Not born to fade away
We’re into weeks 2 and 3 of Lent, and I progressed with my Irish retreat. We looked into the question of virtue, and how it plays out in our daily lives. Frankly, that’s meant quite a lot of thinking and soul searching, because I found that I challenged some of the terms used and the way they were used. For instance, “freedom,” “virtue”, “joy” and “charity.” For a while, I felt like I was back at work, listening to one of my policy-soaked colleagues painstakingly explaining the difference between a ship and a boat . (Yes, there is a clear difference. I’m still not persuaded that it needed 45 minutes of explanation to clarify it!) I had thought that freedom meant the ability to act without restraint, to be free of external influence. But in the Catechism of the Catholic Church , freedom is the power, rooted in reason and will, to act or not, to perform deliberate actions on one’s own responsibility. During most of the presentation, I was mentally struggling with the difference