses on God. Instead, because life in dialogue with God (and here I mean the really deep dialogue that comes from posing the profound questions of being and meaning we each are and listening to or receiving the response that God is) represents freedom from the false self and the freedom of the true self, the hermit comes to know and love all of reality in God, in the truth. We reject enmeshment in the distorted reality c 603 calls "the world," with all that fosters the false self, and we embrace authentic engagement, that is, we love and revere the truth and beauty of all reality in God. 

This is genuine freedom. It is the way Christ perceived and loved God's creation, the way empowered by the Holy Spirit, the way that sees everything that is with a clarity and reverence we are made for, but are incapable of when we are enmeshed and unfree. This shift from false to true self, from the inability to see rightly to clarity of perception, and the inability to love as Christ loves to being one in whom Christ lives and loves ("I live, yet not I, but Christ lives in me!" Gal 2:20) is the very essence of the freedom of the hermit. And yet, it is not always easy to love in the selfless way Christ loved and with the generosity of God. We must be reborn and remade for that. 

Hermits commit (dedicate) themselves to being remade (consecrated and sanctified) in and by God. They literally dedicate themselves to being loved into wholeness/holiness in the way only life with and in God can do. This means they commit themselves to becoming the very place where heaven and earth come together and interpenetrate one another. They dedicate themselves to God's project of being Emmanuel to his creation, and the corresponding human vocation of being Emmanuel in and through Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit. The natural outflow of this dedication is an active love for all that God holds as precious. In Christ, our lives of prayer are not just a matter of praying for others, though of course we do that, but of becoming the intercessory "place" in our world where Human and Divine truly meet and come to abide in one another. We become symbols of what c 603 calls "the silence of solitude", symbols of genuine freedom to truly be ourselves for and in relation to others, signs of liberation from the noise and enmeshment of what c 603 calls "the world", and made prophetic with lives commissioned to challenge our Church and creation to truly become and be what God wills these realities to be.

This is not about just doing anything at all, or even about doing just what we truly like doing (though we are apt to really love doing what we do in this way, and being who we are in Christ). Again, it is about doing the will of God in our world. It is about being the persons God calls us to be, and doing so for the sake of God, God's Church, and the whole of God's creation. In embracing this kind of freedom and letting God grasp us, we sacrifice many of the discrete gifts God has given us in order to become the single overarching gift he makes us to be in His Son and Spirit. 

We trust that God knows how best to use us, and, when we look back over the whole scope of our lives, we will be amazed at the wondrousness of the tapestry he has woven with the woof of our sinfulness, illness, suffering, death, betrayals and infidelities, struggles, incapacities, ignorance, venality, etc, and the graced warp of our love of others, the passion and hard work of our own dedication to life and Love-in-Act, and the victory of Divine meaning over absurdity. Because this use of the material of our own lives by God is not manipulative, but transformative and transcendent, it sings of an otherworldly freedom. Most people will never perceive the truth of this -- at least not this side of death. Others will catch glimpses of it. A relative few will know it themselves, even if they are not hermits. This, by the way, is one reason the life of hermits and the anchorites you refer to is known as "hidden". Superficially, such lives look so limited and constrained that most people will miss their real depth and breadth.  That different way of seeing (or not seeing) is what your questions reflect --- the difficulty of seeing the profound freedom that constitutes a truly human life grasped by and grounded in God, especially when that person is a hermit or anchorite. 

We tend to mistake the nature of the lives of such persons in two main ways: first, we can see them as narrow, limited, or constrained in a way that seems to mean they are neither free nor particularly human, and second, we can see them as wholly disengaged from and uncaring of everything and everyone of real value, and so, empty and meaningless. (This latter mistake is one  that some who have called themselves "hermits" through the centuries have made, and currently still make!) The freedom of the hermit, however, is one of deep and broad engagement, pervasive and abiding love, not in the abstract, but concretely, really, humanly. Hermits reject enmeshment so that we might be engaged with reality as Christ was and is.  We do it so that he might be uniquely embodied in us in anticipation of the New Heaven and New Earth that Jesus' death and resurrection inaugurated. We reject enmeshment so we might love --- fully, freely, truly, and more profoundly in Christ than "the world" can even imagine. This is the foundational freedom of the hermit. Every other freedom flows from this and serves it.