Thought for the Day, 9 November 2009

The Rev. Dr Giles Fraser

Somewhere in the bottom of some dusty draw somewhere in my house lies a little piece of the Berlin wall. Unfortunately, I didn't come by it by being present on that momentous occasion when the wall was breached, twenty years ago today. Nor was I one of the celebrated 'mauerspechte' or wall woodpeckers who took sledghammers to the concrete in the weeks that followed. I got mine from a mini bar in a posh hotel in Freidrichstrasse. There it was, all packaged up in the fridge, alongside the nuts, chocolate bars and Champaign. Just a few Euros bought me a little piece of history.

The fall of the Berlin wall was probably the most important political event in my lifetime. The end of that hated barrier marked a world-historical victory for freedom and liberty. And nowhere was it celebrated more than in the churches that did so much to organize resistance to communist repression and to keep the flame of hope alive. The cry of freedom is deep within the DNA of the Judao-Christian tradition, from the story of the people of Israel finding salvation from Egyptian slavery to the call in Jesus' very first public sermon to bring freedom to the captive and release to the oppressed.

But although the necessity for human freedom is an absolute given for Christians, the question of what we do with our freedom is another thing entirely. That great C19th Catholic thinker Lord Acton rightly said that 'Liberty is not the power of doing what we like, but the right to do what we ought'.

Strolling around Freidrichstrasse in former East Berlin these days, the most eye-catching change from twenty years ago is the density of really expensive shops selling trendy clothes to the super rich. A cynic might conclude that the great cry of liberty begins all noble and righteous but ends up being about little more than the freedom to shop, to spend thousands of Euros on a designer handbag. Of course, I know that shopping creates wealth and that capitalism has brought millions out of poverty.

Even so, my little bit of the wall still troubles me. Bought in a mini bar, it speaks to me of the ability of freedom to become something cheap and tawdry. Not the right to do what we ought to do, but simply a license to do whatever it is we please.

In the Christian story, free will is just the start. We are judged on what we do with it, what we make of ourselves. For freedom can be wasted and squandered, frittered away on ephemera, and a life that adds up to nothing. Milan Kundera, that great prophet of post-communist angst, called it 'the unbearable lightness of being'. Free is great. But free and wasted is nothing great at all.