From inside a confessional adjacent to the school’s main auditorium, I audibly heard the students cheering! This was their last student assembly for the school year and after a week or two of grueling exams, school would be finally over.
Their cheers gradually subsided. Another sound filled the auditorium and stole into the chapel. I couldn’t resist humming to the tune since the familiar melody was so catchy and the rhythm just youthfully coool! It was Let it go! from Disney’s movie Frozen.
Even though the song was originally sang by a woman, the students couldn’t keep themselves from
shrilling at the top of their voices. This was only so obvious especially when the message of this Oscar winning song is what every person –young or old– yearns for: independence or freedom! In or out of tune, the students triumphantly screamed the refrain: Let it go… let it go!
I readily related to them, because I knew exactly how it felt some years ago when I would have sang a similar tune to make a claim for my independence. As children grow, the natural desire to think, speak out and do what they felt doing was a sign of ‘growing up’ and ‘acquiring one’s identity’.
With young people I have talked with, the topic of independence –not to mention their so-called love-life– is always an issue that arises. They feel that as they grow up, they expect their parents to trust them more. They feel parents don’t give them the ‘space’ they badly need to explore things and make decisions on their own.
This is why many young people identity with Ana and Elsa, the two sisters in Frozen. Without really wanting to, their efforts to discover and grow in their freedom only chilled their relationship and eventually froze it (as well as the entire kingdom) temporarily.
But was it really their parents’ fault? Elsa and Ana’s parents felt that the best way to help their children was to keep Ana’s freezing power always concealed.
As the movie narrates, and life as well, parents often have the best intentions to why they limit or give certain parameters to their children’s exploration of freedom’s horizon. Adults have already experienced a great deal of life and are only thoughtful enough not to want their children to suffer what they have suffered in their own ‘wrong notions of being free and independent.’
The plot freezes further in Frozen when the parents of Ana and Elsa tragically die. The sisters are left to manage their own lives. When things get out of hand, Ana finally renders a chilling expression of breaking out of what she had hidden from everyone: Letting it go!
Undoubtedly, letting go or removing certain physical and moral limits has its own apparent and temporary rewards. When everyone discovers what she had been hiding, Ana flees and lets out a blizzard of powers she had never done before. She is now FREE! but more than ever ALONE!
The sense of fulfillment that everyone feels, especially the young, when they manage to break away from certain moral or religious barriers is only temporary. They begin to realize that such a great power as freedom must be exercised with great responsibility. Misusing it, that is, employing it for limited selfish ends will only result to isolating oneself more and enslaving him to his vices.
To equate freedom to simply ‘doing what I like’ and ‘how I feel like’ is not freedom but licentiousness. It does not allow any room for any discernment. In turn this prevents the formation of ideals and convictions. Finally, without a clear end in mind, the person is reluctant to make any commitment to God and others. A cold and unnatural fear develops that only leads to personal preservation, isolation and satisfaction.
The secret to true freedom is not the false idea of ‘letting go’ but of NOT letting go of God. Once we ‘let go’ of God we let go of everything, that is, life loses its true meaning. Sometimes holding on to God, to ‘our faith and its demands’, to ‘obedience to our parents’ and to ‘our chores or civil duties’ may not be easy. But in the end if all of these are done out of love, there will be a clearing moment when we will truly mature in our spiritual life and self-giving.
Like Ana, we will discover that the key to exercise our freedom properly is within the context of love: our love for God, our love for parents and friends. This is when we learn to nurture a nobler sense of independence in the form of reflective spontaneity, incisive creativity, discerning initiative, and cheerful sense of service.
Such splendid character traits are the true manifestations of youthful freedom in the person.
These are the habits that will gradually remove the degrading forms of false freedom in laziness, egoistic entitlement, emotional indifference, rebelliousness and frivolous critical-mindedness.
So when we feel or become aware of our disordered tendencies in our minds, hearts, passions and flesh, let us sing out a song –a prayer– to our Lord, singing, “Don’t let go! Don’t let go!” And with the words of St. Josemaría we can repeat: “Lord, may I have not other freedom, than the freedom of loving you!”
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