On one of those quiet days with God, I took myself in front of a cage with a bird inside. With birdseed, water, perches, but in bars. He was still, he was not hurt, he appeared to be very well. I stayed there for a few minutes imagining what life that bug had and comparing a bird that is not deceived. There were, in my meditation, clear, positive and negative points of being inside or outside.
Inside, the safety of the predators, the food and the water that does not need to go back and the favorable environment of the non-exposure regarding the heat or rain / cold; but, the bars limited his flight, the freedom stolen by a human beast pleasure of "having". Outside, to be able to fly where to wish, to contemplate all the immensity that your eyes can reach; freedom. But, at the risk of many predators, the demand for food, etc.
Being God, the Creator of absolutely ALL that exists, including myself and the past, I could not resist the temptation to compare our realities. In this great "bubble" that is our life, we are sometimes imprisoned by society, pray for our habits (routine), pray for our sins, pray for our unbridled desires to "have", pray for our religiosity, for our independence of God, pray for our fears, pray for our carnality, pray for our infantility / immaturity, pray for our preconception, pray for the lack of love for our neighbor, and so many "prayers" that we could stay here eternally speaking.
We enter cages made by us or by others. Cages emotions, social, religious / ecclesiastical, generational, etc. Cages that "give us security" to flee from the world out here, from the conflicts that only who is alive passes. Cages that bring us relief, happiness, pleasure, comfort, that massage our ego, that puts us up, but, cages.
People confuse what the word "freedom" means. They believe they can do everything, it makes them free. And it is exactly the opposite. When you can not stop doing something, A prisoner. Just as the bird that I saw, in those cages, we did not go hungry or thirsty. The "jailer" feeds us, quenches our thirst, "protects us" from the external, from the predators. We depend on human hands to kill our hunger and our thirst for what is passing. However, not yet, nothing more than cages.
The worst cages are those whose doors are open. We are so, but, so accustomed to its interior that, or we do not perceive that its doors no longer exist or we can not get away from this environment. Someone once said wisely, "break the chains of the cell, but do not be surprised if the prisoner did not leave, maybe the cell is absolutely comfortable." The big problem of not getting free is that when you spend a lot of time in the cage, when you are released, we do not know how to act. We do not have intimacy with the environment of freedom. We are easy targets for predators.
I ask you: For what wings, if we can not, do not know or do not want to fly?
In the hands of the Father, even with the wounds of flight, even with missing feathers, even with the myopic sensation of being trapped (1 Corinthians 7:22), we are more protected than in our existential cages.
Only a bird accustomed to freedom can truly feel the wonderful feeling of the wind hitting its face and moving its feathers.
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