'Prayer is the greatest freedom of all'

Father Giles Conacher, a Benedictine monk in Scotland for 47 years, reflects in a brief BBC video on what freedom means to him and how to achieve it:

I think that freedom everywhere, anywhere, is love. Letting yourself be loved, which is always risky. And loving, which is maybe even riskier.

Prayer, I suppose, is the greatest freedom of all, because it's a relationship, it's a gift of God. It's very mysterious, I think. It's a gift and you just accept what comes.

Silence is an enabling thing. It frees you for listening, for availability, for avoiding imposing yourself.

How often in speech are we trying to do someone down or demonstrate our superiority or all of that? So, silence frees you from those things. 

Most monks do all sorts of things. So you take your turn washing up, peeling the spuds, cooking the lunch, driving the car. Many little jobs. Just like a family. 

Habere est haberi, which means, "What you possess, possesses you". The less you've got, the more freedom you have. And that’s a freedom which is quite hard to acquire in some ways because letting go of things is detachment.

It's difficult but it's essential for freedom because as our lives go on, you have to let go of things. Maybe your memory, maybe your sight, maybe your hearing, maybe mobility. You've got to let them go.

Because one day, you have to let go of your life, the ultimate impoverishment. But that’s the only way to get to the freedom of eternal life. 

It will be tough at times, everybody's life is tough at times. But as they say, the retirement benefits are out of this world. 

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