A kid spending the night at his older brother's first apartment had to grapple with some hard lessons -- but they turned out to be the start of something much better.
“Do you reject sin, so as to live in the freedom of God’s children?” asks the priest.
“I do,” responds the congregation renewing their baptismal promises.
“I don’t,” I said as a teenager, refusing to be confirmed.
“Do you reject sin, so as to live in the freedom of God’s children?” sounded absurd to me, like, “Do you reject half of the products in the store, so that you’ll have more choices when you shop?”
I didn’t buy it.
But the Church was right about what I wanted: I wanted freedom. Freedom like my brother had.
My brother, three years my senior, had moved across town to his own apartment by the University of Arizona and my first introduction to freedom, as I defined it, came when he invited me for an overnight stay at his apartment.
He picked me up in the beautiful 1964 sky-blue Cadillac he had bought at an amazing price from an older couple who really had never used it except for trips to the corner store in the dry desert air. But, like all beautiful things on earth, that car was doomed to die — and sooner than we expected.
My brother’s roommate, we’ll call him Brad, was a Mormon who worked at a heavy metal bar and his life was filled with all the contradictions that implies. But that didn’t look like a contradiction to me. It looked like freedom.
I learned differently late that night after I had gone to bed.
I was awakened by giggling out in the stairway that leads to the apartment, the second story rooms of a downtown house. Brad was returning from work with a sampling of his bar’s clientele — two women in jean shorts who were laughing and a stony-faced man in jacket and pants who was eerily quiet.
Inside, Scott bickered playfully with the girls, who wanted to go home, while the sullen man stared straight ahead, rubbing his pocket. But when he absentmindedly took a gun from the pocket, the girls’ giggling stopped, even when he put it back.
Instead, they urgently demanded to leave. Now. My brother, using his big brother voice, commanded Brad to take the women home, and ordered the gunman into his own doomed Cadillac.
Its doom came that night after my brother and Brad had returned.
A loud popping sound in the driveway interrupted a tense conversation between my brother and Brad. We ran outside to see the Cadillac glowing from within. Then it was engulfed in flames, spectacularly, like a car in the movies, and its windows buckled and shattered.
Brad came alive in the firelight, waking the downstairs neighbors and shouting at me to stay back from the car. The fire department came and sprayed, then examined, the smoldering hull.
The next day, the Channel 4 News showed a row of cars that had become burnt shells just like my brother’s. The mugshot of the arsonist came up: It was the stone-faced gunman from the heavy metal bar. He had torched a whole parking lot that night, and somehow got my brother’s car, too.
And thus, my night of freedom ended in a burst of flames, and, added urgency to the questions swirling around in my brain.
Questions such as: Who, in the end, is really free?
All of us that night had followed a course we freely chose, against what our parents — and society — dictated.
But I wasn’t free — I was at the mercy of my brother, and Brad.
They weren’t free — they had to reckon with each other.
The two women weren’t free — they were stuck at Brad’s apartment, begging for a ride.
My brother’s Cadillac didn’t make him free — he had to dispose of a drunken arsonist in it, and then he had to dispose of the car.
The arsonist made the most spectacular choices of the night, wielding a gun and a lighter in a blaze of glory that got him on the evening news. But he ended up in a jail cell, the least free of all.
So: If none of us achieved freedom that night by following our desires in an unfettered way, what exactly is freedom?
I started to learn that freedom isn’t permission to do whatever you want — it’s the power to do what is best.
Nothing much changed that night, but I started to learn a valuable lesson: Doing whatever you want doesn’t make you free; it makes you a slave to whatever you want. I would still have to learn that choosing Christ, the human image of God, who is love, gives you the power to be really free.
I share this story because I have been telling the story of how I found my faith here and at Benedictine College, to explain why I now believe what I previously rejected. I want others to see how the Church gets it right. By our baptism, we really are “brought into the realm of the freedom of the children of God.”
